This research focuses on the concept of « linking value », applied to mutualist insurance companies, in order to contribute to the revival of their core values and democratic ideals. It is fed by the evolutions of contemporary society, where chosen consumption is progressively replacing mass consumerism, thus moderating the producer-consumer dichotomy, which allows new types of relationships between actors to emerge. The progressive disappearance of the borders between consumption actors is key to our work, as the mutualist insurance companies' stakeholders build new types of relations, beyond classic consumption relations, which yields not only exchange value and use value, but also a linking value. The concept of linking value was originally developed by social science, and further brand community developments have led to mobilize this notion in the marketing field. Its usage in the field of insurance services is new. Our work comprises a survey among members of Groupe Macif, including interviews with Macif employees, Macif delegates, and Macif's historic founder. Linking value is an "evasive object", and we had to implement a specific research methodology in order to bring it to light and characterize it within the company. To analyze the interviews, we used an appropriate coding technique, through dedicated software (Modalisa). The research is carried through a double data analysis method, named etic - emic (or horizontal – vertical), aimed first at understanding what has a meaning in the respondent's locutions, and then at identifying the elements of structure of the linking value from the meanings identified. Such reasoning requires that the interviewer has empathy capacities with the respondents. Our research brings the following results: • First, we qualify the "link experience" based on emotions, a reciprocity intention, an ethical functioning and shared confidence. • We then propose a characterization of linking value in the mutualist field, based on an extension to Rémy's typology (2000), which is the current reference for services companies. • Next, we show how linking value emerges, depending on it being based on a priori activism, or on a posteriori relationship between the employees and the policy holder. • We establish the main characteristics of linking value: its capacity to temper the otherness created by the contract, an asymmetry between the partners of the exchange, the very lack of community feelings among members. • We expose the privileged expression vectors for this linking value: the empathy deployed by company's employees and the solidarity schemes. • Recognition emerges also as a foundation to linking value. We register our reasoning in the field of recognition theory, as it founds an ethic of interpersonal relationship, constituent of social link. The mutual recognition dynamics allows each individual to experience a "collective revival", and to share his belonging to a political or ethical community, without losing his identity. Mutualist insurance companies need to recognize such a pluralist community, in which each individual sees himself in the purpose of a company model, as this recognition founds linking value. We finally show that resuming the democratic ideals that historically founded Mutualist Associations is what will allow them to restore an authentic social link, in the spirit of modern mutualism. ; Cette recherche, centrée sur le concept de « valeur de lien », traite plus spécifiquement de sa mobilisation au sein de l'entreprise d'assurance mutualiste, en vue d'esquisser un renouveau de son modèle ainsi que de l'idéal démocratique dont il est porteur. Elle s'inscrit dans les évolutions de la société contemporaine, dans laquelle le consumérisme de masse fait progressivement place à une consommation choisie, et où la relation de pur commerce prend une dimension sociétale. La dichotomie classique producteur-consommateur est ainsi tempérée, et l'on assiste à l'établissement de nouveaux types de relations entre les acteurs de la consommation. L'analyse de ce processus d'effacement progressif des frontières entre acteurs de la consommation est au cœur de notre travail. En effet, au sein des sociétés d'assurance mutualistes, les parties prenantes nouent des relations spécifiques, qui dépassent la relation de consommation classique, apportant à l'échange marchand, au-delà d'une valeur d'échange et d'une valeur d'usage, une « valeur de lien ». Le concept de valeur de lien est issu des sciences sociales. L'émergence des « communautés de marques » dans le domaine de l'économie des biens a conduit les théoriciens et les praticiens du marketing à mobiliser ce concept dans les sciences de gestion. Mais la mobilisation de ce concept dans l'économie des services et plus spécifiquement dans l'assurance, reste encore fragmentaire et partielle, laissant ainsi un champ libre à ce travail de recherche. Notre recherche trouve son ancrage dans un travail d'enquête effectué au sein du sociétariat et de certains personnels du groupe Macif. Nous avons été conduits à qualifier la valeur de lien « d'objet fuyant », et donc à concevoir une démarche d'investigation spécifique permettant de la mettre en évidence et de la caractériser au sein de l'entreprise. Cette démarche s'appuie sur une analyse d'entretiens effectués auprès d'un groupe exploratoire constitué de sociétaires et de personnels en contact du groupe Macif. Elle met en œuvre une technique de codage des données et un traitement informatique adapté (logiciel Modalisa). La démarche d'investigation s'effectue selon une double analyse des données, de type étique-émique (ou horizontal-vertical), visant tout d'abord à comprendre ce qui fait sens à travers les discours des répondants, ensuite à dégager de ce sens les éléments d'une structuration de la valeur de lien. Une telle démarche implique notamment, de la part de l'intervieweur, une capacité d'empathie avec les répondants. Notre recherche nous conduit à dégager les résultats suivants : • En premier lieu, nous qualifions « l'expérience du lien », fondée sur les émotions, une intention de réciprocité, une éthique de fonctionnement et une confiance partagée. • Ensuite, une caractérisation de la valeur de lien dans le champ mutualiste est proposée, sur la base d'une extension de la typologie de Rémy (2000), qui fait actuellement référence dans le champ des entreprises de service. • Puis nous montrons comment la valeur de lien se manifeste, selon que le lien est fondé sur un militantisme a priori, ou sur une relation suscitée a posteriori lors de l'échange entre les personnels en contact et les assurés. • Nous soulignons les principaux traits de la valeur de lien : une capacité à tempérer l'altérité créée par le contrat, une dissymétrie entre les partenaires de l'échange, un manque de sentiment communautaire au sein-même du sociétariat. • Nous dégageons les domaines d'expression privilégiés de cette valeur de lien : l'empathie dont témoignent les personnels en contact et les dispositifs à visée solidaire et de l'entreprise. • La reconnaissance émerge également comme fondatrice de la valeur de lien. Notre démarche s'inscrit dans le champ de la théorie de la reconnaissance qui fonde une éthique de la relation interpersonnelle, constitutive du lien social. [.]
Diateichismata sind Befestigungsmauern, die durch bebautes oder unbebautes Areal ummauerter Siedlungen verlaufen und dieses in zwei Gebiete teilen; sie bilden mit den jeweiligen Umfassungsmauern meist komplexe Verteidigungssysteme. Die vorliegende Arbeit behandelt das Phänomen des Diateichisma als Befestigungsbauwerk und seinen Einfluß auf die urbanistische Organisation des Stadtbildes. Die Darstellung der Forschungsgeschichte und der antiken Schriftquellen zum Thema Diateichisma bilden die Einleitung der Arbeit. Einen zentralen Punkt bildet dabei die Analyse der Siedlungen mit Diateichisma nach siedlungstypologischen Gesichtspunkten. Weitere wesentliche Fragestellungen betreffen das Verhältnis des Diateichisma zum urbanen Raum sowie die Ursachen, die zur Errichtung der Diateichismata geführt haben. Die Siedlungen mit Diateichisma werden detailliert in einem Katalog erfaßt. Die technischen Daten zu den Siedlungen werden tabellarisch dargestellt, die Testimonien zu Diateichisma sind mit Auszügen der relevanten Textpassagen wiedergegeben. In der Forschung wurden Diateichismata als militärische Zweckbauten behandelt, sie wurden aber nie systematisch untersucht. Für eine vergleichende Analyse der Siedlungen mit Diateichisma wurde die Auswertung des bauchronologischen Verhältnisses von Diateichisma und Umfassungsmauer als am meisten geeignetes Kriterium herangezogen, weil nur dieses Verhältnis Aufschluss über die Entwicklung der Siedlungsgröße geben kann. Zu unterscheiden sind: 1. gleichzeitig mit der Umfassungsmauer errichtete Diateichismata; 2. nachträglich errichtete Diateichismata; 3. Diateichismata, die durch Erweiterung des befestigten Stadtgebietes entstanden sind. In den meisten der untersuchten Siedlungen (23 Beispiele) wurde Diateichisma nachträglich errichtet. Durch Stadterweiterung entstandene Diateichismata finden sich in 19 Städten. Gleichzeitig wurden die wenigsten Diateichismata erbaut (14 Beispiele); bei 4 Siedlungen ist das Verhältnis zwischen Diateichisma und Umfassungsmauer unklar. Diateichismata lassen sich vom 7. bis zum 2. Jhd. v. Chr. in griechischen Siedlungen nachweisen. Bei der chronologischen Verteilung der einzelnen Siedlungen zeigt sich, dass in klassischer und hellenistischer Zeit die meisten Diateichismata errichtet wurden. Innerhalb des griechischen Kulturraumes sind Diatechisma-Siedlungen weit gestreut. In wenigen Gebieten lassen sich Häufungen erkennen: Vermehrt treten nachträglich errichtete Diateichismata im westgriechischen, durch Stadterweiterung entstandene vor allem im nordwestgriechischen Bereich auf. Generell liegt die Funktion von Diateichismata darin, Feinde, die in das Stadtgebiet eingedrungen sind, an einem weiteren Vordringen zu hindern oder bei siedlungsinternen Konflikten als Barrieren zwischen den Streitparteien zu dienen. Trotz der militärischen Funktion verfügt nur eine geringe Anzahl von "militärischen" Diateichisma-Siedlungen über ein Diateichisma, das hier zur Abtrennung von Fluchtbezirken diente. Die überwiegende Mehrzahl an Diateichismata wurde in selbständigen Poleis, sind aber im Gegensatz zu Umfassungsmauern weder Zeichen noch Garant politischer Autonomie. Die Bedeutung von Diateichismata ist in Poleis im griechischen Koloniegebiet aufgrund des Spannungsfeldes unterschiedlicher Bevölkerungsgruppen von besonderem Interesse. Am häufigsten treten Stadterweiterungen bis zur Mitte des 3. Jhs. v. Chr. auf, die möglicherweise mit den Umsiedlungen größerer Bevölkerungsgruppen in archaischer und klassischer Zeit sowie mit Neugründungen von Städten im Zusammenhang stehen. Im Gegensatz zu den Vergrößerungen des Siedlungsraumes wurde meist durch kriegerische Auseinandersetzungen oder siedlungsinterne Konflikte begründet, in Teilbereichen des westgriechischen Raumes vor allem in der zweiten Hälfte des 5. Jhs v. Chr. der Siedlungsraum verkleinert. Diateichismata verändern das Stadtbild nachhaltig und verfügen durch ihre prominente Stellung innerhalb des Stadtgebietes auch über repräsentative oder abschreckende Funktion. Sie werden nur selten intentionell vollständig entfernt und bleiben oft im Stadtbild weiterhin bestehen, auch wenn ihre ursprüngliche Funktion nicht mehr erfüllt ist. Sie werden in der Folge in andere Bauwerke integriert oder dienen der einfachen Steingewinnung. Als Trennmauern innerhalb des Siedlungsgebietes sind Diateichismata eng mit der urbanistischen Planung verbunden und sind sichtbare Grenzmarken zwischen Stadtteilen. Diese wurde in den meisten Siedlungen als Wohnbereiche genutzt, bei einigen wurden auch explizit Hafen- und Handelszonen abgetrennt. Weniger häufig treten abgeteilte Militärzonen auf. Generell haben in allen Arten von Diateichismata Siedlungen nicht besiedelte Areale innerhalb eines Diateichisma die Funktion von Fluchtbezirken. Als hauptsächliche Ursachen und Anlässe, die zur Errichtung von Diateichismata führten, sind die Fortschritte der Angriffstaktik in klassischer Zeit mit gleichzeitigem, bereichsweise festzustellenden Bevölkerungsrückgang zu nennen: Diateichismata wurden daher v.a. in hellenistischer Zeit als Mittel der Siedlungsraumverkleinerung eingesetzt. Im gleichen Zeitraum stehen diesen Tendenzen regional Vorgänge Der Siedlungsraumvergrößerung v. a. in Nordwestgriechenland und Westgriechenland - gegenüber, die mit Siedlungszusammenlegung und wirtschaftlichem Aufschwung in Zusammenhang zu bringen sind. ; A Diateichisma is part of a city´s fortification system. Unlike a city wall it was built within the urban area dividing a city in two parts. This study focuses on two aspects. On the one hand, the phenomenon of diateichismata is considered as part of fortification architecture, on the other hand the influence of diateichism on the organisation of the urban space is pointed out. Furthermore, the reasons, why diateichismata were build are considered as a focal point of the study. The settlement are displayed in a catalogue, technical data is in charts. Written sources mentioning diatechisma are put together including relevant passages of the text. In scientific research diateichismata have been regarded as mere functional buildings, however, they have been studied systematically. In this study, the significance of diateichismata is analysed beyond the aspects of fortification; in particular, the impact of diateichismata on the development and utilisation of urban space is a spezial interest. A comparative analysis of settlements with diateichisma has needs of comparable criteria. The most applicable term, after which settlements with diateichisma can be discerned and put in order, is the chronological relation of diateichisma and city wall, because here chronology is the only variable giving valuable information on settlement development. Hence three variations of settlements with diateichisma can be discerned: 1. Settlements with diateichisma built together with the enceinte. 2. Settlements with secondarily but diateichisma. 3. Settlements with diateichisma which originate after expansion of walled urban space. Most of the studied settlements have diateichismata which were built after the enceinte (23 examples) or which origins from expansion of walled city space (19 settlements). Contemporaneous diateichismate are rare (14 settlements), only in a few cities the relation between diateichisma and city wall remains unclear. The earliest diateichismata be dated in late 7th cent. B.C., the latest was build in the middle of the 2nd cent. B.C. Within this chronological frame the highest concentration of diateichismata can be traced in classical and hellenistic times. The distriution of cities is spead from the Iberian Peninsula to Greek parts of modern Afghanistan (Graeco-bactria). Only any regions do show concentrations of settlements with diateichisma. In the Western Mediterranean there are more cities with secondarily built diateichisma, in the area of north-western Greek in a lot of cities the walled urban space was enlarged establishind diateichismata between the original city area and the newly acquired space. Generally, diateichismata serve as obstacles to enemies which conquered the enceinte already or as barrier wall for hostile parties fighting within the boundaries of the city wall. Despite of the clear military function only cities of military character have a diateichisma; there it always serves as a barrier wall protecting free space Meant to host soldiers when attacked. The predominate group of settlements with dateichisma are free poleis. Concerning poleis in Greek cities in a non-Greek environment, the significance of diateichismata gains more interest, envolving the conflicts of different ethnical groups. In these cities ("colonies") one can detect mostly enlargement of urban space with covers the period of the 5th to the middle 3rd centuries B.C. Probably this process is conneted with the moving of large groups of people by the Western Greek tyrants in late archaic classical times and with the renewed founding of cities in the 4th cent. B.C. Contrary of the processs of enlargement of city space, in some areas of the Western Mediterranean cities were diminished insize. Diateichismata have a deep impact on the organisation of the urban space and also have representative and determine function. In most cities diateichismata remain standing as a ruin, detached from their original function of a barrier wall, or they integrated in newly erected buildings. As barrier walls, however, they are always organisation of urban space and remain as a visible borderline between different city quaters. Most of these partitioned off areas were used as dwelling space, but also in quite a lot of settlements explicitly the trading harbour zones were separated and protected by a diateichisma. Only a few cities divided military areas. Generally, empty space seperated by diateichisma was kept free for people escaping when being attacked. A main reason or occasion to build a diateichisma is the development of sieging techniques from late classical times onwards, being accompanied by a regional declining population density. Hence, especially in late classic and hellenistic times the erection of a diateichisma is a proved method to protect a city. However, a regional visible contemporanous development of urban space, probably connected with regional economic upturns, shows that the phenomenon of cities divided by a diateichisma is not a uniform development of military architecture. Rather a diateichisma is a mirror of the economic and political situation of a settlement and in special cases also of a region.
This paper studies the effects of voluntary accounting information disclosure through auditing on firm access to finance, exposure to corruption, and sales growth. Relying on a data set of more than 70,000 firms in 121 countries, the analysis finds that disclosure can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, audited firms exhibit a slightly lower level of financial constraints than unaudited firms. On the other hand, audited firms face a significantly higher level of corruption obstacles. The net effects of voluntary information disclosure on firm growth are negative, which can largely be explained by the fact that most of the countries in the sample are developing countries where institutions are weak. The beneficial effect of disclosure increases as a country's property rights protection improves. The qualitative results are robust to considerations of the endogeneity of auditing and to alternative measures of corruption and financial constraints. The findings reveal the dark side of voluntary information disclosure: exposing firms to government expropriation where institutions are weak.
