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Theory Talk #75: Tarak Barkawi on IR after the West, and why the best work in IR is often found at its marginsIn this Talk, Tarak Barkawi discusses the importance of the archive and real-world experiences, at a time of growing institutional constraints. He reflects on the growing rationalization and "schoolification" of the academy, a disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized within a university audit culture, and the future of IR in a post-COVID world. He also discusses IR's contorted relationship to the archive, and explore future sites of critical innovation and inquiry, including the value of knowledge production outside of the academy. PDF version of this TalkSo what is, or should be, according to you, the biggest challenge, or principal debate in critical social sciences and history?Right now, despite thinking about it, I don't have an answer to that question. Had you asked me five years ago, I would have said, without hesitation, Eurocentrism. There's a line in Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe where he remarks that Europe has already been provincialized by history, but we still needed to provincialize it intellectually in the social sciences. Both sides of this equation have intensified in recent years. Amid a pandemic, in the wreckage of neoliberalism, in the wake of financial crisis, the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the events of the Trump Presidency, and the return of the far right, the West feels fundamentally reduced in stature. The academy, meanwhile, has moved on from the postcolonial to the decolonial with its focus on alternative epistemologies, about which I am more ambivalent intellectually and politically. Western states and societies are powerful and rich, their freedoms attractive, and most of them will rebound. But what does it mean for the social sciences and other Western intellectual traditions which trace their heritage to the European Enlightenments that the West may no longer be 'the West', no longer the metropole of a global order more or less controlled by its leading states? What kind of implications does the disassembling of the West in world history have for social and political inquiry? I don't have an answer to that. Speaking more specifically about IR, we are dealing now with conservative appropriations of Eurocentrism, with the rise of other civilizational IRs (Chinese, European, Indian). These kinds of moves, like the decolonial one, foreground ultimately incommensurable systems of knowing and valuing, at best, and at worst are Eurocentrism with the signs reversed, usually to China. I do not think what we should be doing right now in the academy is having Chinese social sciences, Islamic social sciences, Indian social sciences, and so on. But that's definitely one way in which the collapse of the West is playing out intellectually. How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?By the time you get to my age you have a lot of debt, mostly to students, to old teachers and supervisors, and to colleagues and friends. University scholars tend not to have very exciting lives, so I don't have much to offer in the way of events. But I can give you an experience that I do keep revisiting when I reflect on the directions I've taken and the things I've been interested in. When I was in high school, I took a university course taught by Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. As many will know, before he became involved in the Vietnam War, and later in opposing it, he worked on game theory and nuclear strategy. I grew up in Southern California, in Orange County, and there was a program that let you take courses at the University of California, Irvine. I took one on the history of the Roman Empire and then a pair of courses on nuclear weapons that culminated with one taught by Ellsberg himself. I actually had no idea who he was but the topic interested me. Nuclear war was in the air in the early 1980s. Activist graduate students taught the preparatory course. They were good teachers and I learned all about the history and politics of nuclear weapons. But I also came to realize that these teachers were trying to shape (what I would now call) my political subjectivity. Sometimes they were ham handed, like the old ball bearings in the tin can trick: turn the lights out in the room, and put one ball bearing in the can for each nuclear warhead in the world, in 1945 this many; in 1955 this many; and so on. In retrospect, that's where I got hooked on the idea of graduate school. I was aware that Ellsberg was regarded as an important personage. He taught in a large lecture hall. At every session, a kind of loyal corps of new and old activists turned out, many in some version of '60s attire. The father of a high school friend was desperate to get Ellsberg's autograph, and sent his son along with me to the lecture one night to get it. It was political instruction of the first order to figure out that this suburban dad had been a physics PhD at Berkley in the late '60s and early '70s, demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But now he worked for a major aerospace defense contractor. He had a hot tub in his backyard. Meanwhile, Ellsberg cancelled class one week because he'd been arrested demonstrating at a major arms fair in Los Angeles. "We stopped the arms race for a few hours," he told the class after. I schooled myself on who Ellsberg was and Vietnam, the Cold War, and much else came into view. Meanwhile, he gave a master class in nuclear weapons and foreign policy, cheekily naming his course after Kissinger's book, I later came to appreciate. I learned about RAND, the utility of madness for making nuclear threats, and how close we'd come to nuclear war since 1945. My high school had actually been built to double as a fallout shelter, at a time when civil defense was taken seriously as an aspect of a credible threat of second strike. It was low slung, stoutly built, with high iron fences that could be closed to create a cantonment. We were not far from Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and a range of other likely targets. All of this sank in as I progressed in these courses. Then one day at a strip mall bookstore, I discovered Noam Chomsky's US foreign policy books and never looked back. At Cambridge, I caught the tail end of the old Centre of International Studies, originally started by an intelligence historian and explicitly multi-disciplinary. It had, in my time, historians, lawyers, area studies, development studies, political theory and history of thought, and IR scholars and political scientists. Boundaries certainly existed out there in the disciplines. But there weren't substantial institutional obstacles to thinking across them, while interdisciplinary environments gave you lots of local resources (i.e. colleagues and students) for thinking and reading creatively. What would a student need to become a kind of specialist in your kind of area or field or to understand the world in a global way? Lots of history, especially other peoples' histories; to experience what it's like to see the world from a different place than where you grew up, so that the foreign is not an abstraction to you. I think another route that can create very interesting scholars is to have a practitioner career first, in development, the military, a diplomatic corps, NGOs, whatever. Even only five years doing something like that not only teaches people how the world works, it is intellectually fecund, creative. People just out of operational posts are often full of ideas, and can access interesting resources for research, like professional networks. How, in your view, should IR responding to the shifting geopolitical landscape?  The fate I think we want to avoid is carrying on with what Stanley Hoffmann called the "American social science": the IR invented out of imperial crisis and world war by Anglo-American officials, foundations and thinkers. Very broadly speaking, and with variations, this was a new world combination of realism and positivism. This discipline was intended as the intellectual counterpart to the American-centered world order, designed, among other things, to disappear the question of race in the century of the global color line. The way it conceived the national/international world obscured how US world power worked in practice. That power operated in and through formally sovereign, independent states—an empire by invitation, in the somewhat rosy view of Geir Lundestad—trialed in Latin America and well suited to a decolonizing world. It was an anti-colonial imperium. Political science divided up this world between IR and comparative politics. This kind of IR is cortically connected to the American-centered world fading away before our eyes. It is a kind of zombie discipline where we teach students about world politics as if we were still sitting with the great power peacemakers of 1919 and 1944-45. It is still studying how to make states cooperate under a hegemon or how to make credible deterrence threats in various circumstances. Interestingly, I think one of the ways the collapse of US power is shaping the discipline was identified by Walt and Mearsheimer in their 2013 article on the decline of theory in IR. In the US especially but not only, IR is increasingly indistinguishable from political science as a universal positivist enterprise mostly interested in applying highly evolved, quantitative or experimental approaches to more or less minor questions. Go too far down this road and IR disappears as a distinct disciplinary space, it becomes just a subject matter, a site of empiricist inquiry. Instead, the best work in IR mostly occurs on the edges of the discipline. IR often serves as cover for diverse and interdisciplinary work on transboundary relations. Those relations fall outside the core objects of analysis of the main social science and humanities disciplines but are IR's distinctive focus. The mainstream, inter-paradigm discipline, for me, has never been a convincing social science of the international and is not something I teach or think much about these days. But the classical inheritances of the discipline help IR retain significant historical, philosophical and normative dimensions. Add in a pluralist disposition towards methodology, and IR can be a unique intellectual space capable of producing scholars and scholarship that operate across disciplines. The new materialism, or political ecology, is one area in which this is really happening right now. IR is also a receptive home for debating the questions thrown up by the decolonial turn. These are two big themes in contemporary intellectual life, in and beyond the academy. IR potentially offers distinct perspectives on them which can push debates forward in unexpected ways, in part because we retain a focus on the political and the state, which too easily drop out of sight in global turns in other disciplines. In exchange, topics like the new materialism and the decolonial offer IR the chance to connect with world politics in these new times, after the American century. In my view, and it is not one that I think is widely shared, IR should become the "studies" discipline that centers on the transboundary. How do we re-imagine IR as the interdisciplinary site for the study of transboundary relations as a distinct social and political space? That's a question of general interest in a global world, but one which few traditions of thought are as well-equipped to reflect on and push forward as we are.That's an interesting and forceful critique which also brings us back to a common thread throughout your work: questions of power and knowledge and specifically the relation between power and knowledge in IR and social science. I'm interested in exploring this point further, because so much of your critique has been centered on how profoundly Eurocentric IR is and as a product of Western power. Well, IR's development as a discipline has been closely tied to Western state power. It would seem that it has to change, given the shifts underway in the world. It's like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons - he's run off the cliff. His legs are still moving, but he hasn't dropped, yet. That said, there's no singularly determinate relation between power and the historical development of intellectual traditions. Who knows what kind of new ideas and re-imagining of IR's concepts we might see? As I say, I think one reflection of these changes is that we're already seeing North American IR start to fade into universal quantitative social science. As Hoffmann observed, part of IR's appeal was that the Americans were running the world, that's why you started a social science concerned with things like bipolarity and deterrence, and with analyzing the foreign policy of a great power and its interests and conflicts around the world. Nowadays the Americans are at a late Roman stage of imperial decline. Thinking from the command posts of US foreign policy doesn't look so attractive or convincing when Emperor Nero is running the show, or something altogether darker is waiting in the wings. IR is supposed to be in command of world politics, analyzing them from on high. But what I've seen over the course of my education and career is the way world politics commands IR. The end of the Cold War torpedoed many careers and projects; the 1990s created corps of scholars concerned with development, civil war and humanitarian intervention; in the 2000s, we produced terrorism experts (and critical terrorism studies) and counterinsurgency specialists and critics, along with many scholars concerned in one way or another with Islam. What I have always found fascinating, and deeply indicative, about IR is the relative absence until relatively recently of serious inquiry into power/knowledge relations or the sociology of knowledge. In 1998 when Ole Waever goes to look at some of these questions, he notes how little there was to work from then, before Oren, Vitalis, Guilhot and others published. It's an astounding observation. In area studies, in anthropology, in the history of science, in development studies, in all of these areas of inquiry so closely entangled with imperial and state power, there are long-running, well developed traditions of inquiry into power/knowledge relations. It's a well-recognized area of inquiry, not some fringe activity, and it's heavily empirical, primary sourced based, as well as interesting conceptually. In recent decades you've seen really significant work come out about the role of the Second World War in the development of game theory, and its continuing entwinement with the nuclear contest of the Cold War. I'm thinking here of S.M. Amadae, Paul Erickson, and Philip Mirowski among others. The knowledge forms the American social science used to study world politics were part and parcel of world politics, they were internal to histories of geopolitics rather than in command of them. Of course, for a social science that models itself on natural science, with methodologies that produce so-called objective knowledge, the idea that scientific knowledge itself is historical and power-ridden, well, you can't really make sense of that. You'd be put in the incoherent position of studying it objectively, as it were, with the same tools. IR arises from the terminal crisis of the British Empire; its political presuppositions and much else were fundamentally shaped by the worldwide anti-communist project of the US Cold War state; and it removed race as a term of inquiry into world politics during the century of the global color line. All this, and but for Hoffmann's essay, IR has no tradition of power/knowledge inquiry into its own house until recently? It's not credible intellectually. Anthropologists should be brought in to teach us how to do this kind of thing. You've been at the forefront of the notion of historical IR, and in investigating the relationship between history and theory – why is history important for IR?Well, I think I'd start with the question of what do we mean when we say history? For mainstream social science, it means facts in the past against which to test theories and explanations. For critical IR scholars, it usually means historicism, as that term is understood in social theory: social phenomena are historical, shaped by time and place. Class, state, race, nation, empire, war, these are all different in different contexts. While I think this is a very significant insight and one that I agree with, on its own it tends to imply that historical knowledge is available, that it can be found by reading historians. In fact, for both empiricism and historicism there is a presumption that you can pretty reliably find out what happened in the past. For me, this ignores a second kind of historicism, the historicism of history writing itself, the historiographical. The questions historians ask, how they inquire into them, the particular archives they use, the ways in which they construct meaning and significance in their narratives, the questions they don't ask, that about which they are silent, all of these, shape history writing, the history that we know about. The upshot is that the past is not stable; it keeps changing as these two meanings of historicism intertwine. We understand the Haitian revolution now, or the indigenous peoples of the Americas, entirely differently than we did just a few decades ago.That raises another twist to this problem. Many IR scholars access history through reading historians or through synthetic accounts; they encounter history by and large through secondary sources. One consequence is that they are often a generation or more behind university historians. Think of how Gaddis, for instance, remains a go to authority on the history of the Cold War in IR. In other disciplines, from the 1980s on, there was a historical turn that took scholars into the archives. Anthropologists and literary scholars used historians' tools to answers their own questions. The result was not just a bunch of