Almost two years since his election, as Obama's popularity continues to sink, many are left wondering what went wrong with his presidency. But before that question can be answered, a more careful consideration of the situation he inherited seems in order: two unwinnable wars, the Guantánamo legal limbo, a badly damaged international reputation and an economic crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression, during which close to ten million jobs were lost. That was the state of the country when he came to power in 2008. In two years Obama has not solved any of these problems completely, but has made headway in many of them. In the context of a slow and jobless economic recovery, and faced with a vociferous opposition which has turned down every chance at bipartisan cooperation, the question should perhaps then be how Obama's level of support among the population remains this high (43%).The President still has the backing of Democratic voters, but has lost the support of Independents. Even those who would never consider abandoning him are suffering from an "enthusiasm gap" that may affect their turnout in the November 2 mid-term elections. With unemployment still hovering around 9.5% and with little prospect of change in the near future, the disillusionment of the electorate is understandable (43% support Obama today, compared with 60% in early 2009). But it is worth pondering how much of this discontent against the party in power is derived from the failure of policy and how much from the divisive political game played by the opposition.In all fairness to Obama, shrill accusations of socialism and big government were raised against him as soon as he came to power and had to immediately address the banking, mortgage and automobile meltdowns. Acerbic Republican opposition to any measure adopted by the Executive since then, has dominated the political discourse and made it almost impossible for the Administration to present evidence that, without its actions, the economic recovery would have taken even longer. It is hard to prove a negative proposition. Republicans have had a receptive audience in the low, mostly white middle class, many of who have taken to the streets under the Tea Party banner, to fight in one voice both against government "take over" of health care and (incongruously) in defense of Medicare (the government-sponsored health program for senior citizens).There is rich irony in hearing the word "socialist" hurled as the ultimate insult to a President who has bailed out the big financial institutions and the two largest automobile industries without nationalizing them, and who has signed a health care reform bill that does not include the controversial public option, which had been the centerpiece of his planned reform but was deemed too liberal by members of his own party. But reason and logic have no role to play in the polarized political atmosphere that we are experiencing today. Emotion and fear are much more productive in the views of the opposition, to help them re-take the House and perhaps even the Senate in this fall election.Timid Democrats in the House and Senate, afraid to lose their newly acquired seats in states and districts that voted for McCain in the 2008 presidential election are also abandoning the president. A posse of four or five of Senate "Blue Dog" Democrats has helped dilute the health care legislation by removing the public option from the bill, and have taken off the table legislation to curb carbon emissions and promote green energy sources. There are different hypotheses of why Obama has been unable to maintain high support rates in spite of having had important legislative victories (TARP, Stimulus spending package, extension of unemployment benefits, health care and financial reform). Former (Clinton's) Labor Secretary Robert Reich and NY Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman argue that Obama's stimulus was ridiculously small, given the state of the economy in January 2009. They blame the President for not using the majorities in the House and Senate to pass bolder legislation. By compromising, Obama disappointed the liberal wing of his party, but more importantly, lost the Independents at the center, who simultaneously believed the Republican rhetoric about "Big government Socialist take over" but resented Obama's bailout of Wall Street. Contrary to the fear-mongering claims of the deficit hawks about the debt, Krugman points out that "far from fleeing US debt, investors are eagerly buying it, driving interest rates to historic lows". Reich insists that Obama missed an opportunity to push the limits of politics, establish a new framework of redistributive policies and regulations, and become a transformative president. Although this view undoubtedly has some merit, it ignores the brutal backlash against government spending that affected every Democrat in the House and Senate and made them fear for their jobs. A larger stimulus would have faced even stronger opposition from among the party's own ranks and seen some defectors. Obama is a pragmatic leader who governs as best he can, given the huge constraints of the current political context.Jay Cost from Real Politics offers a different explanation: Obama's geographic coalition was never broad enough because he failed to win the hearts and minds of middle and rural America. It is from those sectors that Independents have abandoned support for the administration in droves. In other words, Obama's major constituencies were in the major cities on the two seaboards and from the suburbs, and included Blacks, youth and university educated white professionals. Even in those cases in which they voted for Obama, white rural America, and blue collar workers never were quite convinced that he would fight for them, and the Wall Street bailout confirmed their suspicion. Underlying it all, there is, of course, the prevalent racism that permeates most sectors of American society and emerges in the form of distrust toward the Commander in Chief: Obama has to prove his loyalty to the country in ways not demanded from others. He has to pay the price of being the first Black president.A third hypothesis that is circulating among pundits is that Obama's focus on health care was misplaced, that he should have concentrated all his attention on economic recovery and job creation instead. Indeed, it was during the 2009 summer of discontent that the electorate became irreconcilably divided and that Republican-launched corrosive ads dominated the airwaves, and rumors about death panels and "pulling the plug on grandma" pervaded City Hall meetings. A general distrust of the federal government and of all incumbents inside the DC belt, while nothing new among the American electorate, re-emerged with new virulence.It is in this context that the Tea Party movement cut its teeth and started dominating the headlines. Spurred by the GOP with the intention of mobilizing the population around anti-tax, anti-federal government sentiments, the Tea-partiers launched national campaigns against all incumbents, and in the process became a voice for the profound anger, fear and frustration that the poor state of the economy and the sustained unemployment rate has caused in the population. Pleased at the frenzy stirred up by the movement, Republicans have complacently let it lead the way, exercising no restraint on their wildest propositions (see below) and allowing it to do the work for them as the voice of the opposition. This is already having unwanted consequences, as extremist Tea-party –fielded candidates from outside party ranks are challenging party insiders in gubernatorial as well as Congressional primary races.Like the eponymous rebellion that took place in Boston in 1773, the Tea Party's main philosophical thrust is against taxes, centralization of power and government overreach. Unlike it, it is also anti-immigrant. Because of the prevalent uncertainty about the economy, their discourse resonates with the electorate. To fight the federal government initiatives, they are finding their best institutional allies in the State governments, courts and legislatures. Indeed, judging by the poisonous political environment, the polarization of the electorate, and the state-based challenges to the federal government, at times it seems that only a Lincolnian figure can save America from another civil war.The so- called "States Revolution" is visible in many fronts. Five states have passed legislation against parts of the federal health reform law, and around 20 states are challenging its constitutionality through the court system. Several states legislatures are getting ready to pass laws modeled after the anti-immigration law in Arizona, which was deemed unconstitutional by a district court but has broad support in the population. It will probably end up in the Supreme Court, as challenges and counter-challenges continue. Interestingly, Obama is in fact deporting more undocumented workers than any of his predecessors, but his reform proposal would give a pathway to citizenship to these workers if they have a job, register with the US government, and pay a fine and back taxes. Immigration has been a thorny issue, with allies and foes on both sides of the aisle. After all, it was Ronald Reagan who gave amnesty to all illegal immigrants in 1986, and George Bush's proposal in 2006 was very similar to Obama's. This is hardly a philosophical issue on which the two parties diverge; it is just a populist cause that is being used by Republicans to stoke the flames of right-wing populism and racism prevalent in main sectors of the population.The backlash against undocumented workers is of such magnitude that it has come to encompass all immigrants. It has now taken the unlikely form of a movement to abolish or amend the 14th Amendment, a foundational provision dating from 1868 which grants citizenship to all born in the United States. The changing of the birth right rule is "worth considering" according to House Minority leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) because "it gives an incentive for people to come to the United States illegally to give birth here." This is outrageous pandering by the Republican Party who has always fathomed itself to be the staunchest defender of the Constitution, which they consider a sacred text to be read literally, with minimal interpretation. Such is the spirit of the times. Republican Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain, the two most important and moderate voices on Immigration Reform have changed their positions (Mc Cain because he is facing a tough primary in his state of Arizona, against, who other, but a Tea Party candidate!) and have both agreed that it is worth a debate. This is not only unprincipled on their part, but also terrible long-term politics, since by taking this stance on immigration they are removing the possibility of regaining the support of the largest growing group of voters, namely the Hispanic or Latino population for years to come.Given the strong anti-incumbent and anti-Washington sentiment prevalent in the population, the results of the mid-term election are hard to predict because some Republicans may lose seats, too. However, the current projections of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia give the Republicans a net win of 32 seats in the House, 7 seats in the Senate (they would need 10 to become the majority) and 6-7 governor seats. The coming mid-term election is being compared to the 1994 "revolution" led by Newt Gingrich which gave Republicans a majority in both the House and Senate. Just like Obama, Clinton was an "outsider" who was handed the presidency partly thanks to his charisma, but mainly because people were disappointed at George Bush Senior, and did not re-elect him. Clinton made health care reform the centerpiece of his first term but failed to get it through Congress. He did manage to pass a controversial crime bill that included a ban on assault weapons, which the Right traditionally opposes. He also raised taxes. Republicans attacked him with an abrasive campaign in favor of lower taxes, second amendment rights and smaller government, and won. Two years later, however, with a brighter economic outlook and a pledge to balance the budget, Clinton was re-elected.But the parallel should not be exaggerated since there are many differences as well. First, Obama did pass health care reform, and that should count have some weight among his supporters, hopefully enough weight to bring them to the polls November 2. Second, the Republican Party's image was not as tarnished in 1994 as it is today, mainly because they hadn't had a majority in Congress for a long time. A New York Times/CBS News poll this past February found that 57% of those polled has negative views of the Republicans this time. The anger is aimed at Washington as a whole and this may help Democrats. The main concern of Democrats in the House and Senate today is the demographics of mid-term elections: older (over 60) white voters, who are the core group of the Tea Party movement and the most outspoken against Obama and this Congress, are also the most likely to vote in mid-term elections. And the "enthusiasm gap" on the Left may induce many Obama supporters to stay home. On the other hand, the Democratic Party learned the lesson of 1994 and is better prepared for the fight: they have been raising money from early on, setting up voters' registration campaigns and trying to mobilize the same base that brought Obama to power two years ago. They stress his activist legislative agenda and its accomplishments: financial reform, health care, extension of unemployment benefits, an energy bill that came short of cap and trade but will meet some green energy goals. More importantly, they are framing the election as a choice between going back to the policies that got the country into the Great Recession, or moving forward with the new policies of corporate responsibility, accountability and more federal supervision of financial institutions in order to avoid similar crises.However, what is clear is that the anemic state of the economy and the high and sustained unemployment rate make all other tactics irrelevant. Uncertainty rules supreme in the minds of the electorate and with it, a fear of what the future may bring and a lack of confidence in the federal government. The Republican opposition is united and vociferous and its message simple and clear: no more taxes, no more deficits, no more government intervention, close borders to immigrants and focus on private job creation through tax cuts; what the federal government won't do, states will. The President should probably counterattack in kind and engage in this ideological battle, but he is not temperamentally suited for it. He dislikes ideological arguments because he wants to be the President of all Americans, as he pledged during his campaign. The next big decision Obama needs to make is whether to let the Bush tax cuts expire after Labor Day or to extend them for two or three years. He has announced his intention to maintain them for the middle class but to end them for the wealthiest individuals, those in the highest 2% income bracket. It would bring their income tax up from 35% to 39%, not a dramatic raise but one that will be resisted strongly by the opposition. Although Obama has a good argument to make (that the $700 billion dollars thus raised would help him reduce the deficit dramatically), there is fear in Congress Democrats that a two- week debate about tax cuts will help Republicans. In a perversely cynical way, perhaps a Republican win in the congressional elections may not be a bad thing after all, and may yet help Obama: let the Republicans make his case for him, that he himself is reluctant to make. Let them stand the public scrutiny and let the public judge if they can provide better, more novel solutions to job creation, to Afghanistan, to immigration reform. A weak performance by a Republican-dominated 112th Congress, an economy that is bound to recover as it enters its next cycle, and a Palin-Huckabee ticket may still get Obama re-elected in 2012.Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Geography Director, ODU Model United Nations Program Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia
From the introduction: For more than two decades, scientific and political communities have debated whether and how to act on climate change. This discussion moved on. Today science is very clear about the magnitude of the risks imposed by unmanaged climate change: 'What we are doing is redifining where people could live and if we do that as a world than hundreds of million of people will move. Probably billions will move. We are talking about gambling the planet, we are talking about a radical change of the way in which human beings could live and where they could live and, indeed, how many of them." With regard to these risks the application of the precautionary principle telling us 'to better be safe than sorry" appears to be imperative and makes traditional cost-benefit analysis become obsolete. Thus combating global warming has become one of the most important issues facing the world in the 21. century. As nobody would be immune from the transformation the planet faces, avoiding this gamble should, in theory, be in the interest of all nations. Unfortunately, a common response in the scale necessary is hard to organize. While the industrialized countries fear the costs of the transformation from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy, it is the poorest people who are facing a double unequity as they 1. will be hit earliest and hardest by the adverse impacts of climate change, and 2. are least responsible for the stock of current concentrations in the atmosphere. This inequity consequently leads to a great sense of injustice in developing countries being asked cut emission, while knowing, that the developed world got rich on high-carbon growth. Without any doubt the outcome of this is a historical responsibility of industrialized countries to take over leadership in reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases. However, bearing in mind that by 2050, approximately eight out of nine billion people in the world will be living in developing nations, it is impossible to get down to emission levels needed without at the same time covering the developing world as well. Against this background international climate protection is a sociopolitical, economical, and ethical challenge, concerning all nations, which have to understand that they are a community based on the principle of mutual solidarity. The international climate regime is regarded as the main platform to further cooperation between nations in order to succesfully combat global warming. Ever since the first world climate conference in 1979 the international community of states pursues the goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions in the medium-term, before finally reducing them in the long-term. In the end of 2009 and 2010, the 15th and 16th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) aimed at achieving the final breakthrough with regard to framing new long-term mitigation commitments necessary in the scale needed to assure that global warming will not exceed 2° C above preindustrial levels; the line of demarcation from which on climate change is supposedly irreversible. Going from this initial situation this thesis will try to determine the driving-forces of the climate regime and research if the regime theory is a capable tool to explain them. In the following chapter it will be started by highlighting the scientific and economic consequences of anthropogenic climate change to amplify, why there is such an urgent need to fight global warming. Thereafter part three is going to deal with the regime theory. After presenting its interest-based, power-based, and knowledge-based school, these different approaches will, in a second step, be applied to the issue area of climate change. Basing on this analysis it is possible to hypothesize on how actors are supposed to behave within the regime. Due to the fact, that this thesis has a limited volume it will be focused on the three actors, which are regarded as not only most important for the regime's success but also possess the biggest influence within the international community, namely the United States, China, and the European Union. Thereby it will be strongly concentrated on the role of the United States. Understanding this role within the international climate regime is considered as absolutely central since the absolute emissions of the US surpass - with the exception of China - those of any other country and its per capita emissions are also amongst the highest in the world. As a result the US although containing just around one-twentieth of the world's population produce almost one-fifth of the world's total emissions of greenhouse gases. Being the world's largest economy the US moreover not only has considerable financial resources which could be directed to environmental problems abroad, but also a technological capability with huge mitigation potentials. Consequently there is a great chance that a possible decision of the US to take a leading role on addressing climate change would set an example that other countries would follow. On the other hand the rest of the world, and here especially developing countries, such as China or India, very likely will not agree to needed actions either, if the US chooses to reject such a leader-role. Therefore it is often spoken of a 'moral duty' of the US to take the lead in the response towards global warming, a duty which is amplified by the fact that the US alone is historically responsible for almost 30% of the total concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. While the EU has recognized its responsibility for anthropogenic climate change and implemented, as the first region worldwide, a comprehensive and demanding programme to fight the greenhouse effect, China's participation and cooperation in the climate change regime is particularly important for two reasons. First, China's impact on climate change is forecasted to be enormous: China's large population, rapid economic growth and heavy reliance on fossil fuels collectively imply large increases in CO2 emissions and thereby a disproportionate influence on climate change. The fourth part is divided in three sections. Since in isolation from its historical and institutional antecedents the global climate regime and the challenges it currently faces, cannot be properly understood, the first section will take a closer look at the current regime, which is founded on the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on climate change and supplemented by its 1997 Kyoto-Protocol. In this context special attention will be given to the exit of the US from the Kyoto process as the slow progress in the international climate negotiations from that point on was mainly triggered by the reluctance of the US to endorse the Kyoto approach. The second section focuses on the main priorities of the actors within climate negotiations, which are in turn highly affected by their energy political situation. The negotiations in Copenhagen and to a minor extent in Cancun will from this basis offer valuable clues to the question to which extent the actors have been able to convert their interests within the regime. In the final part it will be possible to draw a conclusion regarding the driving-forces of the regime and how they affect its effectiveness and robustness. After giving a compressed outlook on potential future driving-forces an assumption will be issued whether the hypotheses developed in the third part can be coroborated as valid.Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents 1.Introduction1 2.Scientific and economic consequences of anthropogenic climate change4 2.1.The natural and anthropogenic greenhouse effect4 2.1.1.The IPCC and its 4th Assessment Report6 2.1.2.The Stern Review and the economics of climate change10 3.The regime theory14 3.1.Three schools of thought within the theory of international regimes15 3.1.1.The interest-based approach15 3.1.1.1.Two-level games19 3.1.2.The power-based approach21 3.1.3.The knowledge-based approach23 3.2.Application of the three approaches to the issue are of climate change25 4.The issue area of climate change33 4.1.The current climate regime33 4.1.1.The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change34 4.1.2.The Kyoto Protocol35 4.1.2.1.The exit of the United States38 4.1.2.2.Basic weaknesses of the Kyoto Protocol41 4.1.3.The Bali Action Plan42 4.2.Prorities of the main actors42 4.2.1.The United States of America44 4.2.1.1.Obama's new climate policy46 4.2.2.China48 4.2.2.1.China's plead for consumption-based inventories54 4.3.International negotiations for a post-2012 agreement in Copenhagen and Cancun58 5.Analysis of the driving-forces in the climate regime64 5.1.The effectiveness and robustness of the climate regime64 5.2.Analysis of the driving-forces with regard to the effectiveness of the international climate regime65 5.2.1.Analysis of the current climate regime65 5.2.2.Analysis of the negotiations for a post-2012 climate regime67 5.2.3.Outlook regarding the regime's potential future driving-forces75 5.2.3.1.A shift in Obama's political priority setting75 5.2.3.2.Developments at the state and local level in the US77 5.2.3.2.1.The ballot on Propostion 23 in California82 5.3.Conclusion83 References90 Table of figures Figure 1:Development of global annual average temperature and CO2-concentrations5 Figure 2: Examples of impacts associated with global average temperature change8 Figure 3: Example of a payoff matrix in the Prisoner's Dilemma17 Figure 4: Example of a payoff matriv in the Battle of the Sexes22 Figure 5: Classification of a country's support for international environmental regulations27 Figure 6: Types of domestic political interest28 Figure 7: Targets of the Kyoto Protocol and actual reductions39 Figure 8: Coal producing states in the US44 Figure 9: Cross-party voting on the ACES in the House of Representatives45 Figure 10: Total energy consumption in China, by type (2008)49 Figure 11: China's exports and CO2-emissions since 200256 Figure 12: C02-emissions from China's net exports in 2004 in comparison with total emissions from China and other countries57 Figure 13: Renewable alternative portfolio standards in the US79 Figure 14: Regional cap and trade programs in the US80 Figure 15: Total global investments in clean energy in $ bn from 2004 to 201085 Appendixes Appendix 1: World carbon dioxide emissions by region107 Appendix 2: National reduction targets in the Non-ETS-Sector in the EU108 Appendix 3: Global carbon dioxide emissions from coal use in million metric tons, by region from 2005 to 2035109 Appendix 4: Global carbon dioxide emissions in million metric tons, by regionfrom 2005 to 2035110 Appendix 5: Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in metric tons per person, by region and country from 2005 to 2035111 Appendix 6: China's coal deposits and major railway infrastructure112 Appendix 7: Copenhagen Accord emission mitigation goals of selected countries113 Appendix 8: New constructions of coal-fired power plants in Germany114 Appendix 9: World nuclear enery consumption, by region from 2005 to 2035115 Appendix 10: Transcript - Interview: Nicholas Stern116 Appendix 11: Transcript - Interview: Hermann Ott.120 Appendix 12: Transcript - Interview: Steve Kretzmann120Textprobe:Text Sample: Chapter 3., The regime theory: The regime theory originated in the late seventies initially in the United States. It searched for answers to challenges in a time when especially crude oil induced shocks in industrial countries have plastically shown the practical consequences of the grown interdependency of economies. So the American study of regimes first and foremost concentrated on the field of the international political economy and was trying to ensure a better understanding of international cooperation. At the same time another phenomenom occured, namely the significant increase in the numbers of international governmental and non-governmental organisations, while the dominance of the United States in the world politics declined. This was a surprising development as, according to the at this time predominant approach of neorealism, international institutions like GATT or the IMF were supposed to become ineffective as a result of the US loosing its status as a global hegemon. To primarily get a better understanding of what international regimes actually are it is useful to study them as social institutions. By means of separating international regimes from international organisations, which are likewise social institutions, two of their main criteria - besides fulfilling the criteria of durability - become especially apparent: In contrast to international organisations, which often have an effect across problems, international regimes always refer to a specific problem area of international politics, like the protection of the ozon layer, trade liberalisations or the problem of climate change, While international organisations can act as cooperative actors, international regimes lack this attribute. In the following it will be concentrated on the interest-based, power-based and knowledge based approach to explain the emergence and characteristics of international regimes. The main focus of attention will be put on the work of Robert Keohane, who produced the most elaborate and also most widely discussed neoliberal approach. While Keohane's formulation had such a strong influence that it has been widely equated with 'regime theory' as such, the neoliberal school of thought, whose overriding emphasis has been on showing the role of international regimes in helping states to realize common interests, has come to represent the mainstream approach analyzing international regimes. Keohane's theory will be complement by Putnams theory of the two-level-games to factor in domestic influences on the interests of states in international negotiations. Thereafter not only the main criticisms of the neorealist school regarding the neoliberal theory will be pointed out, but also the cognitivist perspective will be shown. Hereby it will concentrate on the branch of weak cognitivism that regards the demand for regimes in international relations as depending on the actors' perception of international problems, which in turn are - e.g. in the case of environmental problems - heavily influenced by the information provided by scientists and so called epistemic communities. The cognitive perspective distinguishes itself from the other two approaches since it is the only one, which does not have a rational but sociological meta-theoretical orientation and is another useful complementation of Keohane's regime theory. While none of the present approaches denies regimes any impact, the degree of institutionalism varies considerably, what not least has something to do with the behavioural models on which neoliberals, realists and cognitivists base their analyses. 3.1, Three schools of thought within the theory of international regime: 3.1.1, The interest-based approach: The interest-based theory attributes international institutions a significant role in international politics and therefore dealt critically with the approach of neorealism, which during the first quarter century after WWII has been predominant in the international relations. Neoliberal and realist theories of international regimes though share their commitment to rationalism, which assumes that states, which act in anarchic structures are the most important actors in international politics. By following selfishly defined interests to maximize own profits they behave as rational egoists for whom altruistism never is a motivating force. Compliance to international rules and norms is according to rationalists not a result of a moral obligaion but of a situation where own short-term gains fail to outweigh own losses in the long-run. In contrast to neorealism the interest-based approach consequently stresses, that stable international cooperation is possible even beyond hegemonic power structures, when cooperation is due to increasing interdependent relations beyond national borders in the common interest of all involved states. Since the actions of a player in a field are driven by its interests and every player behaves as a utility maximizer problematic acting interdependencies might emerge, in which a better collective result can solely be reached through cooperation. A need for cooperation is typical for the utilization of global collective goods, which once provided can be used by everyone not only by its providers but also by free-riders, namely states not contributing to make the good available. This is a situation, entitled by Garrett Hardin as the 'tragedy of the commons", that entails two major problems. 1. unless it happens to produce significant side-effects in the form of private goods an individual actor, contemplating whether to contribute to the collective good or not, most likely won't find a unilateral effort that will pay off, and 2. concerning the collective good itself, the smaller the actor the more its own benefit-cost ratio for unilateral efforts will negatively deviate from that of the world. Although in this constellation players have a common interest in securing the common good, cooperation seems very unlikely since each player will regard it as irrational.
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Six years after former President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, the disastrous consequences of this decision are still adding up. In addition to Iran being closer than ever to a nuclear weapons capability, now we must consider how the declining security situation in the Middle East has raised the stakes significantly. Trump promised a "better deal" but instead we got an increasingly costly blunder that may be impossible to fix.To fully understand the enormity of Trump's decision to leave the Iran deal, consider this: When the U.S. and Iran were complying with the deal, it was estimated that it would take Iran about one year to produce enough fissile material (in this case, weapons grade uranium) for a nuclear bomb (known as the "breakout" time). The states negotiating with Iran (the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, and Germany) assessed that this would be enough time to respond to possible violations and prevent Iran from producing a bomb. Even if Iran were to acquire sufficient fissile material, it could still take another year for Iran to make a deliverable nuclear weapon. As of May, 2018, the deal was working and considered (by most) to be a great success.Then President Trump unilaterally left the deal, calling it a "horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made." And now we are in a much worse place. Iran says it has no intent to produce nuclear weapons and U.S. intelligence sees no current efforts by Tehran to weaponize, yet Tehran is believed to be not one year but just weeks from being able to produce enough fissile material for a bomb if it chooses to do so. At the same time, the ability of international inspectors to detect violations in a timely manner has eroded. As one U.S. official said of Iran, "they are dancing right up to the edge."Worse still, relations between the United States and Iran have been so damaged by Trump's withdrawal that it does not appear as though the deal can be resurrected. Any efforts to stabilize the U.S.-Iran relationship have been severely complicated by the recent exchange of direct attacks between Israel and Iran. Just as we need a non-military approach more than ever, the prospects for a diplomatic solution appear distant. What's worse is that increasing tensions may be pushing Tehran closer to a political decision to go nuclear. The danger of an Iranian bomb and the related risk that Israel could attack Iran's nuclear sites could lead to wider military conflict in the region. Of course, it did not have to be this way. The deal was working until Trump abandoned it and, if he had not, it could still be working today.How did we get here?To comply with the Iran deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, Tehran agreed to significantly limit its nuclear program. Under the deal:Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98% to 300kg and limit uranium enrichment to 3.67%, suitable for civilian nuclear power but well below highly enriched (20%) or weapons grade (90%). Those limits would have lasted for 15 years.Tehran limited the number of uranium centrifuges in operation by two-thirds and committed not to build any new enrichment facilities for 15 years. The Fordow enrichment plant (designed as a secret, underground facility) was prohibited from enriching uranium, and limited enrichment could take place only at the Natanz facility.Iran agreed to redesign another nuclear facility to produce much less plutonium and its spent fuel would be shipped out of country. Iran agreed to provisionally implement additional safeguards under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).A year after President Trump's withdrawal, Iran began to retaliate by incrementally breaching the terms of the deal. Tehran lifted the cap on its uranium stockpile, increased enrichment beyond the allowed 3.67% and resumed and expanded activity at prohibited nuclear facilities.Many of Iran's advances were taken in response to provocative actions from the U.S. and Israel. In early 2020, the Trump administration killed Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and soon after Tehran announced that it would no longer abide by its enrichment commitments under the deal. But, even so, Tehran said it would return to compliance if the other parties did so and met their commitments on sanctions relief.In late 2020, Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated near Tehran, reportedly by Israel. Soon after, Iran's Guardian Council approved a law to speed up the nuclear program by enriching uranium to 20%, increasing the rate of production, installing new centrifuges, suspending implementation of expanded safeguards agreements, and reducing monitoring and verification cooperation with the IAEA. The Agency has been unable to adequately monitor Iran's nuclear activities under the deal since early 2021.Iran began enriching uranium to 20% in early 2021 at Fordow and then to 60% at Natanz a few months later after an act of sabotage damaged Natanz. Since then, Iran has been steadily increasing the rate of enriched uranium production. The latest IAEA report (February 2024) estimates Iran's enriched uranium stockpile to stand at 5,525kg, more than 27 times the level permitted under the deal, with 833kg enriched to 20-60%.How close to a bomb?Iran is steadily advancing its nuclear program, getting ever closer to becoming a "threshold state" with the ability to make a weapon while making no overt move to build one.The U.S. government estimated in March 2022 that Iran would need as little as one week to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one nuclear weapon, according to a State Department official. During a March 2023 congressional hearing, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley testified that Iran could produce this amount of enriched uranium "in approximately 10-15 days."In its 2024 annual threat assessment, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that "Tehran has the infrastructure and experience to quickly produce weapons-grade uranium, if it chooses to do so."And in March 2024, France, Germany, and the UK estimated that Iran had acquired enough highly enriched uranium that, if enriched further to 90%, would theoretically be enough for three nuclear explosive devices.There is greater uncertainty about how long it would take Iran to build a nuclear weapon once it has the required weapons-grade uranium. Such steps, referred to as "weaponization," include producing uranium metal and shaping it into bomb parts, producing high explosives and electronics, and fitting it all into a device that could be used for a demonstration test. It would presumably take longer to produce a bomb that could be delivered by aircraft or a warhead small enough to fit onto a ballistic missile.According to official U.S. assessments, Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in late 2003 and has not resumed it. Reportedly, this program's goal, according to U.S. officials and the IAEA, was to develop an implosion-style nuclear weapon for Iran's Shahab-3 ballistic missile. A State Department official stated in April 2022 that Iran would need approximately one year to complete the necessary weaponization steps.We cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together againMuch of Iran's uranium activities can be reversed; centrifuges can be disassembled, facilities can be closed, and uranium stocks can be blended down or shipped out of the country, as was done under the terms of the original deal. However, after years of operating more sophisticated centrifuges, Iran has acquired technical knowledge that cannot be undone.But more importantly, we have lost the political opportunity to reach a comprehensive deal with Iran. The Iran nuclear deal would not have been possible without the active support of Russia and China. Yet these countries are no longer aligned with the West on these issues and Iran is actively supporting Russia in its war with Ukraine and selling oil to China. Iran does not need sanctions relief from the United States as much as it once did.It was often said that although the Iran deal did not solve all the problems in the U.S.-Iran relationship, it solved an important one by taking an Iranian nuclear bomb out of the equation. That even if the myriad problems in the Middle East continued, at least we would not be facing those challenges and Iran on the nuclear threshold. And now that is exactly where we are.The lessons of this tragic tale are clear: a meaningful nuclear agreement is much harder to create than to destroy; if we are lucky enough to get one it should be protected; and if we lose it, we should try to replace it.The Iran deal was a truly remarkable achievement, and we would be much better off today if the United States had rejected the fantasy of a "better deal" and remained in compliance with the one we had. Trump's decision (aided by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-national security adviser John Bolton) to walk away was an historic and utter failure. Now, the prospects of finding a new diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear crisis are daunting. But we must try; the alternatives are worse.
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In 2009, when Israel was bombing Gaza, one of the most prominent advocates of the realist school of international relations, John Mearsheimer, wrote an article explaining that while the nominal goal of Israel's "Operation Cast Lead" was to counteract Hamas rocket attacks, the underlying purpose was "to get the Palestinians in Gaza to accept their fate as hapless subjects of a Greater Israel." He predicted it would fail in this purpose and that armed conflict would persist until the underlying issue of the status of the Palestinian territories was resolved. Sadly, this analysis proved to be as prescient as his more famous warning about mounting tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine.In both Eastern Europe and the Middle East, we can see the bitter fruits of policymakers ignoring these warnings. The United States is pumping arms and money into local wars that both threaten to spiral into far larger conflicts. In both cases, the stated war aims of our local proxies are unlikely to be achieved any time soon — if at all. And in each case, veteran advocates of a more restrained U.S. foreign policy have advocated a long-term ceasefire and moves toward diplomatic resolution of the underlying conflict.University College London professor of international relations Philip Cunliffe, however, has argued that the Left's foreign policy restrainers are being inconsistent. He thinks we were being driven by "sober realism" on Ukraine but have now "lost it" and let ourselves be swayed by humanitarian emotions about the Palestinians.This critique doesn't survive a closer look. It misunderstands the relationship between realist critiques of the aims of war and moral horror at the consequences of war. And it ignores everything the two cases have in common.A Tale of Two Wars Neither the terrorist attack on October 7 nor Russia's invasion of Ukraine were morally justified. They were, however, both predictable and widely predicted. Cautious voices at the heights of the Western foreign policy establishment had been saying that encouraging Ukraine's long-term ambitions to join NATO could inflame tensions with Russia since the end of the Cold War. And there were numerous similar warnings that Netanyahu's strategy of simultaneously digging his boot deeper into the necks of the Palestinians and trying to make a separate peace with surrounding Arab states, thus depriving the Palestinians of the one thing they had going for them — the support, however ambiguous and inconsistent, of those states — was a recipe for exactly this kind of explosion.In both cases, failure to see the warning signs has been compounded by subsequent U.S. policy. While this policy may finally be changing in Ukraine, the Biden administration's default approach to both conflicts has been to write blank checks. In both cases, there have been signs of regret and hesitation along the way — weapons systems that aren't sent to Ukraine for a few months out of concerns that they're too escalatory (and then get sent anyway) or Biden begging Netanyahu for "humanitarian pauses" even as 1.7 million of the more than 2 million residents of Gaza had already been displaced and thousands of children lay dead. Both Zelensky and Netanyahu have pushed back hard against such squeamishness and both men have, more often than not, gotten their way — even though, in both cases, it seems quite unlikely that our allies' stated goals will be achieved on the battlefield.Ukraine retaking both Crimea and every last inch of the Donbas seems supremely unlikely even given another five or 10 years of more war. Similarly, counterinsurgency campaigns with the goal of "eradicating" some terrorist or guerilla force are a dime a dozen around the world. It's far less common for such campaigns to lead to the actual extinction of the targeted force. As Israeli propaganda itself emphasizes, the top leadership of Hamas is not in Gaza but Qatar. Moreover, after seven weeks of "total war" that Israeli officials themselves are eager to compare to atrocities like the Allied bombing of Dresden, it's not yet clear how much the Gaza-based operations of Hamas have been hampered. Meanwhile, as even Elon Musk has realized, displacing millions of Palestinians from their homes and killing and maiming vast numbers of innocents is a recipe for supercharging future recruitment to Hamas or even more radical organizations. As is so often the case around the world, trying to solve long-term geopolitical problems by dropping bombs creates many corpses and few solutions.In both cases, the most likely consequence of a less belligerent course of action would be some sort of territorial compromise that falls considerably short of perfect justice. I've argued elsewhere that liberal democratic principles which in other contexts would be accepted by most Westerners across the political spectrum would entail simply offering West Bank and Gaza Palestinians citizenship in the single state that has de facto existed between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea for the last 56 years. But I'm not deluded about that happening in the short term — and even if a "two-state solution" involved Israel's full retreat to its pre-1967 borders, that would mean the State of Palestine would be created in 22% of the shared homeland. Similarly, as hawks have long fretted, any sort of negotiated peace in Ukraine will mean Russia retaining some of the land it illegally seized in the course of a bloody war that it started. These are bitter pills to swallow.Nevertheless, you'll find realist scholars and commentators advocating peace in both contexts — and for the same reasons. In both cases, pointlessly prolonging the wars would lead to enormous and avoidable suffering for civilian populations. In both cases, the families of the soldiers whose lives would be sacrificed by pointless extension of the wars can be spared. And in both cases, moves toward diplomatic resolution can head off the terrifying possibility of these wars spiraling into larger regional or even global conflicts.Cunliffe's CritiqueCunliffe accuses advocates of peace in both conflicts of selectively choosing not to share graphic images of the Ukrainian victims of the Russian invasion while over-sharing images of Palestinian death and destruction. Providing hyperlinks of articles by me and Branko Marcetic, he says the "strangest saddest cases" on the anti-war Left are those of us "who for long years managed to preserve their intellectual poise and political integrity in the face of monolithic mass conformity, elite hostility, and relentless gaslighting by the mainstream media, only to eventually crumble and succumb to supporting the 'latest thing.'"This is a misunderstanding on several levels. For one thing, I know of no case of a left-wing critic of both wars whose position on Israel/Palestine wasn't the same two years ago. Second, the idea that "mass conformity, elite hostility, and relentless gaslighting by mainstream media" flow in the direction of advocacy for the Palestinians feels like news from an alternate dimension. While I've never particularly enjoyed being called a "Putin apologist" for advocating de-escalation and peace negotiations in Ukraine, that sort of rhetorical ugliness doesn't even begin to touch the tidal wave of firings, deplatformings, denunciations from politicians of both parties, and mass public shaming that's come down on advocates of peace in Israel/Palestine since October 7. (There have also been some incidents of free speech crackdowns the other way, as institutions try to prove their "even-handedness," but no one really denies that it's been lopsided.) Nothing remotely equivalent has happened to advocates of a negotiated solution in Eastern Europe. There are no trucks driving around university campuses displaying the names of "anti-Ukraine" students and professors. There are no laws against boycotting Ukraine on the books in any state.Finally and most importantly, Cunliffe misunderstands the relationship between humanitarian concern about the carnage of war and realism about what can be achieved by war. Outrage about one side's crimes can be — and often is — used to whip up support for wars that will only make everything worse. So, for example, Russian crimes in Ukraine are often showcased for the purpose of bolstering support for prolonging a war whose continuation won't move the eventual ceasefire line very far, but will result in decades of Ukrainian children being blown up by unexploded cluster bombs. Furthermore, the grisly atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 are being used to justify mass death and displacement in Gaza, which will do nothing to reduce the threat of future terrorism. But the objection to such deceptive military solutions to long-term geopolitical problems isn't just that they won't work.Anti-war protestors levitating the Pentagon through the power of meditation won't work either — but if someone wants to dedicate an afternoon to giving it a shot, that's fine with me. The problem with these awful and pointless wars is that they won't achieve their stated objectives but they will result in vast numbers of dead, maimed, and psychologically broken human beings.Cunliffe isn't wrong that restrainers feel moral horror about this in the case of Gaza. He's wrong to think we don't feel it in the case of Ukraine — or that advocacy of restraint in both cases isn't a consistent position.Dear RS readers! 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International audience ; Fishing and Marine Ecosystems: Two ScenariosThe closing months of 2021 saw a significant level of conflict between France and the UK over post-Brexit fishing arrangements in the waters between their territories. It was clear that access to fishing stocks represented a strategic concern for the parties concerned. It must be admitted that, in a context of climate change and decades of ill-considered fishing practices, the fishing sector finds itself facing significant change. Didier Gascuel shows this here as part of the series devoted to the sea and oceans begun in our columns in summer 2020.After reviewing past trends (characterized by increasing over-exploitation of marine ecosystems and resources), he shows how things have changed in recent years, when it has been possible to better manage and regulate fishing activity. But although over-exploitation is currently held in check, there is still no eco-systemic approach to make marine environments genuinely resilient. Can there be one? Looking toward a horizon of 2050, Didier Gascuel proposes two scenarios for fishing and marine ecosystems in this article. The first of these (the worst-case scenario) takes us back to a situation of generalized over-fishing, without meaningful oversight tools or socio-political involvement to regulate it, the whole situation being further aggravated by climate change. The second — more virtuous — scenario is that of 'pesco-ecology' in which, as in agro-ecology, the sector undertakes to manage fishing and marine resources in synergy with ecological and environmental needs. This scenario, by far the most desirable in terms of preserving fishing stocks (and, in the longer term, our own ecosystem), demands a high level of political and social mobilization at the global level. Yet it can become a reality, particularly if seized upon by the European Union. ; La fin de l'année 2021 a été particulièrement marquée par les différends entre la France et le Royaume-Uni concernant les modalités de pêche post-Brexit dans les eaux séparant leurs territoires. On a pu voir combien l'accès aux ressources halieutiques constituait un enjeu stratégique pour les acteurs concernés. Il est vrai que dans le contexte du changement climatique et de décennies de pêche non raisonnée, le secteur de la pêche est en proie à d'importantes évolutions. C'est ce que montre ici Didier Gascuel, dans le cadre de la série consacrée à la mer et aux océans lancée dans nos colonnes à l'été 2020.Après avoir rappelé les tendances passées (marquées par une surexploitation croissante des ressources et des écosystèmes marins), il montre comment les choses ont évolué dans les années récentes, permettant de mieux encadrer et réguler les activités de pêche. Mais si la surexploitation marque le pas, manque encore une approche écosystémique pour enclencher une véritable résilience des milieux marins. Peut-elle advenir ? Se projetant à l'horizon 2050, Didier Gascuel propose ici deux scénarios pour la pêche et les écosystèmes marins. Le premier (celui du pire) nous replace dans une surpêche généralisée, sans outils de contrôle significatifs ni implication sociopolitique pour la réguler, le tout aggravé par le changement climatique. Le second, le plus vertueux, est celui de la « pêchécologie » dans lequel, sur le modèle de l'agroécologie, le secteur s'engage dans une gestion de la pêche et des ressources marines en synergie avec les nécessités écologiques et environnementales. Ce scénario, de loin le plus souhaitable dans une perspective de préservation des ressources halieutiques (et à plus long terme de notre propre écosystème), exige une forte mobilisation politique et sociale à l'échelle mondiale, mais il peut devenir réalité, en particulier si l'Union européenne s'en empare. S.D.La fin de l'année 2021 a été particulièrement marquée par les différends entre la France et le Royaume-Uni concernant les modalités de pêche post-Brexit dans les eaux séparant leurs territoires. On a pu voir combien l'accès aux ressources halieutiques constituait un enjeu stratégique pour les acteurs concernés. Il est vrai que dans le contexte du changement climatique et de décennies de pêche non raisonnée, le secteur de la pêche est en proie à d'importantes évolutions. C'est ce que montre ici Didier Gascuel, dans le cadre de la série consacrée à la mer et aux océans lancée dans nos colonnes à l'été 2020.Après avoir rappelé les tendances passées (marquées par une surexploitation croissante des ressources et des écosystèmes marins), il montre comment les choses ont évolué dans les années récentes, permettant de mieux encadrer et réguler les activités de pêche. Mais si la surexploitation marque le pas, manque encore une approche écosystémique pour enclencher une véritable résilience des milieux marins. Peut-elle advenir ? Se projetant à l'horizon 2050, Didier Gascuel propose ici deux scénarios pour la pêche et les écosystèmes marins. Le premier (celui du pire) nous replace dans une surpêche généralisée, sans outils de contrôle significatifs ni implication sociopolitique pour la réguler, le tout aggravé par le changement climatique. Le second, le plus vertueux, est celui de la « pêchécologie » dans lequel, sur le modèle de l'agroécologie, le secteur s'engage dans une gestion de la pêche et des ressources marines en synergie avec les nécessités écologiques et environnementales. Ce scénario, de loin le plus souhaitable dans une perspective de préservation des ressources halieutiques (et à plus long terme de notre propre écosystème), exige une forte mobilisation politique et sociale à l'échelle mondiale, mais il peut devenir réalité, en particulier si l'Union européenne s'en empare. S.D.La fin de l'année 2021 a été particulièrement marquée par les différends entre la France et le Royaume-Uni concernant les modalités de pêche post-Brexit dans les eaux séparant leurs territoires. On a pu voir combien l'accès aux ressources halieutiques constituait un enjeu stratégique pour les acteurs concernés. Il est vrai que dans le contexte du changement climatique et de décennies de pêche non raisonnée, le secteur de la pêche est en proie à d'importantes évolutions. C'est ce que montre ici Didier Gascuel, dans le cadre de la série consacrée à la mer et aux océans lancée dans nos colonnes à l'été 2020.Après avoir rappelé les tendances passées (marquées par une surexploitation croissante des ressources et des écosystèmes marins), il montre comment les choses ont évolué dans les années récentes, permettant de mieux encadrer et réguler les activités de pêche. Mais si la surexploitation marque le pas, manque encore une approche écosystémique pour enclencher une véritable résilience des milieux marins. Peut-elle advenir ? Se projetant à l'horizon 2050, Didier Gascuel propose ici deux scénarios pour la pêche et les écosystèmes marins. Le premier (celui du pire) nous replace dans une surpêche généralisée, sans outils de contrôle significatifs ni implication sociopolitique pour la réguler, le tout aggravé par le changement climatique. Le second, le plus vertueux, est celui de la « pêchécologie » dans lequel, sur le modèle de l'agroécologie, le secteur s'engage dans une gestion de la pêche et des ressources marines en synergie avec les nécessités écologiques et environnementales. Ce scénario, de loin le plus souhaitable dans une perspective de préservation des ressources halieutiques (et à plus long terme de notre propre écosystème), exige une forte mobilisation politique et sociale à l'échelle mondiale, mais il peut devenir réalité, en particulier si l'Union européenne s'en empare. S.D.La fin de l'année 2021 a été particulièrement marquée par les différends entre la France et le Royaume-Uni concernant les modalités de pêche post-Brexit dans les eaux séparant leurs territoires. On a pu voir combien l'accès aux ressources halieutiques constituait un enjeu stratégique pour les acteurs concernés. Il est vrai que dans le contexte du changement climatique et de décennies de pêche non raisonnée, le secteur de la pêche est en proie à d'importantes évolutions. C'est ce que montre ici Didier Gascuel, dans le cadre de la série consacrée à la mer et aux océans lancée dans nos colonnes à l'été 2020.Après avoir rappelé les tendances passées (marquées par une surexploitation croissante des ressources et des écosystèmes marins), il montre comment les choses ont évolué dans les années récentes, permettant de mieux encadrer et réguler les activités de pêche. Mais si la surexploitation marque le pas, manque encore une approche écosystémique pour enclencher une véritable résilience des milieux marins. Peut-elle advenir ? Se projetant à l'horizon 2050, Didier Gascuel propose ici deux scénarios pour la pêche et les écosystèmes marins. Le premier (celui du pire) nous replace dans une surpêche généralisée, sans outils de contrôle significatifs ni implication sociopolitique pour la réguler, le tout aggravé par le changement climatique. Le second, le plus vertueux, est celui de la « pêchécologie » dans lequel, sur le modèle de l'agroécologie, le secteur s'engage dans une gestion de la pêche et des ressources marines en synergie avec les nécessités écologiques et environnementales. Ce scénario, de loin le plus souhaitable dans une perspective de préservation des ressources halieutiques (et à plus long terme de notre propre écosystème), exige une forte mobilisation politique et sociale à l'échelle mondiale, mais il peut devenir réalité, en particulier si l'Union européenne s'en empare.