history books, but entirely new readings of core questions. The classic example is the historical Shakespeare that Stephen Greenblatt found in the archives, rather than the one whose texts had been read by generations of students in English departments. My point here is that working in archives was conceptually, theoretically significant for these disciplines and the subjects they studied. For example, historical anthropology has given us new perspectives on imperialism. While there is some archival work in IR of course, especially in disciplinary history, it is not central to disciplinary debates and the purpose is usually theory testing in which the past appears as merely a bag of facts. In sum, when I say history and theory, I don't just mean thinking historically. I mean actually doing history, being an historian—which means archives—and in so doing becoming a better theorist. Could you expand on these points by telling us about your recent work on military history? I think that military history is particularly interesting because it is a site where war is reproduced and shaped. Military history participates in that which it purports only to study. Popular military histories shape the identities of publics. Staff college versions are about learning lessons and fighting war better the next time. People who grow up wanting to be soldiers often read about them in history books. So our historical knowledge of war, and war as a social and historical process, are wrapped up together. I hope some sense of the promise of power/knowledge studies for larger questions comes through here. I'm saying that part of what war is as a social phenomenon is history writing about it. It's in this kind of context that the fact that a great deal of military history is actually written by veterans, often of the very campaigns of which they write, becomes interesting. Battle produces its own historians. This is a tradition that goes back to European antiquity, soldiers and commanders returning to write histories, the histories, of the wars they fought in. So this question of veterans' history writing is in constitutive relations with warfare, and with the West and its nations and armies. My shorthand for the particular area of this I want to look into is what I call "White men's military histories". That is, Western military history in the modern era is racialized, not just about enemies but about the White identities constructed in and through it. And I want to look at the way this is done in campaigns against racialized others, particularly situations where defeats and reverses were inflicted on the Westerners. How were such events and experiences made sense of historically? How were they mediated in and through military history? I think defeats are particularly productive, incitements to discourse and sense making. To think about these questions, I want to look at the place of veterans in the production of military histories, as authors, sources, communities of interpretation. My sandbox is the tumultuous first year of the Korean War, where US forces suffered publically-evident reverses and risked being pushed into the sea. In a variety of ways, veterans shape military history, through their questions, their grievances, their struggles over reputation, their memories. This happens at many different sites and scales, including official and popular histories, and the networks of veterans behind them as well as other, independently published works. Over the course of veterans' lives, their war throws up questions and issues that become the subject of sometimes dueling and contradictory accounts. Through their history writing, they connect their war experience to Western traditions of battle historiography. They make their war speak to other wars. This is what military history is, and how it can come to produce and reproduce practices of war-making, at least in Anglo-American context. Of course, much of this history writing, like narrations of experience generally, reflects dominant ideologies, in this case discourses of the US Cold War in Asia. But counter-historians are also to be found among soldiers. The shocks and tragic absurdities of any given war produce research questions of their own. At risk of mixing metaphors, the veterans know where the skeletons are buried. They bear resentments and grievances about how their war was conducted that become research topics, and they often have the networks and wherewithal to produce informed and systematic accounts. So as well as reproducing hegemonic discourses, soldier historians are also interesting as a new critical resource for understanding war.This shouldn't be that surprising. In other areas of inquiry, amateur and practitioner scholars have often been a source of critical innovation. LGBTQ history starts outside the academy, among activists who turned their apartments into archives. Much of what we now call postcolonial scholarship also began outside the academy, among colonized intellectuals involved in anti-imperial struggles. Let me close this off by going back to the archive. There are really rich sources for this kind of project. Military historians of all kinds leave behind papers full of their research materials and correspondence. The commanders and others they wrote about often waged extended epistolary campaigns concerned with correcting and shaping the historical record. But more than this, by situating archival sources alongside what later became researched and published histories, what drops out and what goes in to military history comes into view. What is silenced, and what is given voice? We can then see how the violent and forlorn episodes of war are turned into narrated events with military meaning. What is the process by which war experience becomes military history?Given the interdisciplinary nature of your work, what field you place yourself in? And are there any problems have you encountered when writing and thinking across scholarly boundaries?In my head I live in a kind of idealized interdisciplinary war studies, and my field is the intersection of war and empire. Sort of Michael Howard meets Critical Theory and Frantz Fanon. This has given me a particular voice in critical IR broadly conceived, and a distinctive place from which to engage the discipline. The mostly UK departments I've been in have been broadly hospitable places in practice for interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, so long as you published rather than perished. Of course, interdisciplinary is a complicated word. It is one thing to be multi-disciplinary, to publish in the core journals of more than one discipline and to be recognized and read by scholars in more than one discipline. But work that falls between disciplinary centers, which takes up questions and offers answers recognized centrally by no discipline, that's something harder to deal with. I thought after Soldiers of Empire won prizes in two disciplines that I'd have an easier time getting funding for the project I described earlier in the interview. But I've gotten nowhere, despite years of applications to a variety of US, UK, and European funders. Of course, this may be because it is a bad project! My point, though, is that disciplines necessarily, and even rightly, privilege work that speaks to central questions; that's the work that naturally takes on significance in disciplinary contexts, as in many grant or scholarship panels. I think another point here is the nature of the times. Understandably, no one is particularly interested right now in White men's military histories. What I think has really empowered disciplines during my time in the UK academy has been the intersection with audit culture and university management. Repeated waves of rationalization have washed over the UK academy, which have emphasized discipline as a unit of measurement and management even as departments themselves were often "schoolified" into more or less odd combinations of disciplines. Schoolification helped to break down old solidarities and identities, while audit culture needed something on which to base its measures. The great victory of neoliberalism over the academy is evident in the way it is just accepted now that performance has to be assessed by various public criteria. This is where top disciplinary journals enter the picture, as unquestionable (and quantifiable) indicators of excellence. Interdisciplinary journals don't have the same recognition, constituency, or obvious significance. To put it in IR terms, Environment and Planning D or Comparative Studies in Society and History, to take two top journals that interdisciplinary IR types publish in, will never have the same weight as, say, ISQ or APSR. That that seems natural is an indicator of change—when I started, RIS—traditionally welcoming of interdisciplinary scholarship—was seen as just as good a place to publish as any US journal. Now RIS is perceived as merely a "national" journal while ISQ and APSR are "international" or world-class. This kind of thing has consequences for careers and the make-up of departments. What I'm drawing attention to is not so much an intellectual or academic debate; scholars always disagree on what good scholarship is, which is how it is supposed to be. It is rather the combination of discipline with the suffocating culture of petty management that pervades so much of British life. Get your disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized in an audit culture environment, and you can really expand. For example, the professionalization of methods training in the UK has worked as a kind of Trojan Horse for quantitative and positivist approaches within disciplines. In IR, in the potted geographic lingo we use, that has meant more US style work. Disappearing is the idea of IR as an "inter-discipline," where departments have multi-disciplinary identities like I described above. The US idea that IR is part of political science is much more the common sense now than it was in the UK. Another dimension of the eclipse of interdisciplinary IR has been the rise of quantitative European political science, boosted by large, multiyear grants from the ERC and national research councils. It's pretty crazy, strategically speaking, for the UK to establish a civilizational scale where you're always behind the US or its European counterparts. You'll never do North American IR as well as the North Americans do, especially given the disparity in resources. You'll always be trending second or third tier. The British do like to beat themselves up. Meanwhile, making US political science journals the practical standard for "international excellence" threatens to make the environment toxic for the very scholarship that has made British IR distinctive and attractive globally. The upshot of that will be another wave of émigré scholars, which the British academy's crises and reform initiatives produce from time to time. Think of the generation of UK IR scholars who decamped to Australia, an academy poised to prosper in the post-covid world (if the government there can get its vaccination program on track) and a major site right now of really innovative IR scholarship. To return to what you mentioned earlier regarding the hesitancy to go to the archives, this is also mirrored in a hesitancy to do serious ethnography, I think as well. Or there's this "doing ethnography" that involves a three-day field trip. This kind of sweet-shop 'pick and mix' has come to characterize some methodologies, because of these constraints that you highlight…A lot of what I'm talking about has happened within universities, it's not externally imposed or a direct consequence of the various government-run assessment exercises. Academics, eagerly assisted by university managers, have done a lot of this to themselves and their students. The implications can be far reaching for the kind of scholarship that departments foster, from PhDs on up. More and more of the UK PhD is taken up with research methods courses, largely oriented around positivism even if they have critical components. Already this gives a directionality to ideas. The advantage of the traditional UK PhD—working on your own with a supervisor to produce a piece of research—has been intellectual freedom, even when the supervisor wasn't doing their job properly. It's not great, but the possibility for creative, innovative, even field changing scholarship was retained. PhD students weren't disciplined, so to speak. What happens now is that PhD students are subject to a very strict four year deadline, often only partially funded, their universities caring mainly about timely completion not placement and preparation for a scholarly career, a classic case of the measurement displacing the substantive value. The formal coursework they get is methods driven. You can supervise interdisciplinary PhD research in this kind of environment, but it's not easy and poses real risks and creates myriad obstacles for the student. A strange consequence of this, as many of my master's students will tell you, is that I often advise them to consider US PhDs, just in other disciplines. That way, they get the benefit of rigorous PhD level coursework beyond methods. They can do so in disciplines like history or anthropology that are currently receptive both to the critical and the transnational/transboundary. That is not a great outcome for UK IR, even if it may be for critically-minded students. Outside of a very few institutions and scattered individuals, US political science, of course, has largely cleansed itself of the critical and alternative approaches that had started to flower in the glasnost era of the 1990s. That is not something we should be seeking to emulate in the UK.So yes, there's much to say here, about how the four year PhD has materially shaped scholarship in the UK. There is generally very little funding for field work. Universities worried about liability have put all kinds of obstacles in the way of students trying to get to field work sites. Requirements like insisting that students be in residence for their fourth year in order to write up and submit on time further limit the possibilities for field work. The upshot is to make the PhD dissertation more a library exercise or to favor the kind of quantitative, data science work that fits more easily into these time constraints and structures. Again, quite obviously, power sculpts knowledge. It becomes simply impossible, within the PhD, to do the kinds of things associated with serious qualitative scholarship, like learn languages, spend long time periods in field sites and to visit them more than once, to develop real networks there. Over time this shapes the academy, often in unintended ways. I think this is one of the reasons that IR in the UK has been so theoretic in character—what else can people do but read books, think and write in this kind of environment? As I say, the other kind of thing they can do is quantitative work, which takes us right back to the fate Walt and Mearsheimer sensed befalling IR as political science. Watch for IR and Data Science joint degrees as the next step in this evolution. Political Science in the US starts teaching methods at the freshman level. They get them young. We have discussed the rather grim state of affairs for the future of critical social science scholarship, at least in the UK and US. To conclude – what prospects for hope in the future are there?Well, if I had a public relations consultant pack, this is the point at which it would advise talking about children and the power of science to save us. I think the environment for universities, political, financial, and otherwise may get considerably more difficult. Little is untouchable in Western public life right now, it is only a question of when and in what ways they will come for us. The nationalist and far-right turns in Western politics feed off transgressing boundaries. There's no reason to suspect universities will be immune from this, and they haven't been. In the UK, as a consequence of Brexit, we are having to nationalise, and de-European-ise our scholarships and admissions processes. We are administratively enacting the surrender of cosmopolitan achievements in world politics and in academic life. This is not a plot but in no small measure the outcome of democratic will, registered in the large majority Boris Johnson's Conservatives won at the last general election. It will have far reaching consequences for UK university life. This is all pretty scary if you think, as I do, that we are nearer the beginning then the end of the rise of the right. Covid will supercharge some of these processes of de-globalization. I can already see an unholy alliance forming of university managers and introvert academics who will want to keep in place various dimensions of the online academic life that has taken shape since spring 2020. Often this will be justified by reference to environmental concerns and by the increased, if degraded, access that online events make possible. We are going to have a serious fight on our hands to retain our travel budgets at anywhere near pre-pandemic levels. I'm hoping that this generation of students, subjected to online education, will become warriors for in-person teaching. All of this said, it's hard to imagine a more interesting time to be teaching, thinking and writing about world politics. Politics quite evidently retains its capacity to turn the world upside down. Had you told US citizens where they would be on January 6th, 2021 in 2016, they would have called you alarmist if not outlandish. I think we're in for more moments like that. Tarak Barkawi is a professor of International Relations at LSE. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His most recent book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, reconceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. Currently, he is working on the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior. This new project explores soldiers' history writing as a site for war's constitutive presence in society and politics.PDF version of this Talk