Introduction Beyond the intrinsic, aesthetic and spiritual values one may assign to nature, the reasons to manage it are multiple due to its central role in a wide panel of ecological functions crucial to human wellbeing and development. For instance, biological structures and ecological processes provide us food, raw materials, water and energy, protect us against erosion or floods, control water quality, pest impact, pollination, give us large enjoyable spaces for recreation, sport and leisure activities, etc. Despite contributing considerably to economic development, social welfare and health, natural resources have often been considered as inexhaustible and unlimited which has caused dramatic damages in economic, social and environmental issues. This is mainly explained by the fact that many ecosystem services (ES) are 'public goods' or 'common goods': they are often open access in character and non-rival in their consumption. Market and policy decisions often fail to capture most ES values with the exception of a few marketed provisioning ecosystem services 'ES' (e.g. food, timber). This systematic under-valuation of ecosystem services and failure to capture the values is one of the main causes underlying today's biodiversity crisis1. ES valuations can serve as methodological baseline for decision support tools aiming at more sustainability thus guiding and accelerating transition. To sustainably manage the supply and the demand of ES, the policy level needs to gain knowledge on where and which services are provided2–4and who are the stakeholders involved. ES maps provide an explicit link between the biophysical data of the ecosystem and expectations of main concerned stakeholders2. There are an essential tool to help for more holistic and transparent decision processes .Additionally, ES valuations allow highlighting ES hotspots, bundles and trade-offs and priority areas for action5. At last, ES valuations can serve as policy efficiency barometer by measuring ES before and after a specific measure. The importance of the ES in policy is reflected at several levels. At the European level, the Strategy 2020 for biodiversity (resulting from the United Nation convention on biological diversity) presents the objective to 'preserve and enhance ecosystems and their services'. Under this objective, one of the actions requested to member states is to 'map and assess the state of ecosystems and their services in their national territory by 2014'6. Recently, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was launched to guide the flow of scientific information related to biodiversity and ES to governments and practitioners7. In this context, the Walloon government decided to work on the 'development of the implementation of the ES concept into practice within the Public Service of Wallonia (SPW)' (Walloon governmental decision 24/04/2014).To put the ES concept into practice, a common platform, entitled 'WalES', is currently being designed. Objectives The objectives of the WalES platform are multifold: • Developing a common interface between administrations and scientists and multiple actors to share up-to-date information, methods, tools, means, experiences, multiple data flows at multiple levels, etc. in order to organize a common information system on ecosystem services and develop a common methodological platform. • Providing a planification tool through the assessment and mapping of ES to highlight ES hotspots, priority areas for action and discrepancies between ES demand and supply, all providing valuable information to optimize planification. • Providing an impact assessment tool assessing ES before and after a project (e.g. infrastructure building) or a political measure (e.g. agri-environmental measures) in order to test their efficiencies and their impacts on sustainability. • Communicating to the public the importance of ES and the dependency of humans, society and economy upon them, hence demonstrating the emergency to take actions. Procedure and outcomes of the WalES project Since the platform aims at serving policy making, its development consults actors in an iterative way and by different means. Through an accompanying committee, different actors from distinct background follow and guide the project from its premises to its finalization. Among them, policy makers, Directorate Generals from the Walloon Region, university scientists and Governmental research agencies are involved. Additionally, consultations with the civil society are planned. Such participatory approaches are known, especially in ES valuation science, to improve the procedural quality of the assessment and provide assessments better answering the needs and questions of the different parties. As first step, all Directorates General of SPW have been consulted in order to identify fields within the distinct missions of SPW for which the development of ES-based tools would be feasible and desirable. From there, the project structure, method and objectives have been established. In a second and on-going step, all structures, research projects and actors involved are being inventoried in order to get insight into what is being done, what is already accomplished and what remains to be done. Simultaneously, a common and shared information system detailing all data and data flows which could serve as indicator or proxy or models for ES measurements, collecting all experiences and methods on ES valuation available at the Walloon and more detailed scales and proposing standardized or recommended ES evaluation method are developed. This common and shared database will be made available on the net for dissemination of ES holistic approaches and should be updated on a participative way. Subsequently, ES assessments and maps of the Walloon regions is developed in order to fulfill the requirements of the Biodiversity Strategy 2020. A conceptual and methodological framework is designed and will be submitted to stakeholders. A Walloon ES classification with corresponding indicators is setup and a methodology for mapping and assessing ES at various scales is developed. However, the framework and information system are not only defined as a simple recurring reporting tool. The holistic approach should be put in practices on a large spectrum of activities on the fields of agriculture, forestry, water management, nature conservation, rural development plan, urban development, tourism activities, etc. and all field experiences should be shared to demonstrate how it works and what are the limits. The ability of ES approach as decision support tool by different stakeholders will be assessed. Concurrently, a website is established in order to accomplish the communication objectives of the project. Besides communicating the importance of ES assessments and conservation for sustainability, the website serves as interactive platform where the methodological framework, the Walloon ES classification and the database of all indicators and proxy available is made available to all stakeholders or researchers needing some baseline. It thus also serves as a facilitating tool for future research on ES providing theoretical and practical information to ensure their sound scientific background and their practical policy implementation. Conclusions: implications of the project in terms of sustainable development The link between ES and sustainable development has now been the center of political and scientific attention for a while1,8–10. Much research is being carried out developing frameworks, tools and models to assess and map ES11–13. More recently, the importance of the ES concept as decision support tool for policy makers has been put forward. It is stated that ES assessments could guide policy decisions towards more sustainability by adding social and environmental criteria to the economic ones usually relied on14. In that sense, ES assessments could accelerate the transition by providing sound information upon which sustainable policy decisions could be made. However, to date, despite being a hot topic, ES assessments serving policy decisions are sparse15 and the challenge for real integration remains16. The WalES project is thus a real opportunity for the Walloon government and science to bind together to contribute to filling in this gap while simultaneously comply with European baseline by providing the requested national ES assessments and mapping. References 1. TEEB. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Mainstreaming the economics of nature, a synthesis of the approach, conclusions and recommendations of TEEB. (Progress Press, 2010). 2. Burkhard, B., Crossman, N., Nedkov, S., Petz, K. & Alkemade, R. Mapping and modelling ecosystem services for science, policy and practice. Ecosystem Services 4, 1–3 (2013). 3. Kandziora, M., Burkhard, B. & Müller, F. Mapping provisioning ecosystem services at the local scale using data of varying spatial and temporal resolution. Ecosystem Services 4, 47–59 (2013). 4. García-Nieto, A. P., García-Llorente, M., Iniesta-Arandia, I. & Martín-López, B. Mapping forest ecosystem services: From providing units to beneficiaries. Ecosystem Services 4, 126–138 (2013). 5. Palomo, I., Martín-López, B., Potschin, M., Haines-Young, R. & Montes, C. National Parks, buffer zones and surrounding lands: Mapping ecosystem service flows. Ecosystem Services 4, 104–116 (2013). 6. UE. EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. (2011). at 7. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). at 8. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Ecosystems and Human Well-Being. (Island Press, 2005). at 9. Abson, D. J. et al. Ecosystem services as a boundary object for sustainability. Ecological Economics 103, 29–37 (2014). 10. Costanza, R. & Folke, C. in Nature's Services societal dependence on natural ecosystems 49–68 (Gretchen C. Daily, 1997). at 11. Nelson, E. et al. Modeling multiple ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, commodity production, and tradeoffs at landscape scales. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 7, 4–11 (2009). 12. Antle, J. M. & Valdivia, R. O. Modelling the supply of ecosystem services from agriculture: a minimum-data approach*. Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 50, 1–15 (2006). 13. Barrios, E. Soil biota, ecosystem services and land productivity. Ecological Economics 64, 269–285 (2007). 14. Bagstad, K. J., Semmens, D. J., Waage, S. & Winthrop, R. A comparative assessment of decision-support tools for ecosystem services quantification and valuation. Ecosystem Services 5, 27–39 (2013). 15. Laurans, Y. & Mermet, L. Ecosystem services economic valuation, decision-support system or advocacy? Ecosystem Services 7, 98–105 (2014). 16. Daily, G. C. & Matson, P. A. Ecosystem services: From theory to implementation. PNAS 105, 9455–9456 (2008).
La formulación de políticas para satisfacer las necesidades de cuidado de la sociedad nunca había sido más urgente que ahora. En muchas partes del mundo desarrollado, la creciente participación de la mujer en el empleo remunerado ha socavado el modelo tradicional del padre como sostén de la familia, el cual descansaba sobre la disponibilidad de una esposa dependiente que permanecía en el hogar para cuidar de los hijos y los parientes discapacitados, mayores o frágiles. Con este documento se busca comprender la forma en que se configuran las políticas del cuidado. Se examina la dinámica existente entre la forma en que el público formula demandas de cuidado y las distintas maneras en que las políticas de cuidado se crean y aplican en diferentes contextos nacionales, regionales e históricos. El énfasis de este estudio recae principalmente en las políticas de cuidado infantil para las madres y los padres trabajadores de Europa, pero también se abordan las políticas dirigidas a las personas discapacitadas y a los proveedores de cuidado no remunerados. El objetivo de este trabajo es entender la relación, en determinados contextos, entre (i) la articulación de las demandas con base en las necesidades de aquellos que brindan o reciben cuidado; (ii) los marcos políticos y la lógica de las políticas relativas a las necesidades de cuidado; y (iii) los resultados de dichas políticas para distintos grupos de beneficiarios y proveedores de cuidados. El documento se divide en dos secciones principales. La primera se ocupa de las diferentes formas en que los actores políticos enmarcan o delimitan las políticas de cuidado en Europa. La sección comienza con un breve repaso de las teorías y los conceptos que sustentan el documento, para luego proceder con la aplicación de dichas teorías y conceptos en un análisis sobre la forma en que se interpretan las necesidades de cuidado en las demandas de aquellos que representan a los proveedores y beneficiarios del cuidado. Se definen cinco áreas de demandas: conciliación entre el trabajo y el cuidado; apoyo a las personas discapacitadas; cuidado no remunerado; exigencias de flexibilidad por parte de los sindicatos; y cuidado suministrado por migrantes. Según la autora, las demandas de cuidado en estas áreas, tomadas en su conjunto, amplían las exigencias de reconocimiento, derechos y redistribución de responsabilidades en materia de cuidado y apuntan hacia un marco general de justicia social. El análisis de la formulación de políticas en Europa revela que algunos de los discursos relacionados con las nociones de justicia social se ven reflejados en la política del cuidado, pero también muestra que el marco predominante es el de la política del cuidado como forma de inversión social en capital humano. En este documento se examinan las oportunidades y limitaciones políticas relativas al surgimiento de derechos sociales para los padres e hijos en Europa. En la segunda parte del documento se examinan las políticas en diferentes contextos nacionales a partir de las siguientes interrogantes: ¿qué factores llevan a la formulación de las políticas? y ¿qué significa esto para los resultados que pueden obtenerse en relación con las desigualdades sociales? Los factores analizados son el cambio demográfico, la inversión social, la generación de empleo y la naturaleza mundial de la política del cuidado. A manera de conclusión, se señala en el documento que las políticas del cuidado en Europa están impregnadas de tensiones y contradicciones dimanantes de las perspectivas tanto de los proveedores como de los beneficiarios del cuidado. Por una parte, se han registrado importantes cambios en los diez últimos años. Por ejemplo, el reconocimiento del potencial de empleo de aquellos que hasta ahora han permanecido marginados del trabajo remunerado, como las madres y las personas discapacitadas; el reconocimiento de la capacidad de los hombres para suministrar cuidado; el aumento de las responsabilidades del Estado como proveedor de cuidados, en especial el cuidado infantil; y el reconocimiento de los parientes proveedores de cuidado. Por la otra, estas oportunidades han venido de la mano con limitaciones, entre ellas el sentido de obligación de las madres y las personas discapacitadas de conseguir trabajo a menudo en las partes más precarias del mercado laboral; una mayor comodificación de los servicios de cuidado; y la producción de padres y proveedores de cuidado, personas mayores y discapacitadas que ejercen su opción como consumidores en el mercado del cuidado, en lugar de hacer oír su voz como ciudadanos en el ámbito público del cuidado. Estos acontecimientos también han tenido como consecuencia la creación de una fuerza laboral migrante pobremente remunerada. En esta situación, el desafío clave radica en utilizar aquellos espacios en los cuales el cuidado se ha politizado y se han adquirido derechos para fomentar el valor político, social y económico del cuidado como componente fundamental de las demandas de justicia social nacional y transnacional. / ; Abstract. The question of how to devise policies to meet the care needs of society has become more urgent than ever. In many parts of the developed world, women's increasing involvement in paid employment has undermined the traditional male breadwinner model which assumed the availability of a dependent wife at home to care for children, disabled family members and older, frail relatives. This paper seeks to understand how care policies are shaped. It looks at the dynamic between how constituencies make care claims and the ways in which care policies are constructed and delivered in different national, regional and historical contexts. The focus is mainly on childcare policies for working parents in Europe, but the purview here also includes policies for disabled people and unpaid carers. Its aim is to provide an understanding, within particular contexts, of the relationship between (i) the articulation of claims based on the needs of those who provide and/or receive care; (ii) the political frames and logics of policies which attend to care needs; and (iii) the outcomes of such policies for different groups of care receivers and providers. The paper is divided into two main sections. The first focuses on the ways different political actors frame care policies in Europe. It starts with a brief review of the theories and concepts that inform the paper. It goes on to apply these to an analysis of how care needs are interpreted in the claims of those representing the providers and receivers of care. Five areas of claims are identified: work/care reconciliation; disabled people's support; unpaid care; trade union demands for flexibility; and migrant care work. It proposes that, together, claims in these areas expand demands for recognition, rights and the redistribution of responsibilities in relation to care, and that they look to an overarching frame of social justice. The analysis of policy making in Europe shows that some of the discourses attached to notions of social justice find reflection in care policy but that the dominant frame is that of care policy as a form of social investment in human capital. The paper examines political opportunities and constraints in the emergence of social rights for parents and children in Europe. The second part examines policies in different national contexts by asking which issues drive policies and what this means for outcomes in terms of social inequalities. The issues examined are demographic change, social investment, employment creation and the global nature of care policy. In conclusion, the paper finds that care policies in Europe are imbued with tension and contradiction from the perspective of those who provide and receive care support. On the one hand, the last decade has seen important changes: for example, the recognition of the employment potential of those previously marginalized from paid work such as mothers and disabled people; the recognition of men's caring capacities; the rise of state responsibilities for care provision, especially in child care; and the recognition of family carers. On the other hand, these opportunities have been accompanied by constraints, including a sense of obligation by mothers and disabled people to find work often in the more precarious parts of the labour market; the increased commodification of care services; and the construction of parents/carers, older and disabled people exercising choice as consumers in the care market, rather than exercising their voice as citizens in the public domain of care. Such developments have also had the consequence of creating a poorly paid migrant labour economy of care. In this situation the key challenge is to use those spaces in which care has become politicized and rights have been won to advance the political, social and economic value of care as a crucial component in claims for national and transnational social justice. / ; Résumé. Comment concevoir des politiques qui puissent répondre aux besoins de soins des sociétés? La question se pose en termes plus urgents que jamais. Dans bien des pays développés, les femmes sont de plus en plus nombreuses à avoir un emploi rémunéré, ce qui a affaibli le modèle traditionnel de l'homme soutien de famille, qui supposait la présence au foyer d'une épouse à charge s'occupant des enfants ainsi que des parents handicapés ou âgés et fragiles. L'auteur de ce document cherche à comprendre comment sont conçues les politiques des soins et de l'assistance aux personnes. Elle examine la dynamique entre les revendications des différents publics en la matière et la façon dont les politiques sont élaborées et appliquées dans divers contextes nationaux, régionaux et historiques. Elle s'est intéressée principalement aux politiques de garde des enfants mises en place pour les parents qui travaillent en Europe, bien que les politiques relatives aux handicapés et aux soignants non rémunérés entrent aussi dans son champ d'étude. Son objectif est de faire comprendre, dans des contextes particuliers, la relation entre (i) l'articulation des revendications qui partent des besoins des soignants et/ou des soignés; (ii) les cadres et logiques des politiques soucieuses de répondre aux besoins en matière de soins et d'assistance aux personnes; et (iii) les effets de ces politiques sur les différents groupes de soignés et de soignants. Le document se divise en deux sections principales. La première porte sur la manière dont différents acteurs politiques conçoivent les politiques de soins et d'assistance aux personnes en Europe. L'auteur commence par un bref exposé des théories et des concepts qui informent le document. Elle poursuit en les appliquant à une analyse des besoins en matière de soins et d'assistance tels qu'ils ressortent de l'interprétation qu'en donnent les représentants des soignants et des soignés dans leurs revendications. Elle recense cinq domaines de revendication: nécessité de concilier travail et soins; aide aux personnes handicapées; soins non rémunérés; revendications syndicales de flexibilité; et place des migrants dans le secteur des soins. Elle suggère que, collectivement, les revendications dans ces domaines tendent à obtenir une reconnaissance, des droits et une redistribution des responsabilités en matière de soins et d'assistance aux personnes, et se réfèrent à un modèle général de justice sociale. L'analyse des politiques élaborées en Europe montre que certains des discours qui s'inspirent des notions de justice sociale se traduisent concrètement dans les politiques de soins et d'assistance aux personnes mais que le cadre dominant consiste à concevoir la politique de soins et d'assistance aux personnes comme une forme d'investissement social dans le capital humain. L'auteur examine ce qui, en politique, favorise l'émergence de droits sociaux pour les parents et les enfants en Europe et ce qui y fait obstacle. La deuxième partie est consacrée à l'examen des politiques dans leurs différents contextes nationaux. L'auteur examine les questions qui peuvent être à l'origine de ces politiques-l'évolution démographique, l'investissement social, la création d'emplois et la nature de la politique des soins dans le monde-et se demande quels en sont les résultats en termes d'inégalités sociales. En conclusion, l'auteur estime que les politiques des soins en Europe sont pleines de tensions et contradictions du point de vue des soignants comme des soignés. D'une part, d'importantes évolutions se sont produites en dix ans: on reconnaît aujourd'hui l'employabilité de personnes qui étaient tenues naguère à l'écart de l'emploi rémunéré telles que les mères de famille et les personnes handicapées, de même que les aptitudes des hommes en matière de soins; les Etats assument davantage de responsabilités dans la prestation de services, en particulier dans le secteur des garderies pour enfants et l'on reconnaît le rôle des soignants familiaux. De l'autre, ces chances ne vont pas sans contraintes: ainsi, les mères et les personnes handicapées se sentent obligées de trouver du travail, souvent dans les secteurs les plus précaires du marché; on assiste à une marchandisation accrue des services de soins et les parents, soignants, personnes âgées et handicapées sont plus perçus comme des consommateurs faisant des choix sur le marché des soins que comme des citoyens dans le domaine public des soins. Ces évolutions ont eu aussi pour effet de créer une économie des soins portée par des travailleurs migrants mal payés. Dans ces circonstances, le grand défi est d'utiliser les espaces dans lesquels les soins sont politisés et où des droits ont été acquis pour faire valoir l'aspect politique, social et économique des soins comme revendication cruciale de justice sociale aux plans national et transnational.
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The study of International Relations is founded on a series of assumptions that originate in the monotheistic traditions of the West. For Siba Grovogui, this realization provoked him to question not only IR but to broaden his enquiries into a multidisciplinary endeavor that encompasses law and anthropology, journalism and linguistics, and is informed by stories and lessons from Guinea. In this Talk, he discusses the importance of human encounters and the problem with the Hegelian logic which distorts our understanding of our own intellectual development and the trajectory of the discipline of IR.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
I don't want to be evasive, but I actually don't think that International Relations as a field has an object today. And that is the problem with International Relations since Martin Wight and Stanley Hoffmann and all of those people debated what International Relations was, whether it was an American discipline, etc. I believe you can look at International Relations in multiple ways: if you think of à la Hoffmann, as a tool of dominant power, International Relations is to this empire what anthropology was to the last. This not only has to do with the predicates upon which it was founded initially but with its aspirations, for International Relations shares with Anthropology the ambition to know Man—and I am using here a very antiquated language, but that is what it was then—to know Man in certain capacities. In the last empire, anthropology focused on the cultural dimension and, correspondingly separated culture from civilization in a manner that placed other regions of the world in subsidiarity vis-à-vis Europe and European empires. In the reigning empire, IR has focused on the management and administration of an empire that never spoke its name, reason, or subject.
Now you can believe all the stories about liberalism and all of that stuff, but although it was predicated upon different assumptions, the ambition is still the same: it is actually to know Man, the way in which society is organized, to know how the entities function, etc. If you look at it that way, then International Relations cannot be the extension of any country's foreign policy, however significant. This is not to say that the foreign policies of the big countries do not matter: it would be foolish not to study them and take them into account, because they have greater impact than smaller countries obviously. But International Relations is not—or should not be—the extension of any country's foreign policy, nor should it be seen as the agglomeration of a certain restricted number of foreign policies. International Relations suggests, again, interest in the configurations of material, moral, and symbolic spaces as well as dynamics resulting from the relations of moral and social entities presumed to be of equal moral standings and capacities.
If one sees it that way then we must reimagine what International Relations should be. Foreign policy would be an important dimension of it, but the field of foreign policy must be understood primarily in terms of its explanations and justifications—regardless of whether these are bundled up as realism, liberalism, or other. Today, these fields provide different ways of explaining to the West, for itself, as a rational decision, or a justification to the rest, that what it has done over the past five centuries, from conquest to colonization and slavery and colonialism, is 'natural' and that any political entities similarly situated would have done it in that same manner. It follows therefore that this is how things should be. Those justifications, explanations, and rationalizations of foreign policy decisions and events are important to understand as windows into the manners in which certain regions and political entities have construed value, interest, and ethics. But they still belong, in some significant way, to a different domain than what is implied by the concept of IR.
I am therefore curious about the so-called debates about the nature of politics and the proper applicable science or approach to historical foreign policy realms and domains, particularly those of the West: I don't consider those debates to be 'big debates' in International Relations, because they are really about how the West sees itself and justifies itself and how it wants to be seen, and thus as rational. For the West (as assumed by so-called Western scholars), these debates extend the tradition of exculpating the West and seeing the West as the regenerative, redemptive, and progressive force in the world. All of that language is about that. So when you say to me, what are the debates, I don't know what they are, so far, really, in International Relations. The constitution of the 'international', the contours and effects of the imaginaries of its constituents, and the actualized and attainable material and symbolic spaces within it to realize justice, peace, and a sustainable order have thus far eluded the authoritative disciplinary traditions.
Consider the question of China today, as it is posed in the West. The China question, too, emerges from a particular foreign policy rationale, which may be important and particular ways to some people or constituencies in the West but not in the same way to others, for instance in Africa. The narrowness of the framing of the China question is why in the West many are baffled about how Africa has been receiving China, and China's entry into Latin America, etc. In relation to aid, for instance, if you are an African of a certain age, or you know some history, you will know that China formulated its foreign aid policy in 1964 and that nothing has changed. And there are other elements, such as foreign intervention and responsibility to self and others where China has had a distinct trajectory in Africa.
In some regard, China may even be closer in outlook to postcolonial African states than the former colonial powers. For instance, neither China nor African states consider the responsibility to protect, to be essentially Western. In this regard, it is worth bearing in mind for instance that Tanzania intervened in Uganda to depose Idi Amin in 1979; Vietnam ended the Khmer Rouge tyranny in Cambodia in 1979; India intervened in Bangladesh in 1971—it wasn't the West. So those kinds of understandings of responsibility, in the way they are framed today in the post-Cold War period, superimposes ideas of responsibility that were already there and were formulated in Bandung in 1955: differences between intervention and interference, the latter of which today comes coded as regime change, were actually hardly debated. So our imaginaries of the world and how it works, of responsibility, of ethics, etc., have always had to compete with those that were formulated since the seventeenth century in Europe, as "international ethics", "international law", "international theory". And in fact that long history full of sliding concepts and similar meanings may be one of the problems for understanding how the world came into being as we know it today. And this is why actually my classes here always begin with a semester-long discussion of hermeneutics, of historiography, and of ethnography in IR and how they have been incorporated.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
I came to where I am now essentially because of a sense of frustration, that we have a discipline that calls itself "international" and yet seemed to be speaking either univocally or unidirectionally: univocally in imagining the world and unidirectionally in the way it addresses the rest of the world, and a lot of problems result from that.
I had trained as a lawyer in Guinea, and when I came to the US I imagined that International Relations would be taught at law school, which is the case in France, most of the time, and also in some places in Germany in the past, because it is considered a normative science there. But when I came here I was shocked to discover that it was going to be in a field called Political Science, but I went along with it anyway. In the end I did a double major: in law, at the law school in Madison, Wisconsin, and in political science. When I came to America and went the University of Wisconsin, I first took a class called "Nuclear Weapons and World Politics" or something of the sort, it was more theology and less science. It was basically articulated around chosen people and non-chosen people, those who deserve to have weapons and those who don't. There was no rationale, no discussion of which countries respected the Non-Proliferation Treaty, no reasoning in terms of which countries had been wiser than others in using weapons of mass destruction, etc.: there was nothing to it except the underlying, intuitive belief that if something has to be done, we do it and other people don't. I'm being crass here, but let's face it: this was a course I took in the 1980s and it is still the same today! So I began to feel that this is really more theology and less science. Yes, it was all neatly wrapped in rationalism, in game theory, all of these things. So I began to ask myself deeper questions, outside of the ones they were asking, so my Nuclear Weapons and World Politics class was really what bothered me, or you could say it was some kind of trigger.
This way of seeing IR is related to the fact that I don't share the implicit monotheist underpinnings of the discipline. That translates into my perhaps unorthodox teaching style, unorthodox within American academia anyway. Teaching all too often tends to be less about understanding the world and more about proselytizing. In order to try to explore this understanding I like to bring my students to consider the world that has existed, to imagine that sovereignty and politics can be structured differently, especially outside of monotheism with its likening of the sovereign to god, the hierarchy modeled on the church, Saint Peter, Jesus, God, uniformity and the power of life (to kill or let live), and to understand that there have always been places where the sovereign was not in fact that revered. Think of India, for example, where people have multiple gods, and some are mischievous, some are promiscuous, some are happy and some are mean, so there are lots of conceptions and some of these don't translate well into different cultural contexts. The same, incidentally, goes for the Greek gods. Of course, we had to make the Greeks Christians first, before we drew our lineage to them. You see what I mean? Christianity left a very deep impact on Western traditions. Whether you think of political parties and a parallel to the Catholic orders: if you are a Jesuit, the Jesuits are always right; if you are a Franciscan, the Franciscans are always right. The Franciscans for instance think they have the monopoly on Christian social teaching. In a similar way, it doesn't matter what your political party does, you follow whatever your party says. The same thing happens when you study: are you a realist, are you liberalist, etc. You are replicating the Jesuits, the Franciscans, those monks and their orders. But we are all caught within that logic, of tying ourselves into one school of thought and going along with one "truth" over another, instead of permitting multiple takes on reality..
For me, as a non-monotheist myself, everything revolves around this question of truth: whether truth is given or has to be found and how we find it. Truth has to be found, discovered, revealed—we have to continuously search. The significant point is that we never find it absolutely. Truth is always provisional, circumstantial, and pertinent to a context or situation. We all want truth and it is always evading us, but we must look for it. But I don't think that truth is given. It is in the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah. And I am comfortable with that but I am not in the realm of theology. I dwell on human truths and humans are imperfect and not omniscient, at least not so individually.
If I had the truth, then I might be one of those dictators governing in Africa today. I was raised a Catholic by the way, I almost went to the seminary. If you just think through the story of the Revelation in profane terms, you come to the realization that ours are multiple revelations. Again in theology, one truth is given at a time—the Temple Mount, the Tablets, and all that stuff—but that is not in our province. I leave that to a different province and that is unattainable to me. The kind of revelation I want is the one that goes through observing, through looking, through deliberating, through inquiry—that I am comfortable with. There can be a revelation in terms of meeting the unexpected, for example: when I went to the New World, to Latin America for the first time, I said, 'wow, this is interesting'. That was through my own senses, but it had a lot to do with the way I prepared myself in order to receive the world and to interact with the world. That kind of revelation I believe in. The other one is beyond me and I'm not interested in that. When I want to be very blasphemous, even though I was raised a Catholic, I tell my students: the problem with the Temple Mount is that God did not have a Twitter account, so the rest of us didn't hear it—we were not informed. I don't have the truth, and I don't really don't want to have it.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I am not sure I want to make a canonical recommendation, if that's what you are asking me for. Let me tell you this: I have trained about eleven PhD students, and none of them has ever done what I do. I am not interested in having clones, I don't want to recreate theology, and in fact I feel this question to betray a very Western disposition, by implying the need to create canons and theology. I don't want that. What I want is to understand the world, and understanding can be done in multiple ways: people do it through music, through art, through multiple things. The problem for me, however, is actually the elements, assumptions, predicates of studies and languages that we use in IR, the question to whom they make sense—I am talking about the types of ethnographies, the ways in which we talk about diplomatic history, and all of those things. The graduate courses that I was talking about have multiple dimensions, but there are times in my seminars here where I just take a look at events like what happened in the New World from 1492 to 1600. This allows me to talk about human encounters. The ones we have recorded, of people who are mutually unintelligible, are the ones that took place on this continent, the so-called New World. And what this does is that it allows me to talk about encounters, to talk about all of the possibilities—you know the ones most people talk about in cultural studies like creolization, hybridization, and all those things—and all of the others things that happened also which are not so helpful, such as violence, usurpation, and so forth.
What that allows me to do is to cut through all this nonsense—yes I am going to call it nonsense—that projects the image that what we do today goes back to Thucydides and has been handed down to us through history to today. There are many strands of thought like that. If you think about thought, and Western thought in general, all of those historically rooted and contingent strands of thought have something to do with how we construct social scientific fields of analysis today—realism, liberalism, etc.—so I'm not dispensing with that. What I'm saying is that history itself has very little to do with those strands of thought, and that people who came here—obviously you had scientists who came to the New World—but the policies on the ground had nothing to do with Thucydides, nothing to do with Machiavelli, etc. Their practices actually had more to do with the violence that propelled those Europeans from their own countries in seeking refuge, and how that violence shaped them, the kind of attachments they had. But it also had to do with the kind of cultural disposition here, and the manner in which people were able to cope, or not. Because that's where we are today in the post-Cold War era, the age of globalization, we must provide analyses that are germane to how the constituents (or constitutive elements) of the historically constituted 'international' are coping with our collective inheritance. For me, this approach is actually much more instructive. This has nothing to do with the Melian Dialogue and the like.
All of the stuff projected today as canonical is interesting to me but only in limited ways. I actually read the classics and have had my students read them, but try to get my students to read them as a resource for understanding where we are today and how we were led there, rather than as a resource for justifying or legitimating the manner in which European conducted their 'foreign' policies or their actions in the New World. No. I know enough to know that no action in the New World or elsewhere was pre-ordained, unavoidable, or inevitable. The resulting political entities in the West must assume the manners in which they acted. It is history, literally. And of course we know through Voltaire, we know through Montaigne, we know even through Roger Bacon, that even in those times people realized that in fact the world had not been made and hence had not been before as it would become later; that other ways were (and still) are possible; and that the pathologies of the violence of religious and civil wars in Europe conditioned some the behaviours displayed in the New World and Africa during conquest and enslavement.
For the same reason I recommend students to read Kant: I tell them to read Kant as a resource for understanding how we might think about the world today, but I am compelled to say often to my students that before Kant, hospitality, and such cultural intermediaries as theDragomans in the Ottoman Empire, the Wangara in West Africa, the Chinese Diaspora in East and Southeast Asia, and so forth, enabled commerce across continents for centuries before Europe was included into the existing trading networks. This is not to dismiss Kant, it is simply to force students to put Kant in conversation with a different trajectory of the development of commercial societies, cross-regional networks, and the movements to envisage laws, rules, and ethics to enable communications among populations and individual groups.
This approach causes many people to ask whether the IR programme at Johns Hopkins really concerns IR theory or something else. I actually often get those kinds of questions, and they are wedded to particular conceptions of IR. I am never able to give a fixed and quick answer but I often illustrate points that I wish to make. Consider how scholars and policymakers relate the question of sovereignty to Africa. Many see African sovereignty as problem, either because they think it is abused or stands in the way of humanitarian or development actions by supposed well-meaning Westerners. I attempt to have my students think twice when sovereignty is evoked in that way: 'sovereignty is a problem; the extents to which sovereignty is a problem in Africa; and why sovereignty is unproblematic in Europe or America'. This questioning and bracketing is not simply a 'postmodernist' evasion of the question.
Rather, I invite my students to reconsider the issue: if sovereignty is your problem, how do you think about the problem? For me, this is a much more interesting question; not what the problem is. For instance, if you start basing everything around a certain mythology of the Westphalia model, particularly when you begin to see everything as either conforming to it (the good) or deviating from it (the bad), then you have lost me. Because before Westphalia there were actually many ways in which sovereigns understood themselves, and therefore organized their realms, and how sovereignty was experienced and appreciated by its subjects. Westphalia is a crucial moment in Europe in these regards—I grant you that. If you want to say what is wrong with Westphalia, that's fine too. But if Westphalia is your starting point, the discussion is unlikely to be productive to me. Seriously!
In your work on political identity in Africa, such as your contribution to the 2012 volume edited by Arlene Tickner and David Blaney, the terms periphery, margin, lack of historicity recur frequently. What regional or perhaps even global representational protagonism can you envisage for IR studies emerging from Africa and its spokespeople?
The subjects of 'periphery' and 'marginalization' come into my own thinking from multiple directions. One of them has to do with the African state and the kind of subsidiarity it has assumed from the colonization onward. That's a critique of the state of affairs and a commentary on how Africa is organized and is governed. But I do also use it sometimes as a direct challenge to people who think they know the world. And my second book, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy (2006), was actually about that, and that book was triggered by an account of an event in Africa, that everybody in African Studies has repeated and still continues to repeat, which is this: in June 1960, Africans went to defend France, because France asked them to. This is to say that nobody could imagine that Africans—and I am being careful here in terms of how people describe Africans—understood that they had a stake in the 'world' under assault during World War II. And so the book actually begins with a simple question: in 1940, which France would have asked Africans to defend it: Vichy France which was under German control, or the Germans who occupied half of France? But the decision to defend France actually came partly from a discussion between French colonial officers in Chad and African veterans of World War I, who decided that the world had to be restructured for Africa to find its place in it. They didn't do it for France, because it's a colonial power, they did it for the world. That's the thing. And Pétain, to his credit, is the only French official who asked the pertinent question about that, in a letter to his minister of justice (which is an irony, because justice under Pétain was a different question) he said: 'I am puzzled, that in 1918 when we were victorious, Africans rebelled; in 1940, we are defeated, and they come to our aid. Could you explain that to me?' The titular head of Vichy had the decency to ask that. By contrast, every scholar of Africa just repeated, 'Oh, the French asked Africans to go fight, and the Africans showed up'.
Our inability to understand that Africa actually sees itself as a part of the world, as a manager of the world, has so escaped us today that in the case of Libya for instance, when people were debating, you saw in every single newspaper in the world, including my beloved Guardian, that the African Union decided this, but the International Community decided that, as if Africans had surrendered their position in the international society to somebody: to the International Community. People actually said that! The AU, for all its 'wretchedness', after all represents about a quarter of the member states of the UN. And yet it was said the AU decided this and the International Community decided that. The implication is that the International Community is still the West plus Japan and maybe somebody else, and in this case it was Qatar and Saudi Arabia: "good citizens of the world", very "good democracies" etc. That's how deeply-set that is, that people don't even check themselves. Every time they talk they chuck Africa out of the World. Nobody says, America did this and the International Community decided that. All I am saying is that our mindscapes are so deeply structured that nothing about Africa can be studied on its own, can be studied as something that has universal consequence, as something that has universal value, as something that might be universalizing—that institutions in Africa might actually have some good use to think about anything. Otherwise, people would have asked them how did colonial populations—people who were colonized—overcome colonial attempts to strip them of their humanity and extend an act of humanity, of human solidarity, to go fight to defend them? And what was that about? Even many Africans fail to ask that question today!
And it could be argued that this thinking is, to some degree, down to widespread ignorance about Africa. We all are guilty of this. And oddly, especially intellectuals are guilty of this, and worse. Let me give you an example: recently I was in Tübingen in Germany, and I went into a store to buy some shoes—a very fine store, wonderful people—and I can tell you I ended up having a much more rewarding conversation with the people working in the shoe shop than I had at Tübingen University. Because there was a real curiosity. You would like to think that it is not so unusual in this day and age that a person from Guinea teaches in America, but you cannot blame them for being curious and asking many questions. At the university, in contrast, they actually are making claims, and for me that is no longer ignorance, that is hubris.
Your work presents an original take on the role of language in International Relations. How is language tied up with IR theory?
The language problem has many, many layers. The first of these is, simply, the issue of translation. If I were, for instance, to talk to someone in my father's language about Great Power Responsibility, they would look totally lost. Because in Guinea we have been what white people call stateless or acephalous societies, the notion that one power should have responsibility for another is a very difficult concept to translate, because you are running up against imaginaries of power, of authority, etc. that simply don't exist. So when you talk about such social scientific categories to those people, you have to be aware of all the colonial era enlightenment inheritances in them. When we talk about International Relations in Africa, we thus bump into a whole set of problems: the primary problem of translating ideas from here into those languages; another in capturing what kind of institutions exist in those languages; and a third issue has to do with how you translate across those languages. Consider for instance the difference between Loma stateless societies in the rain forest in Guinea, and Malinke who are very hierarchical, especially since SundiataKeita came to power in the 13th century. But the one problem most people don't talk about is the very one that is obsessing me now, is the question how I, as an African, am able to communicate with you through Kant, without you assuming that I am a bad reader of Kant.
The difference that I am trying to make here is actually what in linguistics is called vehicular language which is distinct from vernacular language. Because a lot of you assume that vehicular language is vernacular—that there is Latin and the rest is vernacular; that there is a proper reading of Kant and everything else is vernacular; or you have cosmopolitan and perhaps afropolitan and everything else is the vernacular of it. But this is not in fact always the case. The most difficult thing for linguists to understand, and for people in the social sciences to understand, is that Kant, Hegel and other thinkers can avail themselves as resources that one uses to try to convey imaginaries that are not always available to others—or to Kant himself for that matter. And it is not analogical—it is not 'this is the African Machiavelli'. It is easy to talk about power using Machiavelli, but to smuggle into Machiavelli different kind of imaginaries is more difficult. Nonetheless, I use Machiavelli because there is no other language available to me to convey that to you, because you don't speak my father's language.
Moreover, there is a danger for instance when I speak with my students that they may hear Machiavelli even when I am not speaking of him, and I warn them to be very careful. Machiavelli is a way to bring in a different stream of understanding of Realpolitik, but it's not entirely Machiavelli. If you spoke my father's language, I would tell you in my father's language, but that is not available to me here, so Machiavelli is a vehicle to talk about something else. Sometimes people might say to me 'what you are saying sounds to me like Kant but it's not really Kant' then I remind them that before Kant there were actually a lot of people who talked about the sublime, the moral, the categorical imperative, etc. in different languages; and if you are patient with me then we will get to the point when Kant belongs to a genealogy of people who talked about certain problems differently, and in that context Kant is no longer a European: I place Kant in the context of people who talk about politics, morality, etc. differently and I want to offer you a bunch of resources and please, please don't package me, because you don't own the interpretation of Kant, because even in your own context in Europe today Kant is not your contemporary, so you are making a lot of translations and I am making a lot of translations to get to something else: it is not that I am not a bad reader.
At an ISA conference I once was attacked by a senior colleague in IR for being a bad reader of Hegel, and I had to explain to him that while my using Hegel might be an act of imposition, and a result of having been colonized and given Hegel, but at this particular moment he should consider my gesture as an act of generosity, in the sense that I was reading Hegel generously to find resources that would allow him to understand things that he had no idea exist out there, and Hegel is the only tool available to me at this moment. But because all of you believe in one theology or another, he insisted that if I spoke Hegelian then I was Hegelian, and I retorted that I was not, but that deploying Hegel was merely an instance of vehicular language, allowing me to explore certain predicates, certain precepts and assumptions, and that is all. In this way, I can use Kant, or Hegel, or Hobbes, or Locke, and my problem when I do this is not with those thinkers—I can ignore the limitations of their thinking which was conditioned by the realities of their time—my problem is with those people who think they own traditions originating from long dead European thinkers. Thus, my problem today is less with Kant than with Kantians.
Or take Hobbes: Hobbes talked about the body in the way that it was understood in his time, and about human faculties in the way that they were understood at that time. Anybody who quotes Hobbes today about the faculties of human nature, I have to ask: when was the last time you read biology? I am not saying that Hobbes wasn't a very smart man; he was an erudite, and I am not joking. It is not his problem that people are still trivializing human faculties and finding issue with his view of how the body works—of course he was wrong on permeability, on cohabitation, on what organs live in us, etc.—he was giving his account of politics through metaphors and analogies that he understood at that time. When I think about it this way, my problem is not that Hobbes didn't have a modern understanding of the body, the distribution of the faculties and the extent of human capacities. Nor is my problem that Hobbes is Western. My problem is not with Hobbes himself. My problem is with all these realists who based their understanding of sovereignty or borders strictly on Hobbes' illustrations but have not opened a current book on the body that speaks of the faculties. If they did, even their own analogies may begin to resonate differently. There is new research coming out all the time on how we can understand the body, and this should have repercussions on how we read Hobbes today.