Daniel Levine on Hidden Hands, Vocation and Sustainable Critique in International Relations











Daniel Levine is part of a new generation
of IR scholars that takes a more pluralist approach to addressing the hard and
important questions generated by international politics. While many of those
interviewed here display a fairly consistent commitment to a certain position
within what is often referred to as 'the debate' in IR, Levine straddles the boundaries
of a diverse range of positions and understandings. Time to ask for
elaboration.














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?






The
question I'd like us to be asking more clearly than we are is, 'are we a
vocation and, if so, what kind of vocation are we'? This points to a varied set
of questions that we, as scholars, gesture to but spend relatively little
theoretical time developing or unpacking. There's an assumption that the
knowledge we produce is supposed to be put good for something, practical in
light of some praiseworthy purpose. Even theorists who perceive themselves to
be epistemologically value-free hope, I think, at least on an intuitive level, that
some practical good will emerge from what they do. They hope that they are doing
'good work' in the sense that some Christians use this term. But, there is not
really a sustained project of thinking through how those works work: how our notions of vocation might
be different or even mutually exclusive, and how the differences in our notions
of vocation might be bound up in non-obvious ways to our epistemological,
methodological, and theoretical choices.







Moreover,
except for a few very important and quite heroic (and minoritarian) efforts, we
don't really have a way to think systematically about the structure of the
profession: how it influences or intervenes or otherwise acts on particular
ideas as they percolate through it, and how those ideas get 'taken up' into
policy. Brian Schmidt has
done work like that, so has Inanna Hamati-Ataya,
Ole Waever, Ido Oren,
Oded Löwenheim, Elizabeth Dauphinee, Naeem Inayatullah,
and Piki Ish-Shalom; and it's good work, but
they are doing what they are doing with limited resources, and I think without due
appreciation from a big chunk of the field as to why that work is important and
what it means.







When
I started writing Recovering
International Relations, I had wanted to recover the 'view from nowhere'
that many social scientists idealize. You know, that methodological conceit
where we imagine we are standing on Mars, watching the earth through a
telescope, or we're Archimedes standing outside of the world, leveraging it
with distance and dispassion. I had worked on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
for a long time, was living in Tel Aviv, working for a think tank, and was—am—an
Israeli citizen and an American citizen. I had this somewhat shocking discovery
right after the Second Intifada broke
out. Most of my senior colleagues were deploying their expertise in what seemed
to me to be a very tendentious way: to show why the second Intifada was Yassar
Arafat's fault or the Palestinian Authority's fault—or, in a few cases, the
Israelis' fault. There were some very simplistic political agendas that were
driving this research. People were watching the evening news, coming into work
the next morning, and then running Ehud Yaari's commentary through their respective fact-values-methods mill. Or if they were
well-connected, they were talking to their friends on the 'inside', and doing
the same thing.







It
was hard to admit this for a long time, but I was very naïve. I found that very
unsettling and quite disillusioning. That's why the view from nowhere was so
appealing. I wanted to be able to talk about
Israel and Palestine without taking a position on Israel and Palestine—but without eschewing the expertise I had
acquired along the way, in part because I was
a party to this conflict, and cared about its outcome. I was young,
inexperienced, and slightly arrogant to boot—neither yet a scholar, nor an 'expert,'
nor really aware of the game I was playing. So my objections were not well
received, nor did I pose them especially coherently. To their credit, my senior
colleagues did recognize something worthwhile in my diatribes, and they did
their best to help me get into graduate school.







As the
project developed, and as I started engaging with my mentors in grad school, it
appeared that the view from nowhere was essentially impossible to recover. With
Hegel and with the poststructuralists, we can't really think from nowhere; the
idea of it is this kind of intellectual optical illusion, as though thinking
simply happens, without a mind that is conditioned by being in the world. Therefore,
there needs to be a process by which we give account of ourselves.







There
are a variety of different ways to consider how one might do that. There's what
we might call the agentic approach, in which we think through the structure of
thought itself: its limitations, our dependence on a certain image of thinking
notwithstanding those limits—thought's work on us, on our minds. This is closest
to what I do, drawing on Adorno and Kant, and Adorno's account of how concepts
work in the mind; how they pull us away from the things we mean to understand
even as they give us the words to understand them. And drawing on Jane Bennett, William Connolly,
Hannah Arendt, Cornel West, JoanTronto, and JudithButler to think through how one
conditions oneself to accept those limitations from a space of love, humility
and service. Patrick Jackson's (TheoryTalk #44) Conduct of Research in IR is quite
similar to this approach; and so is Colin Wight's Agents, Structures and International
Relations; though they use more philosophy of science than I do.







One
could also do this more 'structurally.' One could say 'this is how the academy
works and this is how the academy interconnects with the larger political
community' and then try to trace out those links: I mentioned Hamati-Ataya,
Oren, and Ish-Shalom, or you could think of Isaac Kamola,
Helen Kinsella, or
Srdjan Vucetic.








Any of
those approaches—or really, some admixture of them—would be pieces of that
project. I would like us to be doing more of that—alongside, not instead of,
all the other things we are already doing, from historical institutionalism to formal
modeling, to large-N and quantitative approaches, and normative, feminist and
critical ones. I would like such self-accounting to be one of the things
scholars do, that they take it as seriously as they take methods, epistemology,
data, etc. Driving that claim home in our field, as it's presently constituted,
is our biggest challenge.






How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?