The absence of contextualization and historicization has proved a great liability for IR. Historicity allows one to receive Hobbes and all those other writers without indulging in mindless simplicities. It helps get away from simplistic divisions of the world—for instance, the West here and Africa there—from the assumptions that when I speak about postcolonialism in Africa I must be anti-Western. I am in fact growing very tired of those kinds of categories. As a parenthesis, I must ask if some of those guys in IR who speak so univocally and unidirectionally to others are even capable of opening themselves up to hearing other voices. I must also reveal that Adlai Stevenson, not some postcolonialist, alerted me to the problem of univocality when he stated in 1954 during one UN forum that 'Everybody needed aid, the West surely needs a hearing aid'. Hearing is indeed the one faculty that the West is most in need of cultivating. The same, incidentally, could be said of China nowadays.
One of the things I would like to deny Western canonist is their inclination to think of the likes of Diderot as Westerners. In his Supplément au Voyage a Bougainville (1772), Diderot presents a dialogue between himself and Orou, a native Tahitian. Voltaire wrote dialogues, some real, some imaginary, about and with China. The authors' people were reflecting on the world. It is hubris and an act of usurpation in the West today to want to lay claim to everything that is perceived to be good for the West. By the same token that which is bad must come from somewhere else. This act of usurpation has led to the appropriation—or rather internal colonization—of Diderot and Voltaire and like-minded philosophers and publicists who very much engaged the world beyond their locales. I have quarrels with this act of colonization, of the incipit parochialization of authors who ought not to be. I have quarrels with Voltaire's characterization of non-Europeans at times; but I have a greater quarrel with how he has been colonized today as distinctly European. Voltaire rejected European orthodoxies of his day and opted explicitly to enter into dialogue with Chinese and Africans as he understood them. Diderot, too, was often in dialogue with Tahitians and other non-Europeans. In fact, the relationship between Diderot and the Tahitian was exactly the same as the relationship between Socrates and Plato, in that you have an older person talking and a younger person and less wise person listening. A lot of Western philosophy and political theory was actually generated—at least in the modern period—after contact with the non-West. So how that is Western I don't know. I encounter the same problem when I am in Africa where I am accused of being Western just because I make the same literary references. It is a paradox today that even literature is assigned an identity for the purpose of hegemony and/or exclusion. Francis Galton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton) travelled widely and wrote dialogues from this expedition in Africa, so how can we say to what extent the substance of such dialogues was Western or British?
So in sum you are not trying to counter Western thought, but do you feel that the African political experience and your own perspective can bring something new to IR studies?
I am going to try and express something very carefully here, because the theory of the state in Africa brought about untold horrors—in Sierra Leone, in Liberia, and so on—so I am not saying this lightly. But I have said to many people, Africans and non-Africans, that I am glad that the postcolonial African state failed, and I wish many more of them failed, and I'm sure a lot more will fail, because they correspond to nothing on the ground. The idea of constitutions and constitutionalism came with making arrangements with a lot of social elements that were generated by certain entities that aspired to go in certain directions. What happened in Africa is that somebody came and said: 'this worked there, it should work here'—and it doesn't. I'll give you three short stories to illustrate this.
One of the presidents of postcolonial Guinea, the one I despise the most, Lansana Conté (in office 1984-2008), also gave me one of my inspirational moments. Students rebelled against him and destroyed everything in town and so he went on national TV that day and said: 'You know I'm very disheartened. I am disheartened about children who have become Europeans.' Obviously the blame would be on Europe. He continued, 'They are rude, they don't respect people or property. I understand that they may have quarrels with me, but I also understand that we are Africans. And though we may no longer live in the village', and it is important for me that he said that, 'though we may no longer live in the village, when we move in the big city, the council of elders is what parliament does for us now. We don't have the council of elders, instead we have parliament. They, the students, can go to parliament and complain about their father. I am their father, my children are older than all of them. So in the village, they would have gone to the council of elders, and they could have done this and I would have given them my explanation'. And the next morning, the whole country turned against the students, because what he had succeeded in doing was to touch and move people. They went to the head of the student government, who said: 'The president was right. We had failed to understand that our ways cannot be European ways, and we can think about our modern institutions as iterations of what we had in the past, suited to our circumstances, and so we should not do politics in the same way. I agree with him, and in that spirit I want to say that among the Koranko ethnic group, fathers let their children eat meat first, because they have growing needs, and if the father doesn't take care of his children, then they take the children away from the father and give them to the uncle. Our problem at the university is that our stipends are not being paid, and father has all his mansions in France, in Spain, and elsewhere, so we want the uncle.' He was in effect asking for political transition: he was saying they were now going to the council of elders, the parliament, and demand the uncle, for father no longer merits being the father. He was able to articulate political transition and rotation in that language. It was a very clever move.
The second one was my mother who was completely unsympathetic to me when I came home one day and was upset that one of my friends who was a journalist had been arrested. She said, 'if you wish you can go back to your town but don't come here and bother me and be grumpy'. So I started an exchange with her and explained to her why it is important that we have journalists and why they should be free, until our discussion turned to the subject of speaking truth to power. At that moment she said, 'now you are talking sense' and she started to tell me how the griot functioned in West Africa for the past eight hundred years, and why truth to power is part of our institutional heritage. But that truth is not a personal truth, for there is an organic connection between reporter and the community, there is a group in which they collect information, communicate and criticize, and we began to talk about that. And since then I have stopped teaching Jefferson in my constitutional classes in Africa, as a way of talking about the free press, instead I talk about speaking truth to power. But it allows me not only to talk about the necessity of speaking truth to power, but also to criticize the organization of the media, which is so individualised, so oriented toward the people who give the money: think of the National Democratic Institute in Washington, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Germany, they have no organic connection to the people. And my mother told me, 'as long as it's a battle between those who have the guns and those who have the pen, then nobody is speaking to my problems, then I have no dog in that fight'. And journalists really make a big mistake by not updating their trade and redressing it. Because speaking truth to power is not absent in our tradition, we have had it for eight hundred years, six centuries before Jefferson, but we don't think about it that way. I have to remind my friends in Guinea: 'you are vulnerable precisely because you have not understood what the profession of journalism might look like in this community, to make your message more relevant and effective'. You see the smart young guys tweeting away and how they have been replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, because we have not made the message relevant to the community. We are communicating on media and in idioms that have no real bearing on people's lives, so we are easily dismissed. That is in fact the tragedy of what happened in Tunisia: the smart, young protesters have so easily been brushed aside for this reason.
The third story is about how we had a constitutional debate in Guinea before multipartism, and people were talking about the separation of powers. And I went to the university to talk to a group of people and I put it to them: why do you waste your time studying the American Constitution and the separation of powers in America? I grant you, it is a wonderful experiment and it has lasted two hundred years, but that would not lead you anywhere with these people. The theocratic Futa Jallon in Guinea (in the 18th and 19th centuries) had one of the most advanced systems of separation of powers: the king was in Labé, the constitution was in Dalaba, the people who interpreted the constitution were in yet another city, the army was based in Tougué. It was the most decentralised organization of government you can imagine, and all predicated on the idea that none of the nine diwés, or provinces, should actually have the monopoly of power. So those that kept the constitution were not allowed to interpret it, because the readers were somewhere else. But to make sure that what they were reading was the right document, they gave it to a different province. So the separation of powers is not new to us.
In sum, the West is a wonderful political experiment, and it has worked for them. We can actualize some of what they have instituted, but we have sources here that are more suited to the circumstances of the people in that region, without undermining the modern ideas of democratic self-governance, without undermining the idea of a republic. Without dispensing with all of those, we must not be tempted to imagine constitution in the same way, to imagine separation of powers in the same way, even to imagine and practice journalism in the same way, in this very different environment. It is going to fail. That is my third story.
Siba N. Grovogui has been teaching at Johns Hopkins University after holding the DuBois-Mandela postdoctoral fellowship of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1989-90 and teaching at Eastern Michigan University from 1993 to 1995. He is currently professor of international relations theory and law at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International Law (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions and Order (Palgrave, April 2006). He has recently completed a ten-year long study partly funded by the National Science Foundation of the rule of law in Chad as enacted under the Chad Oil and Pipeline Project.
Related links
Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins University Read Grovogui's Postcolonial Criticism: International Reality and Modes of Inquiry (2002 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's The Secret Lives of Sovereignty (2009 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Counterpoints and the Imaginaries Behind Them: Thinking Beyond North American and European Traditions (2009 contribution to International Political Sociology) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Postcolonialism (2010 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Sovereignty in Africa: Quasi-statehood and Other Myths (2001 book chapter in a volume edited by Tim Shaw and Kevin Dunn) here (pdf)
The United States holds dear our values of democracy, civil liberties, and the separation of the branches of our government. In fact, every member of our armed services has sworn an oath to defend the parchment that declares these institutions sacred, and it is the obligation of the United States Armed Forces to preserve and protect those democratic liberties which we hold dear. Given this, it is surprising to know that US Army doctrine idolizes a military dictator, who knowingly seized complete control of his home state following political unrest. Intriguingly, this same figure, who was revered by his soldiers and that same state he commandeered, struggled with marital and familial conflicts his entire life. These statements may be confusing, as there couldn't have possible been a military coup in the United States, let alone a leader of that coup who is still beloved by his statesmen today. Ironically, this individual is no other than Civil War hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. While the aforementioned facts are not popularly discussed in history, many Americans know and recognize Chamberlain and his contribution to the United States. He is remembered for his actions in battle which earned him the Medal of Honor later in life. Joshua L. Chamberlain is undoubtedly one of the most popularly researched and written figures in the American Civil War era. Moreover, there are a multitude of sources that further my research, answering the question of how Chamberlain was remembered during and after the war compared to evidence of the life he lived. Upon examination of several key books and articles that discuss the memory of Chamberlain, from during the war to the modern day, a baseline literature review can be made regarding the question as well as its answer. These selected works have all contributed to the field regarding Joshua Chamberlain and how he is remembered both in his own time and our modern age. ; Winner of the 2022 Friends of the Kreitzberg Library Award for Outstanding Research in the Senior Arts/Humanities category. ; Investigating Joshua L. Chamberlain; Distinctions Between the Memory and Reality of Maine's Famed Colonel Jacob Maker HI 430 A Professor Sodergren 12 December 2021 1 The United States holds dear our values of democracy, civil liberties, and the separation of the branches of our government. In fact, every member of our armed services has sworn an oath to defend the parchment that declares these institutions sacred, and it is the obligation of the United States Armed Forces to preserve and protect those democratic liberties which we hold dear. Given this, it is surprising to know that US Army doctrine idolizes a military dictator, who knowingly seized complete control of his home state following political unrest. Intriguingly, this same figure, who was revered by his soldiers and that same state he commandeered, struggled with marital and familial conflicts his entire life. These statements may be confusing, as there couldn't have possible been a military coup in the United States, let alone a leader of that coup who is still beloved by his statesmen today. Ironically, this individual is no other than Civil War hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. While the aforementioned facts are not popularly discussed in history, many Americans know and recognize Chamberlain and his contribution to the United States. He is remembered for his actions in battle which earned him the Medal of Honor later in life. Joshua L. Chamberlain is undoubtedly one of the most popularly researched and written figures in the American Civil War era. Moreover, there are a multitude of sources that further my research, answering the question of how Chamberlain was remembered during and after the war compared to evidence of the life he lived. Upon examination of several key books and articles that discuss the memory of Chamberlain, from during the war to the modern day, a baseline literature review can be made regarding the question as well as its answer. These selected works have all contributed to the field regarding Joshua Chamberlain and how he is remembered both in his own time and our modern age. Academic books such as Hands of Providence by Alice Rains Trulock, John Pullen's Twentieth Maine, and Conceived in Liberty by Mark Perry portray Chamberlain in a prolific 2 light. They all generally revere him, initiating their books with praise calling him "a great American hero and a genuinely good man," as well as "remarkable" and a "graceful gentleman".1 Not only do these historians hold these ideals, but the US Army and other agencies openly promote Chamberlain for his heroics without analyzing the reality of who he was holistically.2 Hands of Providence is one of the more prolific biographies describing Chamberlain and the 20th Maine. Trulock writes of his life before, during, and after his war service. She accurately illustrates how Chamberlain's colleagues at Bowdoin, as well as others in his life, regarded him early in the war.3 Comparatively, she notes statements from his soldiers about how they viewed him during the war, both in good and bad lights.4 Pullen does the same, but instead focuses mainly on the unit instead of its commander. This also allows for more in-depth analysis of how his men, and soldiers of the Confederacy, viewed Chamberlain.5 He also describes his work ethic, intelligence, and leadership characteristics regarding how they effected his colonelcy and command during the war. Conceived in Liberty differentiates from the other works because it primarily focuses on the two commanders at Little Round Top and their lives before, during, and after the war. This includes some of the more unsavory events that Trulock and Perry omit, particularly how Chamberlain's home life regarding his wife Fannie's disappointment in their marriage.6 The mentioning of this, as well as information about the abovementioned 1880 affair make this source stand apart from the others.7 1 Trulock, Hands of Providence, xvii; Pullen, Twentieth Maine, 3. 2 United States Department of Defense, "Medal of Honor Monday," https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/story/Article/2086560/medal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-joshua-chamberlain/ [accessed 3 November 2021]; Weart, "Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain," https://themilitaryleader.com/leadership-action-chamberlain/ [accessed 3 November 2021]. 3 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 11; Trulock, Hands of Providence, 57; Trulock, Hands of Providence, 105. 4 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 305. 5 Pullen, Twentieth Maine, 128. 6 Perry, Conceived in Liberty, 4; Perry, Conceived in Liberty, 42; Perry, Conceived in Liberty, 333. 7 Perry, Conceived in Liberty, 387-392. 3 Edward Longacre's The Soldier and the Man is an interesting contradictory source. Instead of constant praise for Chamberlain, Longacre credits him for both his good and poor actions during the war. He calls into question his ego and insecurities, selfish desires for greatness above all else, and indifference towards soldiers to include ordering their execution.8 Longacre writes this from a different perspective, that of truth regarding Chamberlain's life both good and bad. There have also been two articles that discuss Chamberlain and his leadership both written by military officers. The first is "Leadership as a Force Multiplier" by Lieutenant Colonel Fred Hillyard, and the second is "Blood and Fire", written by Major John Cuddy. Hillyard focuses on Chamberlain's leadership characteristics while deeming if he deserves the high pedestal he is placed upon, while Cuddy analyzes how different scholars understood Chamberlain and his leadership philosophy. They both state how Chamberlain has been designated as a symbol of leadership within the military and agree that he received all his knowledge from his commander, Colonel Ames, who was West Point educated.9 Furthermore, they consider Chamberlain in a favorable light by calling him a military genius.10 This differs from other sources in that it outright debates his poor attributes instead of assuming him to be an admirable figure. These articles exemplify the dichotomy of reality and fiction regarding how Chamberlain is remembered. This literature provides insight on the dichotomy of thought regarding Chamberlain, with the more mainstream historians, like Trulock, Pullen, and Perry picturing him as an idyllic, humble, and professional gentlemen who represented the best of Federal officers. This is countered by more modern writers, such as Longacre, Hillyard, and Cuddy, understanding that 8 Longacre, The Soldier and the Man, 100; Longacre, The Soldier and the Man, 118. 9 Hillyard, "Force Multiplier", 4. 10 Cuddy, "Blood and Fire", 2. 4 Chamberlain was by no means perfect, and his flaws should be investigated as much as his successes. Chamberlain's life and legacy is extremely important because it effects how we remember him and his actions during the Civil War. Popular history tells us of Chamberlain's battlefield heroics and of his gentlemanly manner both in and out of battle. Yet, what has not been compiled popularly is the reality of his life, and the memory associated with it. Growing up in Maine, learning about Chamberlain and his regiment was common, mainly as a high point in Maine's history. However, it is increasingly important to recognize who our leaders and heroes were in their lives and hold them accountable for both the good and bad things they did over the course of their lives. Throughout the research, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was viewed in high regard by both his adversaries and peers during the Civil War, as well as in his post-war politics, continuing into today's popular history. Yet, there are differing opinions that emerge over time regarding whether his political skills were as impressive as portrayed as well as how multiple personal issues plagued him and his ability to execute the offices bestowed upon him. *** Joshua Chamberlain came from a respected family in Brewer, Maine, outside of Bangor. In the Bangor area, and later Brunswick, Chamberlain and his relatives were regarded as model citizens who held dear to principles of toughness, work ethic, and democratic values.11 He was raised with these morals and sought after them in his personal and professional life. Concepts of honesty and integrity became trademarks of the family, with his parents expecting those attributes from the Chamberlain children.12 Educated in religion at the Bangor Seminary as well 11 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 57; Longacre, The Soldier and the Man, 16. 12 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 57. 5 as traditionally at Bowdoin, he garnered a reputation as an astute academic who was a stickler for the rules and lived by a code of honor.13 Despite his found success in the classroom, Chamberlain had always fancied a military lifestyle, devoting one term of school at the Whiting Military Academy in 1843, as well as participating in several musters with the Maine Militia before entering service in the Civil War.14 Soon after his schooling, Chamberlain accepted a position as a professor at his alma mater, Bowdoin College. He influenced and instructed students on rhetoric and language prior to the war, even writing recommendations and using his political sway to help students gain commissions and enlistments.15 Eventually, his longing to serve coincided with the nation's necessity for leadership. Joshua Chamberlain's contributions to the preservation of the Union are undoubted, yet the perception of him by peers before and in the early years of the conflict indicate dissenting opinions from his popular reference as a revered leader by all. With the nation at war, Chamberlain's desire to serve increased daily as students graduated, or dropped their academics, and enlisted to serve the Union. In envy, Chamberlain utilized his familial and academic connections to pen a letter to the Governor of Maine, Israel Washburn. In this letter he states, "I have always been interested in military matters, and what I do not know in that line I know how to learn", pleading with the governor to allow a man with no military background or training a chance to command.16 Having claimed to be taking sabbatical in Europe, his colleagues detested his notion to leave Bowdoin and sent letters to the Governor urging him to not grant Chamberlain a commission declaring him to be "'no fighter, but only a mild-mannered common student'", "'nothing at all'", and "'good for nothing'".17 Evidently, despite he and his family's 13 Longacre, The Soldier and the Man, 20, 25-26. 14 Longacre, The Soldier and the Man, 18, 53. 15 Nespitt, Through Blood & Fire, 17. 16 Joshua Chamberlain, as quoted in Nespitt, Through Blood & Fire, 9. 17 Colleagues at Bowdoin, as quoted in Trulock, Hands of Providence, 11. 6 reputation throughout Maine, some harbored public doubts about his ability to lead men into battle, mainly because he was thought to be needed more in his role as a Professor at Bowdoin than in the army by some. Contrarily, there were others who supported Chamberlain's military ambitions full-heartedly. Brunswick's reputable physician, Dr. John D. Lincoln, wrote on Chamberlain's behalf, declaring him to be "'as capable of commanding… as any man out of… West Point" and that the enlisted men would surely "'rally around his standard as they would around a hero.'"18 It wasn't just family friends who supported Chamberlain, local newspapers deemed him "a capable and efficient officer" both fit for battle and the lieutenant colonelcy of the 20th Maine.19 The political sway of the his physician as well as the admirability of local press convinced Governor Washburn to grant Chamberlain's commission, yet opting instead to place West Point educated Adelbert Ames of Rockland as commander of the unit due to Chamberlain's lack of field experience and general military knowledge.20 Although there was noted dissent regarding his commission, his soldiers and fellow officers attest to his leadership attributes both under fire and while encamped. In accordance with what Dr. Lincoln wrote to Governor Washburn, he was commended by his troops as being "idolized" within the unit for his stature and leadership, unlike Ames who was viewed as tyrannical and cruel to his men.21 The men of the 20th Maine were driven towards Chamberlain's sympathetic, more egalitarian leadership style, as Ames gave his men no respect believing that military hierarchy should be placed above all else. The men of the unit rejected this, as in Maine 18 Lincoln, as quoted in Trulock, Hands of Providence, 11-12. 19 "Letter from the State Capitol," Portland Daily Press. 20 Longacre, The Soldier and the Man, 55. 21 Pullen, Twentieth Maine, 77. 7 they and their commander stood evenly on the social scale.22 Colonel Ames was detested for his constant drill and disrespect for his men, being proclaimed by his soldiers as a "'savage" whose "'men would surely shoot him'" when drawn into battle.23 Ames was blissfully unaware of these thoughts, but Chamberlain relished his public perception and continued to care deeply about his men and by extension his image. By default, the volunteers fell on Chamberlain for support and assurance, as they distrusted their Colonel. Chamberlain proved himself militarily at Fredericksburg, and most notably Gettysburg, as a great military officer and tactician. Although his actions are known and renowned, the perspective of him by others during battle is paramount to understanding how he was perceived. For example, over the course of the war Colonel Ames forced many of his regiment's officers to resign due to poor performance and lack of leadership, yet he referred to Chamberlain as his "'best officer'" who led from the front and modeled honor and bravery for his unit.24 Soldiers testified to an instance where his academic and military intelligence united to deceive the enemy by pretending to be a Confederate under the cover of darkness, fooling the enemy into believing the Union line was far away.25 They also pronounced his leadership as something that should be exemplified, as he refused to order his men into unnecessary danger and would not give them orders he would not execute himself.26 This praise was not solely from his soldiers, but other officers from around the army. The commanding general of the Fifth Corps, General Sykes, congratulated him after Gettysburg by saying that the actions of the 20th Maine, and Chamberlain's leadership thereof, were the most 22 Loski, Chamberlains of Brewer, 15. 23 Thomas Chamberlain, as quoted in Loski, Chamberlains of Brewer, 15. 24 Ames, as quoted in Trulock, Hands of Providence, 105. 25 Pullen, Twentieth Maine, 57. 26 Pullen, Twentieth Maine, 80; Trulock, Hands of Providence, 151. 8 important to occur during the battle and that if Little Round Top was lost so was the Union cause.27 His direct superior, Colonel Rice, declared "'your gallantry was magnificent, and your coolness and skill saved us.'" indicating a consensus amongst all involved that Chamberlain's actions were valiant and noble placing him amongst the army's most superb officers.28 His subordinates and supervisors agreed that Chamberlain was an exceptional officer, which is something to note considering some officers, like General Thomas, were liked by their men and hated by their leaders. While it is not surprising that comrades of Chamberlain praised him, the reactions and testimonies of his enemies are important as well. Colonel William Oates was the commander of the opposing 15th Alabama at Little Round Top, and remarkably only had good things to say about Chamberlain. Oates stated that the decisiveness taken by the 20th Maine made them the hardest fighting unit he had ever seen, and that their "'gallant Colonel'" possessed exorbitant amounts of "'skill and… great bravery'" that saved the Union from defeat.29 Another anonymous soldier recollected on how, during Little Round Top, he had a clear line of sight on Chamberlain, yet felt a strong feeling not to fire upon him. He adhered to this feeling, and later expressed how glad he was that he hadn't killed him in a letter to Chamberlain.30 However, it was not only units involved in direct conflict against Chamberlain that respected him. During the surrender at Appomattox, Confederate Major General John B. Gordon stated that the officer from Maine was "'one of the knightliest soldiers of the Federal army'" because of the respect Chamberlain had bestowed upon the surrendering forces.31 Instead of 27 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 155. 28 Rice, as quoted in Trulock, Hands of Providence, 155; Perry, Conceived in Liberty, 271. 29 Oates, as quoted in Pullen, Twentieth Maine, 128. 30 Pullen, Twentieth Maine, 122. 31 Gordon, as quoted in Trulock, Hands of Providence, 305. 9 humiliating the men as they laid down their weapons, Chamberlain ensured that they were treated fairly, yet still making it known who the victor was. In postwar years, editions of the Confederate Veteran painted Chamberlain in a similar fashion. They tell of how brilliant he and his unit were in battle, over 35 years after the end of hostilities.32 The magazine makes it known how great of a leader Confederate soldiers believed he was. In fact, he is cited as representing the Federal Army in 1913 at a monument dedication in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This reconciliatory monument represented the peace between the states by inscribing the names of both Confederate and Federal war dead. Furthermore, Chamberlain attended as a "distinguished soldier" and gentlemen in the eyes of former Confederates.33 It is common for friendly forces to recognize the brilliance of successful military actions; yet surprising that enemy combatants also revered Chamberlain and his actions despite their catastrophic impact on the Confederate war effort. Chamberlain is remembered after the war for his accolades as a representative of Maine while pursuing political aspirations and maintaining public appearances, yet his support never faltered, and he remained generally well respected despite familial disputes and marital issues that troubled his private life. Politically savvy since his days as a professor, Chamberlain made the jump from wartime commander to state executive in a matter of years after the conclusion of hostilities. An indication of his popularity with the people of Maine, he was elected with the largest majority of any gubernatorial candidate in his first election. He ran on the promise to ratify the 14th and 15th amendments, all while ensuring the former Confederacy paid for their sins while earning their right of federal representation. 34 32 "About a Distinguished Southern Family," Confederate Veteran. 33 "Herbert Head of Peace Memorial", Confederate Veteran. 34 Joshua Chamberlain, as quoted in Trulock, Hands of Providence, 337. 10 Chamberlain desired "'suspension of certain privileges'" and "'certain rights'" for former Confederates, of which he believed had been relinquished by waging war. 35 He appealed to Congress, arguing that war is not a game, therefore the losers should be held accountable for their transgressions. He was known for a conservative streak compared to other Republicans, which itself angered those radicals in Maine politics. For example, he publicly argued against allowing suffrage to freedmen, claiming it to be too much of a change too quickly.36 He also supported Maine's conservative senator in voting against the impeachment of Andrew Jackson, an obvious minority opinion in fiercely liberal Republican politics. 37 He was never a practical politician, but his neglect of party viewpoints disgruntled leaders within Republican forums. This was different from other reconstruction leaders, as many focused-on reconciliation instead of punishment and often sided with the powerful postwar party. Although popular among the citizens of the state, he was unprepared for the life of a politician. In essence, he was not prepared for dissenting opinion, and outright disregard for his point of view at times, as he was at this point used to military reverence for the commanders orders. He fought with the legislature on several issues, mainly temperance and the legality of capital punishment in the state, but also found common ground and gained support from both parties.38 Previous legislations had proposed and supported temperance committees that oversaw laws regulating alcohol use and distribution. They established "special police", which Chamberlain declared an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of Mainers.39 He wrote to the legislature describing his dissatisfaction regarding this bill yet felt it his duty as executive to 35 Joshua Chamberlain, as quoted in Trulock, Hands of Providence, 338. 36 Longacre, The Soldier and the Man, 264. 37 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 338. 38 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 338. 39 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 338; Goulka, Grand Old Maine of Maine, 25. 11 sign it nevertheless due to its success in the legislature.40 He angered many within the state with his conduct regarding this issue, refusing to attend temperance meetings and denying them public forums. Chamberlain took his position as governor quite literally, as is evident by his signing of bills he disagreed with instead of vetoing them. He believed it was his, and the government of Maine's, responsibility to enact and therefore enforce law. By extension, he brought this same fervor to the capital punishment debate saying that laws should either change or be enforced. He is quoted saying, "'If we cannot make our practice conform to our law, [we must] make our law agree with our practice'".41 This debate had been raging far before Chamberlain was Governor, with his predecessors simply tabling execution authorizations as it was state law the Governor had to authorize each death with a signature. Furthermore, he used his executive power to commute sentences, but insisted on carrying out many of them considering it, again, his elected duty.42 He confided in his mother that "'many are bitter on me about capital punishment but it does not disturb me in the least'", continuing to describe that some had sent threatening letters in response to his ordering of the executions. 43 He responded calmly "'The poor fool for whomever thinks he can scare me… is mistaken… I do not have a particle of fear in me of anything that walks or flies,'" assuring his mother of his safety.44 His administration was not without success, as garnered support on several important issues. Chamberlain's exoneration of Civil War veterans with pardons received support from both parties, and the people as well.45 Furthermore, the establishment of the Maine's agriculture 40 Goulka, Grand Old Maine of Maine, 79; Smith, Fanny and Joshua, 197. 41 Joshua Chamberlain, as quoted in Trulock, Hands of Providence, 339. 42 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 339. 43 Joshua Chamberlain, as quoted in Goulka, Grand Old Maine of Maine, 75. 44 Joshua Chamberlain, as quoted in Goulka, Grand Old Maine of Maine, 75. 45 Goulka, Grand Old Maine of Maine, 71. 12 academy, the predecessor of the University of Maine, under his administration again excited the people and both political parties.46 This school created another avenue of education for Maine's youth, one not affiliated directly with the little ivy elite of Bowdoin, Bates, and Colby Colleges. Despite his immense popularity, and the fact that both parties supported him in a fifth term, Mainers typically regarded him as an ineffective politician.47 Today, he is not remembered for his political career or exploits, with historians and everyday people recognizing him for his war exploits. Unbeknownst to the public, while Chamberlain pursued political and public aspirations, his family was disintegrating. Not only did he and Fannie have marital issues, but his siblings all experienced turmoil that was directly and indirectly caused by the patriarch's endeavors. During the war, it was known that Fannie and Chamberlain were often at odds regarding their marriage and the direction of their lives. While she begrudgingly supported her husband's military endeavors, she was often distant during the war and hoped that when he returned to Maine he would settle down and make time for her.48 According to letters between the two, it appears that Fannie would often neglect to return letters to Chamberlain, saying he had sent seven letters by October of 1862 compared to receiving only two from his wife.49 This pattern continues throughout the war with Chamberlain asking "'Where are you… I do not hear from you all this long while?. It is more than a month that I have heard a word from you?'".50 Fannie and Chamberlain's marriage was strained by the distance and lack of communication during the war, yet his issues would also follow him into his post-war career. 46 Goulka, Grand Old Maine of Maine, 25. 47 Goulka, Grand Old Maine of Maine, 25. 48 Perry, Conceived in Liberty, 333. 49 Nespitt, Through Blood & Fire, 23. 50 Joshua Chamberlain, as quoted in Desjardin, Life in Letters, 184. 13 Fannie understood how tenaciously ambitious her husband was. He was a man of perception, and it came to no surprise to her that he accepted the Republican nomination and subsequent election as governor. Unlike her support during the war, Fannie made it clear she did not and would not encourage him in this undertaking, as she felt neglected as a wife.51 She felt so strongly about this, she refused to accompany her husband in Augusta, instead opting to stay in Brunswick. He missed her dearly and wanted to share his experience as governor with her pleading, "'we are getting rather lonesome without you…'" while encouraging her to accompany him saying "'we are having some quite pleasant times, only you are wanting to complete our happiness.'"52 Still, despite his proposed love and longing for his wife, their marriage continued to decline throughout his term to the point of abuse accusations and threats of divorce. Fannie, extremely unhappy with her marriage by 1868, released public statements alleging physical and mental abuse during their marriage. Chamberlain's response was chilling, saying "'if it were not you… I should make quick work of these calumniaters…'".53 Seeming more concerned with his public image than his marriage or the state of his wife, he says his enemies will "'ruin'" him when they catch hold of the allegations.54 Chamberlain scolded her like a child, warning her of the perils that faced widows in their society, as well as the unsought humiliation a separation would bring for himself and their families.55 These marital issues continued for the remainder of their lives, with Chamberlain confused on how or why his wife remained so disappointed in their union. They came to a mutual agreement, that they would remain married to preserve public respect for themselves and their family while living separately 51 Perry, Conceived in Liberty, 334. 52 Perry, Conceived in Liberty, 334; Joshua Chamberlain, as quoted in Goulka, Grand Old Maine of Maine, 59. 53 Joshua Chamberlain, as quoted in Smith, Fanny and Joshua, 195. 54 Joshua Chamberlain, as quoted in Smith, Fanny and Joshua, 195. 55 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 341. 14 for much of the remainder of their lives.56 These public statements were used as fodder by his enemies but amounted to make little difference as Chamberlain was subsequently reelected. Despite this, it is important to understand these accusations to therefore appreciate Chamberlain holistically, and acknowledge their absence in popular history. During the war, Joshua's brother Tom fought alongside Chamberlain in the 20th Maine while the remaining Chamberlains awaited the return of their soldiers. Sarah, their sister, continued life at home while John, being chronically ill, served alongside his brothers as a Chaplain. Upon returning home, John became increasingly sick. Despite the ailments of his brother, Chamberlain ran and was elected for governor whilst his wife spent considerable time caring for John.57 Tom, meanwhile, was lost after his wartime service. He lived and worked in New York for a time, yet never found anything worthwhile. Soon thereafter, John died and Governor Chamberlain left his Tom to fend for himself, stranding him both financially and emotionally as Tom had come to rely on the hospitality of John in Chamberlain's absence.58 Later in life he did the same, as Tom returned to Maine in 1889 after failed pursuits in Florida. Chamberlain, now retired, refused to help him as he had his own financial problems. Tom, neglected to attend any reunions of the 20th Maine, therefore allowing his brother to obtain the spotlight.59 Upon Tom's death, Chamberlain retained the same mindset regarding his siblings. Despite this, Tom never resented his brother, in fact encouraging and supporting him until the day of his death.60 Joshua Chamberlain made himself a priority throughout his life, doing so by routinely disregarding the needs of his loved ones in exchange for his own. This is 56 Perry, Conceived in Liberty, 339. 57 Loski, Chamberlains of Brewer, 78. 58 Loski, Chamberlains of Brewer, 82. 59 Loski, Chamberlains of Brewer, 86. 60 Loski, Chamberlains of Brewer, 88. 15 another unknown aspect of Chamberlain's life, and something that he and popular historians do not want the public to see, as it would taint his image as a saintly officer and leader. Omitted from almost every contemporary textbook or lesson regarding Joshua Chamberlain is the 1880 Maine Gubernatorial crisis, termed the 'Count-Out Crisis'. Essentially, elected Democrat Governor Alonzo Garcelon sought reelection in 1879 against two opponents, Daniel F. Davis of the Republican Party and Joseph L. Smith of the Greenbacks Party. With the vote split between three candidates, 49.6% of the votes went to Davis with the remainder split between Garcelon and Smith. The Maine Constitution declared that without over 50% of the votes, no winner could be announced, and the legislature must elect the governor.61 Facing a Republican majority in the legislature, Garcelon manipulated the votes by casting aside Republican votes as invalid, causing the Supreme Court of Maine to declare his actions unconstitutional and award the governorship to Davis. Garcelon refused to yield his office and began appointing Democrat and Greenback Representatives and Senators while declaring himself the rightful governor. All sides began to mobilize paramilitary forces, forcing then Commander of the Maine Militia, Joshua Chamberlain, to intervene.62 Called upon by leaders of the elected legislature, Chamberlain swiftly took control of the government by using civilian police to oust Garcelon's staff and council before alterations could be made to the legitimate election results.63 Controlling the state as a military dictator, Chamberlain now faced the daunting task of relinquishing power to one of the three factions, retaining it for himself, or allowing the courts to decide. He was urged from all sides, with many pleading him to retain the democratic institutions in place.64 Chamberlain confides his great 61 Desjardin, Life in Letters, 239; Foley, Ballot Battles, 164. 62 Foley, Ballot Battles, 165-167. 63 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 356. 64 Desjardin, Life in Letters, 242. 16 responsibility in Fannie saying "'There is… No Governor, no legislature… I have been obliged to assume the defense… of the state… I am determined that Maine shall not become a Southern American State'".65 He is interpreted as referencing his Confederate counterparts and the lawlessness he associated with their secession and subsequent reintegration into the Union, as well as nations literally situated on the South American continent that were notable monarchies and dictatorships. Chamberlain's outlook on his role in this matter is that of a noble hero, something that surely inflated his ego as well as gave him a needed break from what he deemed to be a morbidly boring life as a civilian. Committed to solving the issue in a non-partisan and equitable manner, Chamberlain managed to enrage almost everyone in Augusta during his occupation. He was offered appointments as senator by each side, to which he adamantly refused stating it was the sole responsibility of the courts to decide the outcome.66 He was discouraged that his own party had amounted military forces and bribed him, and that they and the Democratic camp called him a traitor and usurper who abused his office as Commander of the Militia by intervening.67 Both sides plotted against him, threatened to kill or kidnap him, yet he stayed true to his goal of "'keep[ing] the peace'" and allowing laws to be executed rightfully.68 A local paper describes the scene as dire, where all of the power of the state was vested into Chamberlain until matters could be resolved.69 It was also cautionary, asking citizens to stay calm and avoid the capital, as infantry from Gardiner had been given authority to fire upon civilians or police should they act malicious.70 In the end, he gracefully guided Maine through twelve days of political and social 65 Joshua Chamberlain, as quoted in Goulka, Grand Old Maine of Maine, 138. 66 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 357. 67 Trulock, Hands of Providence, 357. 68 Joshua Chamberlain, as quoted in Trulock, Hands of Providence, 359. 69 "Chamberlain Holds the Helm," Daily Kennebec Journal. 70 "Chamberlain Holds the Helm," Daily Kennebec Journal. 17 unrest, ultimately allowing the court to empower the duly elected legislature to establish Davis as Governor. While Chamberlain fought to maintain his public image though marital and political disputes, today's scholars have begun to delve into his life and analyze his actions. Military writers, for example, annotate analysis his military exploits without necessarily focusing on other aspects of his life. By extension, these writers represent the popular memory of Chamberlain today. Military doctrine displays Chamberlain as the best and brightest military leader of the Civil War, yet writers like Hillyard, Cuddy, and Foley discuss his leadership style progression and whether he deserves the high pedestal he is placed in. Fred Hillyard points out in his paper that the Army uses Joshua Chamberlain as an example of leadership to be emulated, saying that the Army claims responsibility in developing leaders in his image through their education pipelines.71 Hillyard, in the 1980's, questions whether or not this selection is plausible, stating that the notion of military education is lost using Chamberlain as an example as he was schooled at a liberal arts college and volunteered for his commission without any prior military education.72 Hillyard also asserts that although the individual actions of Little Round Top are admirable, the tactics and leadership of the Civil War cannot be adequately translated to modern conflicts. He argues that "students may not relate to the muskets, bayonets, [and] bugle calls… when their thoughts are normally of sophisticated weapons systems… [and] the modern battlefield".73 Moreover, Hillyard continues to question the Army's position regarding Chamberlain, asking if his actions, although notable, were necessarily different from military actions of his time. 71 Hillyard, "Force Multiplier", 3. 72 Hillyard, "Force Multiplier", 3. 73 Hillyard, "Force Multiplier", 6. 18 Hillyard equates Chamberlain's war heroics to his personality, luck, and the fact that the pressure of the situation helped shape him into a military genius. Chamberlain's temperament and personal awareness were key to his success at Gettysburg, in that he was able to learn and adapt to the given situation.74 Hillyard also contributes Chamberlain's willingness to share in the suffering of his men as a motivator for them to follow his lead in battle.75 Unequivocally agreeing that his actions were great, he remains unconvinced that Chamberlain was a special instance of leadership. He determines that when people of character are placed in precarious situations, they usually will make consequential decisions.76 He concludes that Chamberlain is a great example of leadership, one that people can look to and learn from, but is not convinced he is the best example that the military should look toward. This exemplifies that, even in the 1980's, scholars viewpoints of him were changing as a holistic image of Chamberlain and his leadership attributes were being developed. In his paper, John Cuddy focuses on Chamberlain's leadership development over time, and how he became a symbol of leadership for the military and the public. Interestingly, Cuddy contradicts Hillyard by saying that his actions during battle were not a result of him being an exemplary human being, instead attributing his bravery to his personality, personal interactions with different role models, as well as his education and professorship at Bowdoin.77 These characteristics, Cuddy argues, projected him to success in leadership roles, and the evaluation of them and him can help others in the future. He also asserts that Chamberlain had an inert sense of entitlement for esteem and prestige citing his pleas to Senator Morrill regarding his permanent appointment to Major General following the war.78 Despite his ego, he was outwardly concerned 74 Hillyard, "Force Multiplier", 6. 75 Hillyard, "Force Multiplier", 8. 76 Hillyard, "Force Multiplier", 5. 77 Cuddy, "Blood and Fire", 4-5. 78 Cuddy, "Blood and Fire", 6. 19 for the welfare of his troops, yet also garnered the need for respect and order within his unit. He was sympathetic to his men but was also strict when called to do so. Cuddy attributes these and other personality traits to his success militarily and asks future students to analyze his self-need for adventure and validation as an example of poor leadership. Chamberlain's combination of humbleness regarding his troops and desire to prove himself made him daring yet conscious enough to lead gracefully in times of stress. Cuddy also determines that Chamberlain is an example of what good role models can do for leadership development, citing his boyhood idols as well as military leaders. Cuddy establishes that Chamberlain's upbringing was filled with military heroes, like his father and grandfather, of whom he always wanted to emulate.79 His childhood was filled with menial labor, hard lessons, and eventual academic prowess. Chamberlain was an advocate for hard work before the war and took these ideals with him into service. Never receiving formal military training, he yearned to prove himself in battle saying "'Soldiering in a time of peace is almost as much against my grain as being a peace man in time of war'" when asked prior to the war about militia service.80 His upbringing shaped his character, which Cuddy argues helped shape him into an effective military leader. Interestingly, we see Foley stray from the commonality of the other military writers, as he seems to agree with popular historians that Chamberlain was a "honorable" and "inspiring" man who answered his nation's call when needed.81 Foley neglects to mention his development as a leader, instead citing sources that clearly picture him as a leader born for greatness. He cites a plethora of Chamberlain's victories, both on and off the field of battle. These include early 79 Cuddy, "Blood and Fire", 15. 80 Chamberlain, as quoted in Cuddy, "Blood and Fire", 7. 81 Foley, "Citizen Warrior", 8. 20 military accomplishments, as well as earning the trust of his men.82 Foley concludes that Chamberlain was simply a military anomaly, crediting in part his successes to "'good genes'".83 He states that Chamberlain's intellectual prowess and desire for challenge fueled his military success, completely disregarding his development as a leader and person throughout his life.84 His lackluster analysis of Chamberlain's life and development is a discredit to leadership development of future military officers, as his paper clearly misinforms the reader by asserting that Chamberlain was a special instance of innate leadership capability. Chamberlain's preeminence is further celebrated today through monuments erected in his name and image. Intriguingly, these monuments were placed far after the Colonel's death in 1914. The first monument was raised on Veteran's Day, 1997, in Brewer near the Chamberlain home. 85 This monument is placed in a public park that is itself a replica of Little Round Top as well as an homage to the Underground Railroad. Named after Chamberlain, it serves to commemorate his battlefield heroics and those of the Hollyoke House that was an actual part of the railroad.86 It is interesting, noting Chamberlain's unfavorable opinions on voting rights for freedmen, that a memorial to him and his unit are placed at an extremely interesting and important historical site in terms of the Underground Railroad, of which Chamberlain was not involved. Yet, the contributions of the Holyoke Family are overshadowed by Joshua Chamberlain's legacy. It's date of completion, as well as location, are significant 82 Foley, "Citizen Warrior", 16. 