I'm 42,
so the Cold War was a big deal. I'm American-born, and I was raised in a pretty
typical suburb. John Stewart from the Daily
Show is probably the most famous product of my hometown, though I didn't
know him. My view of history was a liberal and progressive in the Michael
Waltzer/Ulrich Beck/Anthony Giddens, vein, but I was definitely influenced by
the global circumstances of the time, and by the 'End of History' discourse
that was in the air. I thought that the US was a force of good in the world. I
was a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey. I really wanted to live in Israel for
personal reasons, and the moral challenge of living in Israel after the
Intifada seemed to go away with the peace process. So, it seemed to me that it
was a kind of golden moment: you could 'render unto Caesar what was due to Caesar',
and do the same for the Lord. I could actually be a Jewish-Israeli national and
also a political progressive. (That phrase is, of course, drawn from the Gospels,
and that may give you some sense of how my stated religious affiliations might
have differed from the conceptual and theological structures upon which they actually
rested—score one for the necessity of reflexivity. But in any case, those
events were important.)







I moved
to Israel when I was 22 and was drafted into the military after I took
citizenship there. In the IDF, I was a low-level functionary/general laborer—a
'jobnik', someone who probably produces less in utility than they consume in
rations. Our job was to provide support for the combatants that patrolled a
certain chunk of the West Bank near Nablus—Shechem, as we called it, after the
biblical name. I was not a particularly distinguished soldier. But we were cogs
in a very large military occupation, and being inside a machine like that, you
can see how the gears and pieces of it meshed together, and I started taking
notice of this. Sometimes I'd help keep the diary in the operations room. You
saw how it all worked, or didn't work; or rather, for whom it worked and for
whom it didn't. All that was very sobering and quite fascinating.







I once
attended a lecture given by the African politics scholar Scott Straus, and he
said the thing about being present right after genocide is that you come across
these pits full of dead bodies. It's really shocking and horrific—there they
are, just as plain as day. Nothing I saw in the sheer level of violence compares
to that in any way—I should stress this. But that sense of it all just being out there, as plain as day, and being
shocked by this—that resonated with me. Everyone who cared to look could
understand how the occupation worked, or at least how chunks of it worked. So I
would say in terms of events, those things were the big pieces that structured
my thinking.







Here's two
anecdotal examples. Since I was a grade of soldier with very limited skills, I
was on guard duty a lot. We had a radio. I could hear the Prime Minister on the
radio saying we are going to strike so-and-so in response to an attack on such-and-such,
and then I could see helicopters pass overhead to Nablus, and then I could see
smoke. Then I could see soldiers come back from going out to do whatever it was
the helicopter had provided air support for. I'd see ambulances with red
crescents or red Stars of David rush down the main road. It began to occur to
me that there was a certain economy of violence in speech and performance. I
didn't think about it in specifically theoretical terms before I went back to
graduate school, but Israelis had been killed, political outrage had been
generated. There was a kind of affective deficit in Israeli politics that
demanded a response, and some amount of suffering had to be returned—so the
government could say it was doing its job. I found this very depressing. My odd
way of experiencing this—neither fully inside nor outside—is certainly not the
most important or authentic, and I'm not trying to set myself up as an expert
on this basis. I'm only trying to account for how it made me think at the time
and how that shows up in what and how I write now.







Later,
when I was in the reserves, I was in the same unit with the same guys every
year. One year, we were lacing our boots and getting our equipment for our
three weeks of duty in a sector of the West Bank near Hebron, I think it was. I
remember one guy, one of the more hawkish guys, said 'we'll show 'em this time,
we'll show them what's what'. Three weeks later, that same guy said 'Jeez, it's
like we're like a thorn in their backside; no wonder they hate us so much.' (He
actually used some colorful imagery that I can't share with you.) I remember
thinking, 'well, ok, he'll go home and he'll tell his family and his friends;
some good will come of this.' The next year, I saw the same guy saying the same
thing at the start, 'we'll show those SOBs.' And then three weeks later, 'oh my
God, this is so pointless, no wonder they hate us…' So after a few years of
this I finally said to him, 'tagid, ma
yihiyeh itcha?'—Like, dude, what's your deal? 'We've had this conversation every year! What happens to you in
the 48 weeks that you're not here that you forget this?' And I think he looked
at me like, 'what are you talking about?'







I
thought about that afterwards: we have these moments of experience when we're
out of our everyday environment and discourse, the diet of news and fear, PR
and political nonsense—that's when these insights become possible. So, when
this guy comes in and says 'ok, we'll get those SOBs,' he's carrying with him this
discourse that he has from home, from the news and TV, from his 'parliament'
with his friends where they get together and talk about politics and war and
economics and whatever else—and then a few weeks of occupation duty disrupts
all that, makes him see it in a different light, and he has these kinds of
fugitive experiences which give him a weirdly acute critical insight. Suddenly,
he's this mini-Foucault.







In a
few weeks, though, he goes back to his life, there's no space or niche into
which that uncomfortable, fugitive insight can really grow, so it just sort of
disappears or withers on the vine, its power is dissipated. This is a very
real, direct experience of violence and it's covered over by all of this
jibber-jabber. So there's a moment where you start to wonder: what exactly
happens there? What happens in those 48 weeks? What happens to me during those weeks? You can see how a
kind of ongoing critical self-interrogation would evolve out of that. Again,
none of those things are exactly what my book's about, but it gives you a sense
of how you might find Adorno's kind of critical relentlessness and negativity vital
and important and really useful and necessary. You can see how that might
inform my thinking.







In
terms of books, as an undergraduate, I had read, not very attentively, Said and
Foucault, and all of the stuff at the University of Chicago we had to take in
what they called the 'Scosh Sequence,' from sociologists like Elijah Anderson
and William Julius Wilson to Charles Lindblom and Mancur Olsen: texts from the
positive and the interpretive to the post-structural. I had courses with some
very smart Israeli and Palestinian profs—Ephraim Yaar, Salim Tamari, Ariela
Finkelstein. And of course Rashid Khalidi was there at that time. Once I was in
the military, the Foucault and Said suddenly started popping around in my head.
Suddenly, this sort of lived experience of being on guard duty made the
Panopticon and the notion of discipline go from being a rather complicated,
obscure concept to something concrete. 'Oh! That's
what discipline is!'







When I
went back to graduate school, I was given a pretty steady diet of Waltz,
rational deterrence theory, Barry Posen, Stephen Walt (Theory Talk #33), and Robert Jervis (Theory Talk #12). Shai
Feldman was a remarkable teacher, so were Ilai Alon in philosophy, Shlomo
Shoham in sociology and Aharon Shai in History. Additionally I had colleagues
at work who were PhD students at the Hebrew University working with Emanuel Adler;
they gave me Wendt (Theory Talk #3), Katzenstein's (TheoryTalk # 15) Culture of National Security, Adler and
Barnett, and Jutta Weldes' early article on 'Constructing National Interests'
in the EJIR (PDF here).
My job was to help them publish their monographs, so I got really into the guts
of their arguments, which were fascinating. I am not really an agency-centered
theory guy anymore and I am not really a constructivist anymore, but that stuff
was fantastic. I saw that one could write from a wholly different viewpoint,
perspective, and voice. This is all very mainstream in IR now, but at the time,
it felt quite edgy, very novel. Part of the reason why the middle chapters of Recovering IR has these long discussions
about different kinds of constructivism is that I wouldn't have had two
thoughts to rub together if it was not for those books. I do disagree with them
now and strongly, but they were very important to me all the same.






What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the
world in a global way?






I'd be
more comfortable answering that question as someone who was, until relatively
recently, a grad student. I've not been productive long enough to say 'Well,
here's how to succeed in this business and be a theorist of enduring substance
or importance' with any authority. But I can say, 'here's how I'm trying to be
one.' There's a famous article by Albert O. Hirschman called 'The Principle of
the Hiding Hand,' (PDF here)
and in it he says that frequently, the only way one can get through really
large or complicated projects is to delude oneself as to how hard the project
is actually going to be. He takes as an example these ambitious, massively
complicated post-colonial economic projects of the Aswan High Dam variety. The
only way such enormous projects ever get off the ground, he says, is if one
either denies their true complexity or deludes oneself. Otherwise you despair
and you never get it done. From the first day of seminar to dissertation
proposal to job—thank God I had no idea what I was in for, or I might have
quit.







Also,
the job market being what it was, we had to be very, very passionate scholars who
wrote and argued for the sheer intellectual rush and love of writing. And yet,
we also had to be very practical and almost cynical about the way in which the
academic market builds on the prestige of publications and the way in which
prestige becomes shorthand for your commodity value. At least in the US, the
decline of tenure and the emergence of a kind of new class of academics whose
realm of responsibility is specifically to engage in uncomfortable kinds of
political and moral critique—but without tenure, and at the mercy of a sometimes
feckless dean, an overburdened department chair or fickle colleagues—that's very scary. If you're doing 'normal
science', it's a different game and the challenges are different. But if your
job is to do critique, in the last ten years, it's a very big deal. Very
difficult. I'm very fortunate in that regard; at Alabama I've had great support
from my department, my chair, and my college.







I was a
Johns Hopkins PhD, and my department was fantastic in terms of giving me
support, encouragement, getting out of my way while throwing interesting books
at me, reading drafts that were bad and helping me make them good—or at least
telling me why they were bad. We did
not get particularly good professional training, because I think they did not
want us to get professionalized before we found our own voice. I'm really
grateful for that, truly. But then there's this period in which you have to
figure out how to make your voice into a commodity. That's really tough, it's a
little bit disheartening—even to discover that you must be a commodity is dismaying; didn't we go into the academy to avoid
this sort of logic? But just like Marx says, commodities have a double life, and
so do you. The use-value of your scholarship and its exchange-value do not
interlock automatically and without friction. So you spend all this time on the
use-value of it—writing a cool, smart, interesting dissertation—thinking that
will translate into exchange-value, and it turns out that it sort of does, but
a lot of other things translate into exchange-value too that aren't really about
how good your work is necessarily. And many of your colleagues, if what you're
doing is original, won't really understand what you're doing; the value or the
creativity of it won't be apparent to them unless they spend a lot of time sifting
through your bad drafts of it, which only a few—but God bless those—will do. So
how you create exchange-value for yourself is important. So is finding people
who will care about you, your project, your future—and learning when to take
their advice, when to ignore it, and how to do so tactfully.







If all that's
hard, you're probably doing it right. It's unfortunate that that's how it is,
but at all events, that's how it was for me.