83 Foley, "Citizen Warrior", 30. 84 Foley, "Citizen Warrior", 29. 85 Maine Civil War Monuments, "Brewer," https://www.maine.gov/civilwar/monuments/brewerchamberlainpark.html [accessed 3 November 2021]. 86 Maine Civil War Monuments, "Brewer," https://www.maine.gov/civilwar/monuments/brewerchamberlainpark.html [accessed 3 November 2021]. Chamberlain Park Statue, Brewer, Maine 21 Chamberlain Statue, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine Maine National Guard Headquarters, Augusta, Maine Chamberlain Post Office, Chamberlain, Maine because it shows that his popularity continued to grow despite his actions having taken place more than 130 years before the monument was placed. The revival of Chamberlain and his exploits in the 1990's can also be explained by he and his unit's stardom in later media. Additionally, Chamberlain retains a second monument in Brunswick on the campus of Bowdoin College. Dedicated in 2003, it is not surprising that the college wanted to commemorate its most notable alumni.87 Yet, this is significant given that the school and its faculty denied his initial requests to serve and slandered him to retain him as a professor. Again, it is notable that almost one hundred years after his death, Bowdoin utilizes the popularity and prestige of Chamberlain's name and likeness to honor him on their campus. Both monuments indicate that Chamberlain's popular memory is alive and thriving in Maine and will be for the foreseeable future. They also indicate that his remembrance has grown in recent years, as these monuments were dedicated in the last twenty-five years. In addition to monuments, his memory lives through his posthumous appointment as the namesake of the Maine National Guard Headquarters in Augusta, dedicated in 2018, as well as an eponymous village in my hometown established sometime in the late 19th century. His legacy is an integral part of Maine's military and political lineage as identified through his idolization by local and state organizations. 87 Maine Civil War Monuments, "Brunswick," https://www.maine.gov/civilwar/monuments/brunswickchamberlain.html [accessed 3 November 2021]. 22 It would be absurd to diminish Joshua Chamberlain's importance to the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg. His decisive military actions and the courage of his unit earn him the distinction as a great officer in the history of our military. The memory displayed by both the northern and southern soldiery indicates just this and exemplifies his gentlemanly traits that are often noted by popular historians and the public. Yet, these examples do not demonstrate the holistic view of who Chamberlain was during his time on earth, both during and after his service in the war. While he was respected for his gallantry in battle by almost all, historians have regularly neglected or diminished his shortcomings in life. Understanding the totality of historically significant people's life is important because we cannot afford to remember people in a single-faceted sense. When looking back on the past, the public deserve to know the good and the bad about the people they are supposed to admire. A one-dimensional viewpoint on any figure has no benefit except to paint a false reality, one that hides reality in exchange for a rose-colored fallacy. Instead, we should be yearning to investigate the lives of our heroes to learn from both their mistakes and accomplishments. In essence, there is more to learn from the mistakes of others than from their successes. Joshua Chamberlain has rightfully been admired for his heroics in battle, yet his private life seemed secluded, isolated, and rarely discussed. Yet, as of late, writers have begun to acknowledge that the hero of Little Round Top was indeed human, with his own demons that menaced him throughout his life. Accusations of abuse, familial abandonment, and general neglect of those he loved has begun to threaten Chamberlain's legacy. Given these flaws and misdeeds being exhumed, will his reputation, for which he fought vehemently to maintain, be tainted or amended in the coming years? Will the lessons taught in Maine schools feature his military feats, as well as his personal shortcomings? This is a question for historians, both 23 professional and amateur, to answer. We hold the keys to truth through research and analysis, and despite the man's noted contributions to our nation, we also owe a debt to future generations to lay out the entirety of Chamberlain's story, and let our children decide the fate of Maine's famed Colonel. 24 Annotated Bibliography Cunningham, S.A. "About a Distinguished Southern Family," Confederate Veteran, 1900. This edition of the Confederate Veteran discusses an encounter between a former Confederate and Gen. Chamberlain years after the war, discussing what happened on the Gettysburg battlefield. The disagreement the two had regarding it, as well as the adjectives used to describe Chamberlain, are interesting and are noted in the paper. "Chamberlain holds the Helm," Daily Kennebec Journal, January 12, 1880. This news article discusses the Maine gubernatorial crisis in 1880 from their point of view. The article talks about Chamberlain being essentially inserted as a military governor, and the fear in the community regarding this. It is used to support research done in other sources. Chamberlain, Joshua. The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaign of the Army of the Potomac, Based Upon Personal Reminiscences of the Fifth Army Corps. Lincoln and London, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Chamberlain's own autobiography is interesting because it was written out of necessity for money. It describes his own experiences of the war and why he believed certain instances occur. This is fascinating because others have differing accounts than he. I did not cite it in the paper, but it is listed in the bibliography. Cuddy, John F. "Training Through Blood and Fire: The Leadership Development of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain." Air Command and Staff College (2015): 2-37. Major Cuddy's essay focuses on Chamberlain's progression as a military leader throughout the war. He states that by modern standards he was a great strategist and soldier yet did not learn at an academy or college. Cuddy advocates for the experiential learning that affected Chamberlain, which he says made him into a great officer. It is used as support for the changing of thought regarding Chamberlain as of late. Desjardin, Thomas A, ed. Joshua L. Chamberlain: A life in Letters: The Previously unpublished letters of a great leader of the Civil War. Harrisburg, PA: National Civil War Museum, 2012. This collection of letters from Chamberlain depicts his personal feeling throughout the war, his gubernatorial years, when he was President of Bowdoin, and throughout his life with his family and colleagues. These primary sources were used when discussing his marital issues, as well as personal feelings during his post-war life. 25 Desjardin, Thomas A. Stand Firm Ye Boys from Maine: The 20th Maine and the Gettysburg Campaign. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995. Desjardin's work focuses exclusively on the Battle of Gettysburg and the actions taken on Little Round Top by the 20th Maine. Most of this book regards the tactics of the battle, but throughout there are personal quotes from soldiers that will be useful, as well as the final two chapters that deal with the immediate memory of the 'Count-on Crisis' and how that affected the remainder of his life. I did not cite this in the paper, but did research it. Foley, Edward B. Ballot Battles; The History of Disputed Elections in the United States. Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 2016. This book has a chapter devoted to the Maine gubernatorial crisis, which was very hard to find research on. I used this source to provide context on the event and why it occurred, while highlighting the importance of Chamberlain's resulting actions. Foley, Chris M. "Citizen Warrior; Major General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain; A Study in Command." USMC Command and Staff College (2012): 8-32. Foley offers a Marine Corps investigation into Chamberlain, who he was as a person, and his leadership characteristics. Like the other officers' papers on Chamberlain, he agrees that the man was a military genius but tends to agree with Trulock and Pullen that Chamberlain's knowledge was an anomaly. Goulka, Jeremiah E, ed. The Grand Old Man of Maine: Selected Letters of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain 1865-1914. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Goulka's collection of letters fits well with the subject of memory because these letters go from during the war until his death. They discuss in depth his time as governor and the issues regarding his family. They are used to support the secondary source work regarding his life and the events that occurred during it. "Herbert Head of Peace Memorial" Confederate Veteran, 1913. The source is another Confederate viewpoint on the Colonel of the 20th Maine. This, like many, portrays him in a positive light. It is regarding a monument displaying peace between belligerents in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This primary source shows an example of how Confederates and Federal troops viewed him during his life. Hillyard, Fred. "Leadership as a Force Multiplier: The Joshua L. Chamberlain Example." US Army War College (1983): 1-29. This essay is written by an Army officer at the War College. LTC Hillyard discusses Colonel Chamberlain's leadership attributes and if he deserves the high stature he has and still is placed in within the Army. He focuses on how Chamberlain was not a trained soldier, but instead an avid learner who used his ability to absorb knowledge from other professional soldiers. Cuddy's piece on the same subject will support this, and Hillyard's 26 article will be used to further demonstrate Chamberlain's reverence amongst the modern military and changing ideals today. "Indignation in Maine" New York Tribune, December 20, 1879. The New York Tribune article discusses again the situation in 1880 in Maine, but from the outside viewpoint of New Yorkers. It is more of how outsiders view the situation instead of Mainers. "Letter from the State Capital" The Portland Daily Press, August 9, 1862. In my research, this is the first instance I could find discussing then Lt Col Chamberlain and his appointment to the newly designated 20th Maine. It states who the officers and NCOs will be within the unit. It describes Chamberlain in a good light, before he was even in combat, which is important to the research. Maine Civil War Monuments "Brewer." https://www.maine.gov/civilwar/monuments/brewerchamberlainpark.html [accessed 3 November 2021]. This is the State of Maine website that documents all the monuments within the state. It gives the relevant information regarding when the monument was placed and by whom. I also will include personal photographs of the site in the final Draft. Maine Civil War Monuments. "Brunswick." https://www.maine.gov/civilwar/monuments/brunswickchamberlain.html [accessed 3 November 2021]. This is like the prior source, simply a different monument. They serve the same purpose and this one will have a personal photograph as well. Nespitt, Mark, ed. Through Blood & Fire: Selected Civil War Papers of Major General Joshua Chamberlain. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1996. This source will add to primary source collection off Chamberlain through letters but only includes works from 1862-1865. They will be used to express his personal feelings during the war regarding his service, his family, and hopefully any issues within his organization. It is used as supporting documents regarding how he was viewed in his time versus how he is remembered. New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center. "140th New York Infantry Regiment's Monument at Gettysburg." https://museum.dmna.ny.gov/unit-history/infantry-2/140th-infantry-regiment/monument-gettysburg [accessed 1 November 2021.] The site depicts the 140th New York Infantry's monument at Gettysburg, which is a statement itself about the men who fought with the unit. It stands as a simple memorial to those who died, including the regimental commander. 27 New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center. "44th New York Infantry Regiment's Monument." https://museum.dmna.ny.gov/unit-history/infantry/44th-infantry-regiment/monument-gettysburg [accessed 1 November 2021.] This huge castle is dedicated to the fighting men of the 44th New York, who were also alongside the 20th Maine at Little Round Top. It is a superfluous monument, given the fact their role in the battle was overlooked by the heroics of Chamberlain and his men. It has a lengthy inscription, unlike the 44th's, which describes what they did during the battle and how many perished. Both these sources will be used to show that some friendly soldiers harbored at least a little bit of jealousy and resentment for Chamberlain's popularity and recognition when they received little to none. Longacre, Edward G. Joshua Chamberlain: The Soldier and The Man. Conshohocken, PA: Combined Publishing, 1999. This book was one of the more helpful sources. It goes into who Chamberlain was as both a soldier and normal person, which my paper discovers through memory. This source helped me express to the reader who Chamberlain really was and how that relates to his popular portrayal. Also, it is one of the only sources that really questions Chamberlain and asks tough questions of his character and actions. Loski, Diana H. The Chamberlains of Brewer. Gettysburg, PA: Thomas Publications, 1998. Loski's book primarily confers how the entire Chamberlain family came to be, and their relevance throughout history. It not only discusses Joshua and Fanny, but also his brother Tom, his sister, other extended family, and of course his parents. I use it to discuss his familial life, mainly regarding how he abandoned them routinely. Norton, Oliver W. The Attack and Defense of Little Round Top, Gettysburg, July 2, 1863. New York, NY: The Neale Publishing Company, 1913. Norton's piece, while older, gives a lot of valuable insight into the battle itself. While this is important to compare thinking from the past to present, there are other sources that do a better job. I do not cite it in the paper Perry, Mark. Conceived in Liberty: Joshua Chamberlain, William Oates, and the American Civil War. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books Limited, 1997. This is one of the more credible sources regarding Chamberlain and his memory, as it also discusses his adversary on Little Round Top and their parallels. Through this source, we can see how other officers and officials of the time viewed Chamberlain both during and after the war, and more importantly how his foes viewed him. Also, the book discusses some of his actions after the war, how it affected his personal life, and how others perceived him. This is a good source to use to refer to both how people thought about him but also the reality of his actions. Also, it is a beneficial source to see how adversaries thought of him, specifically William Oates who commanded the regiment that opposed him at Little Round Top. 28 Pullen, John J. The Twentieth Maine: A Volunteer Regiment in the Civil War. Philadelphia, PA: J.B Lippincott & Company, 1957. The book provides instances of how he is/was remembered. Mainly this source quotes Oates, Chamberlain's counterpart, but also Chamberlain's soldiers regarding their leader. Because the point of this paper is to focus on memory, this source will be helpful because it has a lot of points regarding how the people he commanded felt about Chamberlain. Smith, Diane Munroe, ed. Fanny and Joshua: The Enigmatic Lives of Frances Caroline Adams and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Gettysburg, PA: Thomas Publications, 1999. Like the Chamberlains of Brewer source, this book will give greater understanding of the relationship of Chamberlain and his wife. Comparing to other sources, I will see if in fact their relationship was strained and if so why. It is mainly letters between the two, accompanied by brief excerpts describing the times and circumstances of the letters. These sources will help determine if his stately appearance was a public rouse or if he was privately a different man. Trulock, Alice Rains. In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain and the American Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Trulock's work is one of the prolific biographies of Joshua Chamberlain but is claimed by writers like Cuddy and Longacre to be one sided and only include the more cheerful instances in his life. Most of the work puts Chamberlain in a good light by designating him as a marvelous leader who was fair and beloved by his troops. Strangely, she does mention some of his more unsavory actions after the war, as well as explaining his resistance in allowing freedmen to vote. I use this source a multitude of times because the author covers almost every instance of Chamberlain's life. United States Department of Defense. "Medal of Honor Monday." https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/story/Article/2086560/medal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-joshua-chamberlain/ [accessed 3 November 2021]. This DoD article discusses Chamberlain as an astute, gentlemanly officer who was a gallant recipient of the Medal of Honor. While this is true, it again is an example of popular memory regarding Chamberlain. He is viewed only through his singular actions, not by a collection of them. Weart, David. The Military Leader. "Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain- Leadership in Action," https://themilitaryleader.com/leadership-action-chamberlain/ [accessed 3 November 2021]. Weart's online article does the same as the DoD's. It describes Chamberlain in a single faceted manner and neglects all the instances that made him human like everyone else.
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Republican Gov. Jeff Landry didn't waste any time in proposing momentous changes to Louisiana's electoral system that could be in place by February.
As expected, a day after his inauguration Landry called the Legislature into special session to deal with a federal district court request regarding a Louisiana case to redraw congressional district boundaries. The court gave the state until Jan. 30 to map out districts in line with its interpretation of recent Supreme Court jurisprudence that gives race preferential treatment among criteria for reapportionment. While the state has about a third of the population identifying as black, only one of six districts is majority-minority in resident composition.
While the political left sees that as a mandate to create two M/M districts, in reality the jurisprudence allows for a wider range of options that ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court may wish to make more narrow. To ensure best adherence to all traditional principles of reapportionment, the Legislature should alter one of the non-M/M districts into an opportunity district that places the white/black ratio of residents at about 1:1 (roughly 45 percent each), and if plaintiffs to the case that triggered the judicial intervention disagree, they can continue the litigation that means a final map may not be in place until 2026 elections.
If it comes to that. While this case involving congressional districts has grabbed much media attention, the media largely have ignored a similar case challenging the setup of Louisiana's legislative districts. A decision remains pending on that at the district court level, but most significantly one motion made by the state as defendant is to challenge the constitutionality of giving race preferential treatment in reapportionment matters. That presents a genuine opportunity for the Supreme Court to abandon its recently-articulated standard, which if so moots entirely the case about the congressional districts.
Another set of court decisions also may scuttle the plaintiffs' case, mooting whatever the outcome of the special session. The neighboring Eight Circuit Court of Appeals is sitting on a ruling that only the federal government may initiate such challenges. The Fifth Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Louisiana, in the case already has ruled against that interpretation in considering the congressional case, but a disagreement between circuits invites Supreme Court intervention that could come out in favor of the novel interpretation. If it did and Democrat Pres. Joe Biden loses reelection, the new Republican president could withdraw Department of Justice participation in the case against Louisiana's districts, making that challenge collapse.
For these reasons, the Legislature should stick to its guns as best it can in the current legal environment by drawing a map with the single M/M and an opportunity district (made even more solid constitutionally by using that to protect incumbent Republican Rep. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House). If that is accepted by the plaintiffs, elections can proceed under that unless the Supreme Court, perhaps using the other Louisiana case as a vehicle, declares the use of race has outlived its use in mapping, whereupon the Legislature could restore its existing map as that better adheres to the traditional principles.
Landry's call also addressed another issue of reapportionment, that of the state's Supreme Court districts. The current map suffers from significant malapportionment in population, although jurisprudence doesn't require roughly equal populations in districts for a judicial electoral map. Nevertheless, Landry made the request that could produce a two M/M map where now only one exists. In fact, five of the sitting justices – three who can run for reelection, two who can't due to the age limit – have circulated a preferred map that creates such an additional district, which also protects the reelection of those eligible and the continued service of those who aren't. The other two justices, Republican Scott Chrichton who can't run for reelection whose northwestern westerly district would be severely dismembered under the new map and no party John Weimer who would lose his seat under the new map, object to that map.
Creation of a second M/M district was floated three years ago, but in the context of expanding the Court by two districts. This would make for a map less violative of the traditional principles than the proposed map which could draw litigation, but it would require amending the Constitution.
For these reasons, the best chance is nothing will happen. Particularly Republican legislators in the most drastically affected districts may deny the simple majorities in each chamber to redraw a seven-member panel, but there may be enough Republicans who wish that change rather than a nine-member panel to prevent the two-thirds majorities needed to cue up the necessary amendment.
All of this maneuvering will create heartburn for potential candidates to take Crichton's place in the Second District. In particular, the campaign committee of Republican Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jeff Cox – whose profile was raised by his issuing the majority decision that helped pave the way for a new election for Caddo Parish Sheriff – for the Supreme Court already has sent out holiday greeting cards on his behalf. Under the proposed plan, Cox would be thrown into a projected M/M district unlikely to elect a Republican, while demographics for him are much more favorable in the existing district.
Finally, Landry's call asked for implementation of closed primaries, unlimited in scope. With the broadness of the language, the most open-ended interpretation would make every single election in the state subject to a closed party primary, meaning those that are currently at-large would have to be replaced with partisan nominations.
It's unlikely that the Legislature would disrupt hundreds of election systems that feature at-large contests – mainly confined to village elections, but also including some larger municipal and local judicial contests – and allow those to continue without the overlay of party primaries. Excepting these, the Legislature could choose whether to apply closed primary elections to any or all of local, state, national, executive legislative, or judicial races.
Bills likely would implement this on a rolling basis: local elections in 2025, national elections and Public Service Commission spots in 2026, and all other state elections in 2027. Also likely is instead of the cumbersome potential four-stage system used for congressional elections in 2008 and 2010 – primary, primary runoff, general, general runoff – primary runoffs would be dispensed with, and perhaps even general runoffs.
Systems like these would mark a profound shift in the electoral environment. No longer could moderate Democrats masquerade as Republicans, and the half-dozen white Democrats in the Legislature might go in number to zero (with a smaller substitution of white-to-black in local contests). With a registered black electorate among Democrats that likely would exceed two-thirds after all the reshuffling occurs (whites registered as Democrats but who haven't voted for a Democrat in some time will have to register as Republicans to have any say in closed primaries for their preferred candidates), white moderates will find they can win only as Republicans in a narrow band of racially swing districts.
While specifically this will strengthen Republican rule statewide, more generally it will provide for more coherent policy-making from the Legislature as parties will become more capable of coordinating members with the greater control their registrants have over nominations. This increased coherence will grant greater independence to the Legislature.
Although some moderate Republicans in particular will object to closed primaries as this threatens their reelections, as a result of last year's elections their numbers have dwindled to the extent that even without them, out of the GOP's 73 in the House and 28 in the Senate surely 53 votes in the House and 20 in the Senate can be scrounged up to push through the change (and a few black Democrats may defect as closed primaries will allow black Democrats generally to gain greater control over the party). Of the three topics presented for consideration in the Louisiana Legislature's First Extraordinary Session of 2024, this one promises to have the farthest-reaching impact of them all.