Would you elaborate on the concept of
vocation and why this is so important to the view from nowhere? It is important
to say that the view from nowhere is perhaps difficult. So is vocation, or a
kind of Weberian approach, a way to articulate that for you?







There's
a quote in a book from a Brazilian novelist named Machado de Assis. His
protagonist is this fellow Bras Cubas, who's writing a posthumous memoir of his
own life. He's writing from beyond the grave. From there, he can view his whole
life and his entire society from outside; he's finally achieved positivism's
view from nowhere. But the thing about this view—and the book means to be a
sendup of the Comtean positivism that was fashionable in Brazil in those
days—is that it gives him no comfort. He now knows why he lived his life the
way he did; how he failed and what was—and what was not—his fault. The
absurdity of it all makes sense. But it changes nothing: he has died
unfulfilled, unloved, and essentially alone: a minor poet and back-bench politician
who was ultimately of little use to anyone nor of much to himself. All he knows
is how that happened.







In the
end, if we're all playing a role in how a world comes into being and it's in
some sense our job simply to accept this, and our job as scholars merely to
explain it, this gives us no comfort in the face of suffering, in the face of
violence and evil. To some extent as scholars, and to some extent as a
discipline, we exist as a response to evil, to suffering, to foolishness, to
folly; it's not a coincidence that the first professorship of IR is created in
Britain in the wake of WWI, and that it's given to someone like E. H. Carr.







If we
don't have a view from nowhere because we've given up anything like a moral
sense that can't be reduced to fractional, material, or ideological
sensibilities, and if we know that sometimes those 'views from somewhere' can
provide cover for terrible kinds of evil or justify awful kinds of suffering,
then the notion of vocation seems to come in at that point and say well,
'here's what I hope I'm doing', or 'here's what I wish to be doing', or 'here's
what I'd like to think I'm doing', and then allowing others to weigh in and
give their two cents. Vocation, in the sense of Weber's lectures, comes out of
that. It's Kant for social scientists: What can I know? What should I do? For
what may I hope? In other words, what the necessity and obligation of thinking
is on the one hand, and on the other what its limitations are.







This is
a way to save International Relations from two things: one, from relativism and
perspectivism, and the other, from a descent into the technocratic or the
managerial. I am trying to stand between the two. My own intellectual
background was in security studies at Tel Aviv University in the 1990s: the
period immediately after Maastricht, in the period of the Oslo Process, the end
of Apartheid. My hope back in the days when the peace process seemed to me to
be going well was that I'd be able to have a kind of technocratic job in
Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Defense. Counting tanks, or something
similar. I thought that would be a pretty good job. I would be doing my part to
maintain a society that had constructed a stable, long-term deterrent by which
to meaningfully address the problem of Jewish statelessness and vulnerability,
but without the disenfranchisement of another people. I could sit down and
count my tanks with a clear conscience, because the specter of evil was being
removed from that work. The problem of the occupation was being be solved.
Again, it's somewhat embarrassing to admit this now.







I would
say in the US academy, there is definitely a balance in favor of the
technocrats. We have enormous machines for the production and consumption of
PhDs in this country. The defense establishment is an enormous player. Groups
like the Institute for Defense Analysis need a lot of PhDs, the NSF funds a lot
of PhDs (for now, at least), and that tips the balance of the profession in a
certain way. My ability to use ideas compellingly at ISA won't change that fact
all by itself, there's a base-superstructure issue in play there.







In
Europe, it's a different story, for a bunch of reasons. The defense
establishments of the EU member states aren't as onerous a presence. And, there
are more of them; so there's a kind of diversity there and a need to think
culturally about how these various institutions interlock and how people learn
to talk to each other: the Martha Finnemore-to-Vincent Pouliot-to-Iver Neumann (Theory Talk #52) study of ideas and institutions and
officials. Plus, you have universities like the EUI and the CEU, which are not
reducible to any particular national interest or education system; creating
knowledge, but for a political/state form that's still emergent. No one knows
exactly what it is, what its institutions and interests will ultimately be.
Because of that, it's hard to imagine the EUI producing scholars with obviously
nationally-inflected research programs, like Halford Mackinder,
Mahan, Ratzel from a century
ago. There will still be reifications and ideologies, but there's more 'give'
since the institutions are still in play. And there's fantastically interesting
stuff happening in Australia, and in Singapore—think of people like Janice
Bialley-Mattern, Tony Burke and Roland Bleiker.











Critique has a long and controversial
history in our discipline. Could you perhaps elaborate, as a kind of background
or setting, how critique can be used in IR and why you've placed it at the
center of your approach to IR theory?







Critique
as term of art comes into the profession through Robert Cox (Theory Talk #37) and through the folks that were writing
after him in the '90s, including Neufeld, Booth, Wyn-Jones, Rengger, Linklater and
Ashley—though pieces of the reflexive practice of critique are present in the
field well before. For Cox, the famous line is that theory is always 'for
something and for someone.' The question is, if that's true how far down does
that problem go? Is it a problem of epistemology and method, or is it a problem
of being as such, a problem of ontology? Is it fundamental to the nature of
politics?







If the
set of processes to which we refer when we speak of 'thinking' is inherently
for someone and for something, and that problem harkens back to the idea that
all thinking is grounded in one's interests and perspectives, i.e., that all
practical or systematic attempts to understand politics are 'virtuous' in the
Machiavellian sense (they serve princely interests) but not necessarily in the Christian
sense (deriving from transcendent values), then we have a real problem in keeping
those two things separate in our minds. Think of Linklater's book Men and Citizens in International Relations
as a key node in that argument, though Linklater ultimately believes (at least
in that book) that a reconciliation between the two is possible. I'm less
convinced.







Now
recall the vocation point we discussed before. IR as a discipline has a deep
sense of moral calling which goes beyond princely interest. And the traditions
on which it draws are as much transcendently normative as anything else. So
encoded in our ostensibly practical-Machiavellian analyses is going to be
something like a sense of Christian virtue; we'll believe we're not merely
correct in our analyses, but really and
truly right in some otherworldly, transcendent way. True or not, that sense
of conviction will attach itself to our thinking, to the political forces and
agendas that we're serving. We'll come to believe that we are citing
Machiavelli in the service of something greater: whether that's 'scientific
truth' or the national interest, or what have you. Nothing could be more
dangerous than that. Critique, as an intervention, comes here: to dispel or
chasten those beliefs. Harry Gould, Brent Steele, and especially Ned Lebow (Theory Talk #53) write about prudence and a sense of
finitude: these are the close cousins of this kind of critique.







If we
take seriously the notion that people sometimes fight and kill in the service
of really awful causes while believing they are doing right, and that scholars
sometimes help them sustain those convictions rather than disabuse them of them—even
if they do not intend this—then critique becomes an awfully big problem and it
really threatens to undermine the profession as such. It opens up a whole new
level of obligation and responsibility, and it magnifies what might otherwise
be staid 'inside baseball'—Intramural scholarly or methodological debates. Part
of the reason why the 'great debates' were so great—so hotly fought—had to do
with this: our scholarly debates were, in fact, ideological ones.







It
undermines the field in another way as well. If we take critique seriously,
there's got to be a lot of moral reflection by scholars. That will make it hard
to produce scholarship quickly, to be an all-purpose intellectual that can
quickly produce thought-product in a policy-appropriate way, because I will
want to be thinking from another space, and of course precisely what
policy-makers want is that you don't
think from some other space; that you present them with 'shovel ready' policy
that solves problems without creating new ones.







So you
now have not just a kind of theoretical or methodological interruption in the
discussion of, say, absolute or relative gains. You now have to give an account
of yourself. And for me, that's what critique in IR means. To unpack the
definition I gave above, it's the attempt to give an account of what the duties
and limits of one's thinking are in the context of politics, given the nature
of politics as we understand it. Because IR comes out of the Second World War,
we're bound to take the most capacious notions of what political evil and
contingency can be; if we are not always in the midst of genocide and ruin,
then we are at least potentially so. And so contingency and complexity and all
the stuff that we're talking about must face that. I want to hold out that Carl
Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau might be
right—in ways which neither they, nor I, can completely fathom. Then I have
to give accounts of thinking that take a level of responsibility commensurate
with that possibility.







In that
vein, when I look at accounts of thinking in the context of the political, when
I look at what concepts are and how they work and how they do work on the world
so that it can be rendered tractable to thought, I realize that what we come up
with when we're done doesn't look very much like politics anymore. We have
tools which, when applied to politics, change it quite dramatically; they reify
or denature it. To be critical in the face of that, you're going to be obliged
to an extensive degree of self-interrogation and self-checking, which I call chastening.







That process
of chastening reason, is, in effect, what remains of the enlightenment obligation
to use practical reason to improve what Bacon called the human estate. What's
left of that obligation is to think in terms of the betterment of other human beings
as best as you can, knowing you can't do that very well, but that you may still
be obliged to try.







That's
really hard to do and it's an odd form of silence and non-silence. After all,
if I were to look at the Shoah while it was happening, or look at what happened
in Rwanda, and say 'well, I don't really have a foundational position on which
to stand so I can't analyze or condemn that'—that would not be a morally
acceptable position. Price and Reus-Smit (TheoryTalk #27) say this
in their 1998 article and they are absolutely right. But then there's the fact
that I don't quite know what to say beyond 'stop murdering people!' The world
is so easy to break with words, and so hard to put back together with them—assuming
anyone cares at all about anything we say. So I am obliged to respond to those
kinds of events when I see them, and I am also obliged to acknowledge that I
can't respond to them well, because my authority comes from the conceptual tools
I have, and they aren't really very good. Essentially, what I'm doing as
scholar of IR is the equivalent is using the heel of my shoe to hammer in a nail.
(That's a nice line, no? I wish it was mine, but it's Hannah Arendt.) It will
probably work, but it will take a while, and the nail won't go in so straight. To
chasten one's thinking is to remind oneself that the heel of one's shoe is not
yet a hammer; that all we're doing is muddling through—even when we do our work
with absolute seriousness and strict attention to detail, context and method—as
of course we should.











You discuss IR theory in terms of different
reifications. In which was does that also lead you to take a stand against a Weberian
understanding of IR?







I think
where I depart from Weber is that he has more faith than I do that, at some
point, disenchantment produces something better. There is faith or hope on
their part that the iron cage that we experience as a result of disenchantment
and as a result of the transformation from earlier forms of charismatic and
traditional authority to contemporary rational ones won't always be oppressive,
not forever. New forms and ways of being will emerge, in which those
disenchanted modes actually will fulfill their promise for a kind of
improvement in the human estate. If it's a long, complicated process—hence the
image of slow boring into hard wood—but faith is still justified, good things
can still happen.







For me,
the question is how would you manage a society that is liable to go insane or
to descend into moments of madness because of the side-effects or intervening
effects of disenchantment and modernization, while holding fast to the notion
that at some point, this is going to get better for most people? I'm a bit less
certain about that than I read Patrick and Weber being. I think that even if
they're right, it makes sense morally as scholars, not necessarily as citizens
or individuals or people, to dwell in the loss of those who fall along the way.








I find
myself thinking about the people who are gone a lot. My ex-wife teaches on
slavery, and I think a lot about this terrible thing she once told me. On slave
ships, when there was not enough food they would throw the people overboard
because ship masters got insurance money if their property went overboard, but
not if human beings succumbed on-ship. There's a scene depicting this in
Spielberg's film Amistad and it
haunts me. I find myself thinking about those people, dragged under with their
chains. I wonder what they looked like, what they had to say. I wonder what
they might have created or how their great-great grandchildren children would
have played with my child. I wonder if my best friend or true love was never
born because her or his ancestor died in this way. An enormous number of people
perished. I can't quite believe this, even if I know it's true.







Yoram
Kaniuk, the recently deceased Israeli novelist, wrote that the Israeli state was
built on the ground-up bones of the Jews who couldn't get there because it was
founded too late. I wonder about them too. And when I taught course modules on
Cambodia, I would find myself looking at the photographs made of the people in
Tuol Sleng before they were killed, the photo archives which the prison kept
for itself. There is a mother, daughter, father, brother, son, and I find
myself drawn into their eyes and faces. I don't want those people to disappear
into zeros or statistics. I want somehow to give them some of their dignity
back, and I want to dwell in the tragic nature my own feeling because it bears
remembering that I cannot ever really do that. If I remember that, I will have
some sense of what life's worth is, and I won't speak crassly about
interventions or bombings or wars—wherever I might come down on them. I would
say that it's almost a religious obligation to attend to the memory of those
people. My desire to abide with them makes me very, very suspicious of hope or
progress. I want this practice of a kind of mourning or grief to chasten such
hope.







There's
a problem with that position. Some will point out to me that this will turn
into its own kind of Manichean counter-movement, a kind of Nietzschean ressentiment. Or else that dwelling in
mourning has a self-congratulatory quality to it. And there are certainly
problems with this position at the level of popular or mass politics. We do see
a lot of ressentiment in our
politics. On the left, there's a lot of angry, self-aggrandizing moral
superiority. And you can think about someone like Sarah Palin in the US as a
kind of populist rejection of guilt and responsibility from the right.







But as social
scientists, we might have space to be the voice for that kind of grief, to take
it on and disseminate the ethics that follow from it; to give that grief a
voice. That kind of relentless self-chastening is what I'm all about. I think
it opens you up to new agendas and possibilities. I think it's a much deeper
way to be 'policy relevant' than most of my colleagues understand this term. If
we are relentlessly self-critical as scholars, and if we relentlessly resist
the appropriation of scholarly narratives to simplistic moral or political ends
and if we, as a society, help to build an intolerance of that and a sense of
the mourning that comes out of that, we also open our society up to say things
like, 'ok, well what's left?'







And
then, well, maybe a lot of things are left, and some of them are not so bad. Maybe
we start to imagine something better. That's where I'd rejoin Jackson and
Weber; after that set of ethical/emotional/spiritual moves. I think, by the
way, that Patrick mostly agrees with me; it's only a question of what his work
emphasizes and what mine has emphasized. On this point, consider Ned Lebow's
notion of tragedy. He and I disagree on some of the details of that notion. But
on top of his remarkable erudition, he's a survivor of the Shoah. I suspect he has thought very deeply about grief and
mourning, and in ways that might not be open to me.











The final question I want to pose to you is
a substantive one: Your understanding of critique somehow does relate to
sustaining progress, in a way. Perhaps on the one hand, you are not so
optimistic as Weber was, but on the other hand, your work conveys the sense
that it is possible to bridge the gap between concepts and things. I'm not sure
if it's possible, but perhaps you can relate it to the substantive example of
how your work relates to concrete political situations. I think the example of
Israel-Palestine comes to mind best.







Again,
I don't think I am as optimistic as that. In my heart of hearts, I desperately
wish this to be the case. To think of the people who were most influential on
my intellectual development—my cohort of fellow grad students at Johns Hopkins
and our teachers, to whom as a group I owe, really, everything in intellectual
terms—I was certainly in the minority view. Most of them were, I think, working
in the Deleuzian vein of making 'theory worthy of the event.' I just don't
believe that's possible; or anyway I think it's really, really, really hard, the work of a generation to tell that
story well and have it percolate out into our discipline and our culture. In
the meantime, we must muddle through. I hope I'm wrong and I hope they're
right. I'm rooting for them, even as I try to give them a hard time—just as I
give Keohane (Theory Talk #9)
and Waltz and Wendt and everyone else I write about a hard time. But I'd be happy, very happy, to
be wrong.







What I
do think can be done is that you can sustain an awareness of the space between
things-in-themselves and concepts, and by extension some sense of the fragility
and the tenuousness of the things that you think and their links to the things
that you do. Out of this emerges a kind of chastened political praxis.







You mentioned
Israel and Palestine, which I care a great deal about and am trying to address
more squarely in the work I'm doing now, partly on my own and partly in pieces I've
worked on with my colleague Daniel Monk. What we observe is that though the diplomatic
negotiations failed pretty badly twelve and a half years ago, we're still
looking at the same people running the show: the same principal advisers and
discussants and interlocutors: in the US and Israel and in the Palestinian Authority.
The same concepts and assumptions too. Just a few days ago, Dennis Ross
published a long op-ed about how we get the peace process back on track, and
you might think that you're reading something from another time—as though the
conflict were a technical challenge rather than a political one. You know that
Prince song about 'partying like it's 1999'?







I don't
know what a peaceful, enriching, meaningful Israeli-Jewish-Arab-Palestinian-Muslim-Christian
collective co-existence or sharing of space or world looks like, but I know
that this pseudo-politics ain't that. When I see something that's just a
re-hashing, I can say, 'come on guys, that is not thinking, that's recycling
the old stuff and swapping out dates, proper nouns and a few of the verbs.' Nor
is it listening to other voices who might inspire us in different ways, or
might help us rethink our interests, categories and beliefs. Lately, I've been
listening to a band called System Ali, hip-hop guys from Jaffa's Ajami quarter,
who sing in four languages. What they say matters less to me than the fact that
they really seem to like another, they trust each other, they let each voice
sing its song and use its words. They have something to teach me about
listening, thinking, acting and feeling—because it's music after all—and that
can produce its own political openings.







Of course,
there are pressure groups, from industry and AIPAC to
whatever else in the US, and those groups merit discussion and debate, but I'm
also wary of the counter-assumption which follows from folks who talk about
this too reductively: that there actually is an American interest, or a
European or Arab or Israeli one, which somehow transcends partisan interest—one
that can be recovered once the diaspora Jews, the oil moguls, the arms dealers
or the Christian 'Left Behind' people are taken out of the picture. That feels
like the same heady brew that Treitschke and Meinecke and the German realpolitik scholars poured and drank:
that the national state has some transcendent purpose to which we gain access
by rising above or tuning out the voices of the polity or its chattering
classes. Only with a light liberal-internationalist gloss: Meinecke meets David
Lake (Theory Talk # 46),
Anne-Marie Slaughter or John Ikenberry.







I can
also go meet starry-eyed idealists who want to hold hands and sing John Lennon,
I can say to them yes, I want to hold your hand and sing John Lennon, but I am
also enough of a social scientist to know that if a policy does not respond to
real and pressing problems—water, land, borders etc.—that any approach that
does not respond to those things will be hopelessly idealist. It will be what
my granny called luftmentsch-nachess—the
silly imaginings of men with their heads in the clouds, like the parable about Thales
and the Thracian maiden. I am not interested in being either a luftmentsch nor a technocrat. So what
does that leave with you with? You need to balance.







You can
look at groups at the margins of political culture to see what they can tell
you. In Israel and Palestine, it's groups like Ta'ayush, Breaking the Silence and Zochrot, and this settler
leader who recently died, Rabbi Frohman, who was going out and meeting every
Palestinian leader he could because for him, being a Jew in the land was not,
in the first instance about his Israeli passport. There were and are
possibilities for discussion that feel really pregnant and feel very different
from the conversation we are sustaining now; which reveal its shallowness and
its limitations and its pretentiousness. These other voices are of course not
ideal either, they are going to have their own problems and limitations, their
own descent into power and exclusion and so on, but they reveal some of the lie
of what we're doing now.







I guess
in the end, social scientists make a living imagining the future on the basis
of the past. I also spend a lot of time reading novels and watching books and
films. Partly because I am lazy and I like them. Partly because I'm looking for
those novels and films to help me imagine other possibilities of being that
aren't drawn from the past. Art, Dewey tells us in The Public and its Problems,
is the real bearer of newness. Maybe then, I get to grab onto those things and
say ok, what if we made those them responsive to an expansive materialist
analysis of what an Israeli-Palestinian peace would need to survive? What if we
held the luftmentsch's feet to the
materialist/pragmatic fire, even as we held the wonk's feet to the luftmentsch's fire? Let them both squeal
for a while. There's possibility there.







Daniel J. Levine is assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Among his recent publications (see below) stands out his book Recovering International Relations.



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Related links








Faculty Profile at U-Alabama
Read the first chapter of Levine's Recovering IR (2012) here (pdf)
Read Barder and Levine's The World is Too Much (Millennium, 2012) here (pdf)
Read Levine's Why Morgenthau was not a Critical Theorist (International Relations, 2013) here (pdf)
Read Monk and Levine's The Resounding Silence here (pdf)




Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Navigating challenging and complex civic spaces is nothing new for local organizations working to advance the rights and inclusion of LGBTI communities. Join NDI Senior Program Officer for Citizen Participation for a conversation with three partners from across the globe working to sustain their advocacy for equality and inclusion, while tackling some of the unprecedented challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Find us on: SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | Google Play
Whitney Pfeifer: Navigating challenging and complex civic spaces is nothing new for local organizations working to advance the rights and inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex communities. Regardless of the levels of tolerance and legal protection in a country, these groups know how to quickly adapt and utilize innovative approaches to maintaining their work and advocating for change.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has forced organizations to cancel Pride events, training, and in-person advocacy efforts, LGBTI organizations have been quick to respond and adjust, playing an integral role in meeting the basic needs of LGBTI individuals while utilizing online creativity to stay connected and sustain LGBTI community building.
Today, we are joined by three partners from across the globe, each working to sustain their advocacy for equality and inclusion, while tackling some of the unprecedented challenges posed by the pandemic.
We'll be speaking to each of these local partners to discover how they have successfully built digital communities that achieved real-life results. Welcome to DemWorks.
In Panama, Fundación Iguales is working to shift social attitudes towards greater respect and acceptance of LGBTI communities. Part of this process includes collecting stories of how LGBTI communities are being impacted by COVID-19 and its response, demonstrating that as humans, we are all impacted by the pandemic, regardless of how we identify. We spoke with Ivan to learn more. Ivan, thank you for joining us.
Ivan: Thank you.
WP: Could you tell us a little bit more about the LGBTI community in Panama and the types of challenges LGBTI individuals face in building and maintaining a community?
I: We are a country between Costa Rica, who just last month legalized civil marriage for same sex couples, and Colombia, a country with equal marriage since April 2016. We're a part of that less of the 30% of Latin Americans who live in a territory where marriage equality is prohibited. Moreover, are known for public policies that takes into consideration LGBTI persons.
The challenges, there are many. As a gay person, for example, I'm not protected by any non-discrimination law, or the gender identity of the trans community is not part of what is respected by the government. There is unfortunately still a lot of stigma and discrimination for being queer.
We're a small country where there's a strong control from conservatives and religious groups, but what are the good news, I guess? The civil society is finally organized, and organizations like Fundación Iguales are doing a marvelous work promoting the respect of our human rights, creating community, helping the LGBTIQ community to be more visible, and therefore more respected by the general public.
We start a legal process to have marriage equality in Panama since 2016. We are very optimistic we will conquer in the courts and in the public opinion, by strategic innovative and emphatic messages of equality.
WP: You alluded briefly to how Fundación is contributing to building and strengthening the community in Panama. Could you discuss the facts a little bit more about how Fundación is contributing to and strengthening during these uncertain times?
I: First of all, with positive messages and with a clear presence in national conversations about the measures during the pandemic, highlighting the reality of LGBTI persons. We have had a very tough situation with restriction based on sex to restrain mobility of people here in Panama, and that had impacted dramatically the trans community and the nonbinary community of Panama, in some cases affecting their access to food and medicines. Yes, to be able to even go to the supermarket and buy bread and milk.
We decided to join forces with other organizations, specifically with an organization called Hombres Trans Panamá. It's an organization conformed by trans men to create a solidarity network. The network was created for two main activities. The first one, it is to assist directly trans and non binary people who register for humanitarian assistance. We already covered 120 people who were in need of food and medicines.
The second part of that program is an online survey to register discrimination cases for the trans community during the quarantine time. We have already had the report of 26 cases, mostly of trans person who were restricted to enter supermarkets to buy food because their gender identity or expression did not match what the police "expect" from them that day. That report was sent to the government, to regional organizations that monitor human rights, and we hope that impact possibly their lives.
For other programs that Fundación Iguales is promoting during this times of pandemic, one that is very important is a series of podcasts called Panademia LGBTIQ+, a program of Fundación Iguales with [foreign language 00:06:20], which is an independent group of journalists to highlight stories of LGBTI persons during these times, telling their stories, especially the trans community.
WP: That sounds like a lot of excellent work and strengthening the collaboration between groups has been really effective, I think, in this COVID pandemic situation.
I: Indeed.
WP: You alluded briefly to these podcasts. Are there other forms of technology that Fundación is using to continue the work that you're doing?
I: Yes, and that's very interesting because we have to reinvent our work, basically. Just before COVID, we finished a super nice, unprecedented program going through the different provinces of Panama that we call the human rights tour, with the idea to be more democratic on the contents of human rights, specifically talking about Inter-American Court of Human Rights decision on equal marriage and gender identity, the Advisory Opinion 24. It was such a success and we planned to right away continue around the whole country. With this situation we have, being confined at home with mobility restrictions, we have to change all that, but we were lucky to have a strong presence in social media with a robust content that we were able to share and build from it. Also, our capacity of doing initiatives jointly with other NGOs like I mentioned before and you highlight, were also key to show the work that we were doing on respecting human rights.
That coordination and collaborations, like the podcast example, the solidarity network, the level of infographic videos and social media interactions of Fundación Iguales are very solid. Since we dedicate an important part of our work to be present in national and international platforms for political participation, that allowed us to be more visible and not to be forget during these complicated times,
WP: It sounds that you've been able to pivot pretty smoothly and quickly, despite I'm sure what have appeared to be challenges that we're all facing during the pandemic.
Would you be willing to talk about kind of the role and benefits of partnering with international organizations such as NDI in your work?
I: When I started Fundación Iguales, I was very privileged to know that working with international organizations like NDI was essential. I lived almost eight years in Washington, D.C., And before that I studied in New York City, and I worked for almost eight years in multilateral organizations. That experience gave me a different look to understand how, and how specifically a country like Panama, a country with so many challenges, with the lack of the government support and local support, I would say, organizations and enterprises and so on ... so for me, it was very important to know that a key part of my work was to knock some doors abroad because it's essential to boost the work that we do here. Definitely, without the help, assistance, donations and more important, the moral support of embassies and organizations like NDI, our work would have been way more difficult than what actually is.
WP: As NDI, we like to partner and collaborate with our partners and recognize you as the experts and provide the technical assistance and guidance as needed. So it's good to hear that this has been beneficial for Fundación. My last question is about what's next for Fundación?
I: We're very focused that we want a social change for our country in a social change for good. We want a Panama where all persons will be respected and where they can all be happy. We want Panama to join the club of countries where same sex couples can have the support and protection of the government, and more importantly, where society in general welcomes their families. We're trans persons can fully live and decide about their dreams and lives. And we're going to conquer that by strategic campaigns, with messages, with empathy.
WP: Thank you, Ivan, for taking the time to speak with us. We look forward to seeing what Fundación is able to do in creating a safer and more equal space for LGBTI communities in Panama.
I: Thank you, it's been a pleasure.
WP: For more than 35 years, NDI has been honored to work with thousands of courageous and committed democratic activists around the world to help countries develop the institution's practices and skills necessary for democracy's success. For more information, please visit our website at www.ndi.org.
You've heard about how an organization is engaging with communities and collecting stories to plan for future advocacy efforts from Fundación Iguales. But what happens when you are in the middle of a project, when things get disrupted? LGBTI communities in Romania successfully organized to prevent an amendment to the constitution that would ban same sex marriage that was put to a referendum in 2018. In the aftermath of these efforts, there was a need to establish priorities moving forward and create space for dialogue within the community about the next steps for the overall movement. Mosaic organized different segments of the LGBTI community, including transgender communities, LGBTI, Roma, women, and older people to build consensus around an advocacy agenda moving forward.
In the midst of these community outreach efforts, COVID-19 happened. Vlad Viski, executive director of MosaiQ is with us. Vlad, thanks for joining us.
Vlad Viski: Thank you for having me.
WP: Can you tell us a little bit more about your project?
VV: Between 2015 and 2018, in Romania, there was a national campaign to change the constitution and ban gay marriages, initiatives which were supported by conservative groups and a large share of the political party. For three years, in Romania, society has been talking, probably for the first time in a very serious manner, about LGBTI rights, about the place for the LGBT community in society. This conservative effort ended with a failure at the polls for the referendum to change the constitution, only 20% of Romanians actually casting the vote for this issue when the minimum threshold of votation, of turnout, was 30%.
This was possible with quite a successful campaign coming not from not only from MosaiQ but from other LGBTI organizations in Romania throughout the country. We all kind of went on the boycott strategy, we're actually asking people to boycott the referendum because human rights cannot be subject to a popular vote.
Once the referendum in 2018 failed in Romania, there was a question in the community. What should we do next? How should our agenda look like for the next couple of years? We at Mosaic, we really tried to focus and we really thought the issue of intersectionality as being extremely important. This is how the idea of this project started, Engage and Empower was the name of the project. It focused on six groups within the LGBT community: transgender people, LBTQ women, elderly, people living with HIV, Roma LGBT people, and sex workers.
WP: Could you talk a little bit more about how the organization is trying to maintain momentum in this community building efforts, despite what's going on with the pandemic?
VV: We at MosaiQ, we had to reimagine some of the projects that we were involved in, so that included canceling events or postponing them or rescheduling for the fall. But the problem is also that we don't really know the timeline for this story or when it will end. We've had issues related to personal issues of people in the community. People living with HIV were not getting their treatment due to the fact that hospitals were closed except for the coronavirus. Then we've had issues related to sex workers not being able to work anymore. The issue of poverty has been quite an important issue. A lot of people have been laid off, a lot of people were not able to pay rent, a lot of people were either in unemployment benefits, and so on.
At the personal level for us and as an organization, all of a sudden we got a lot more messages from people asking for help. We've tried to help them on a case by case basis. We are not a social health kind of organization, but we've tried to fix as many problems as we were able to. Then throughout this, and actually talking about issue of intersectionality and the issue of the project and the way we work with the Roma LGBT community, what we've witnessed throughout this pandemic and the lockdowns, especially, was an increase in violence, against Roma people from the police. So together with colleagues from civil society, especially Roma groups, we had to monitor hate speech in the media, monitor cases of abuse and violence from the police, and also make statements and letters to official institution, to the president and the prime minister and so on. So for us, it was an issue of also solidarity with other groups affected by the pandemic.
WP: I believe that you've had to move some of your activities online, correct?
VV: That was another part, which we kind of tried to make the best out of the situation. We felt that there were a lot of young kids, for example, who, because schools were closed, they had to go back and live with their homophobic parents. A lot of organizations, LGBT organizations in Romania were not able to have the Zoom meetings with their volunteers because they were living with homophobic or transphobic parents so they could not reveal what they were doing or who they were talking to. So the issue of depression and psychological pressure that comes on people being locked down, people trying to survive throughout this pandemic, we decided to have a campaign online, which was called MosaiQ Quarantine, and that included parties online in order to support queer artists who were not able to earn any money because there were no gigs. We organized these online parties and we paid them and we supported their work.
Then we had the zoom talks with, or like talks online, with all of the organizations and groups in Romania, LGBT groups, to kind of better see the situation on the ground in different cities in Romania. That was for us extremely important because we felt like there was a need to have this dialogue within the community.
Then we had the all sorts of posts on social media and different kinds of events. We also talked with organizations from the region, from the US, from Moldova, from Russia, to kind of see what the feeling also over there.
So for us, it was quite an exercise to take advantage of the fact that using social media and using online tools, we were able to reach out to people who otherwise would not have been able to participate in our events, being so far away.
WP: It sounds like Mosaic has certainly stepped up to the challenges. Could you just briefly talk about what NDI support has meant to Mosaic?
VV: I think the project funded by NDI was extremely important, both for the community ... right now, we have an active Roma LGBT group. We have all of these, the issue of intersectionality being put on the agenda. We have the [inaudible 00:19:36] sports, which is a sports club run by women who is also trying to grow based also on the support that Mosaic has offered through NDI. We've had, at the Pride last season, the first Roma LGBT contingent putting the issue on the agenda. So for us, in many regards, this project kind of focused us more on this intersectional approach to activism and the need to include all voices within the community. The trust that they had in us was very important.
WP: I'm glad to hear that it's been a fruitful partnership, both for NDI and Mosaic. Vlad, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
VV: Oh, that's it.
WP: We'll be back after this short message.
To hear more from democracy heroes and why inclusion is critical to democracy, listen to our DemWorks podcast, available on iTunes and SoundCloud.
Before the break we heard from two partners using digital platforms to create and support communities. But how are groups sustaining their online networks and communities once created? Rainbow Rights trained paralegals in the Philippines on legal issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity and how to support LGBTI communities. Through Google Classroom, these paralegals formed an online network to help communities facing discrimination and violence. Eljay, welcome to our podcast. Could you tell us a little bit more about the paralegal support project?
Eljay: Yeah. One of the main components of our community paralegal program is to create a national online platform wherein all of the trained paralegals of our organization will be able to share their experiences, their cases, and they could also refer some of the difficult cases to us. So that's the main idea. It's just that it gained a deeper significance in this COVID-19 pandemic that we're experiencing because a lot of legal organizations hurried to do to do what we had been doing in the past year, which is to create an online platform.
Right now, even though there's a lot of problems in the Philippines barring the central autocracy, we have been maintaining the platform. People are still referring cases to us and we are working on those cases. Part of the deeper significance that it has is in the Philippines, human rights violations have increased because of the lockdown. So it became a source of reporting documentation for these human rights violations during the lockdown. We did not expect that it will evolve that way but we're happy that it has, and despite some connectivity issues in the Philippines, it has been reaping as well.
WP: So when you're talking about the program, there've been increased human rights reports, is that generally more broad human rights abuses? Or are we talking specifically to the LGBTI community?
E: Yeah, we accept every report on numerous violations, but we take on the LGBTI human rights violations specifically. When we receive human rights violations that is not really in our lane, so to speak, we refer them to bigger organizations. We have seen increased numerous violation against the LGBTQI community here.
WP: You had mentioned that Rainbow Rights fortunately had organized the training for the paralegals before the pandemic hit and already have a plan in place to use online platforms, which was Google Classroom, to create this network across the country. You've briefly referenced what the current situation is like now, but could you go a little deeper into that? What kind of challenges is Rainbow Rights facing in continuing to engage with the community?
E: As I have mentioned, maybe a bigger challenge is the connectivity issues in the Philippines. We don't have good internet here, and that's a challenge. It's also challenged to keep the interest level of our paralegals and keep them engaged. That is also challenged because they have bigger problems now. Because of the pandemic, they're thinking of their health, they're thinking of their livelihoods, and that is a challenge during these times.
However, before the pandemic, we also saw that we had to be creative at the level of interest, so that's a challenge. The situation, it's working. Overall situation's working. We have referrals, we continue to share modules in our platform, refreshing their memory on the training. We also try to be light. There are some light moments so that they be so that they keep themselves also, the interest level is high and that they see us and they trust us in maintaining this platform.
WP: You alluded to the fact that it's often difficult to maintain interest of your paralegals when engaging online.
E: Basically, we had a two-pronged approach on this. One is to find the people who has a genuine interest to serve the community. So in our selection process, we have chosen people who have track records of service in their communities. The other side of the approach is to build on the spirit of camaraderie, friendship, and community solidarity between us. So even before the pandemic, we have been setting up calls and checking on them, even adding them on Facebook and Twitter just to continually engage with them. I think that's a big part of our strategies. We're also looking to ... I think in my personal view, I think a lot of what they do is labor, so I think in the future, we will be able to compensate them for their efforts in their community and we're looking into that as well.
WP: That's really interesting. Could you speak a little bit more to the role and benefits of partnering with international organizations such as NDI in your work and as well as helping to sustain this national network?
E: Yeah. I think it's invaluable. Foreign support, foreign funding support such as the NDI had been really great for us. We have been envisioning this project for a long time and NDI gave us the opportunity to really implement it. They also gave us a level of freedom in how to execute the program because there's a recognition that we in the ground know how to solve our problems. But there's also a lot of technical support aside from the funding. Like in digital security, NDI has given us a lot of resources, even given us a training for this and how to secure our online platforms. They also provided a lot of coalition building resources. So there, and I think we are also sharing what our experience with NDI to our other funders, because I think with NDI, we had a lot of freedom and we had a lot of support because you guys always check on us, so that's great.
WP: Well, I'm glad to hear that NDI is taking care of our partners. Thinking about how June is Pride Month for a lot of communities around the world, and Pride is often equated to the community of LGBTI people around the world how would you say Rainbow Rights efforts have contributed to strengthening the community in the light of the violence and the discrimination that LGBTI people face on a daily basis in the Philippines?
E: Since 2005, Rainbow Rights has been doing this approach wherein we come ... a top down approach at the policy level, but we also complement it with from the grassroots, bottom up approach. We make sure that whatever we bring at the policy level, it is informed by our grassroots services. I think that's one of our biggest contribution, is to really complement policy with experience on the ground. Most of the policies that we've pushed for is really coming from what our experiences and what are the real needs of the people that we serve in the communities. I think that's one of our biggest contributions in our approach. We're not just the legal, we don't just bring cases to court. We don't just bring legal expertise, but we also inform it with community level approaches and grassroots approaches.
WP: Well, thank you LJ again for taking the time to speak with us and telling us a little bit more about how Rainbow Rights is contributing to a holistic support system to the LGBTI community in the Philippines.
E: Thank you so much for this opportunity.
WP: Thank you to Ivan, Vlad, and Eljay for sharing their experiences and for the work you're doing to advance LGBTI equality and inclusion, and thank you to our listeners. To learn more about NDI or to listen to other DemWorks podcasts, please visit us at ndi.org

Rainbow Rights Paralegal Training



A Conversation With LGBTI Activists on Community-Building

Democracy (General), Podcast Listen LGBTI Pride National Democratic Institute NDICountries: All Regions

 The Conference of Defence Associations Institute made a splash this week with an open letter "Call for Action: Canada's National Security and Defence in Peril."  It made a heap of news given who signed it: a heap of former ministers of defence, a bunch of ambassadors and high ranking civil servants, and several retired generals and admirals (tis funny to me that the title of the piece omits the squids and skimmers):I respect the hell out of many of the signers as well as folks at CDAI, which as been a terrific partner of the CDSN.  However, I have quibbles, both minor and major, which I would have shared this morning on the radio had the host not gotten the wrong talking points--he asked me about Elon Musk and the CBC.  While it was fun to rant about bad faith actors engaged in vice-signalling, I did prep for the interview and didn't want to waste it, so here's some thoughts about this piece.  First, I want to address a few specific gripes before getting to the larger context.The letter talks about our military capabilities being woefully inadequate to protect our landmass.  That is not only true, that will ALWAYS be true.  How so?  The primary military threat to Canada are missiles launched by Russia/China/North Korea.  We can't stop those.  No matter how much we spend, we can't because we don't have ballistic missile defenses.  The Americans have been working on such defenses since Reagan's Star Wars speech, and they really haven't made much progress on it.  So, we should be clearer about what are the threats and what we need to defend ourselves from those threats.  The biggest threats to Canadian lives and property are stuff outside the military domain: climate change, pandemics, and cyber attacks (while the military has a cyber role, we should not be spending the scarce commodity of disciplined, trained people in uniform on jobs civilians can and should do).  People can cite Russian investments in the north, but we have to keep in mind that they have a whole lot of north to defend.  I do really worry about a war with China, but that is a China-Taiwan conflict that will spillover, and we will never have a navy big enough to make a dent in that conflict.  I say all this, even as I agree with the basic premise--we need to spend more.  But there are some difficulties with that, as I get to, below."We have also fallen short in meaningful contributions to burden
sharing for the collective defence and security of our allies and
partners." Oh really?  What burden has Canada shirked?  Canada paid the third highest price of any ally in Afghanistan and had far less restrictions until it became a training mission.  Canada is one of four framework nations organizing the defense/deterrence/reassurance missions in the Baltics and Poland.  While our contingent has been smaller than the others, the resulting need to organize many smaller and less respected (sorry) contingents has earned Canada a heap of kudos for stepping up when France refused to do so.  Canada has played a leading role in training Ukrainian forces before the Russian invasion of 2022 and since.  Canada has shipped a comparative level of arms and ammunition and other supplies to Ukraine.  When people say Canada has not burden-shared enough, they really mean Canada hasn't spent enough on its military.  But that is not "burden-sharing" because spending on our own military really does not lift the burden that much from the others.  Here's a secret: the US would spend as much as it currently does even if Canada doubled its spending.  Indeed, given the domestic political dynamics driving American defense spending, I am pretty sure that if each and every US ally spent the equivalent of 2% of GDP on defense, the US would still spend about the same.  Which branch of the US military will say: hey, our allies have spent more, we don't need to spend as much?  Which defense contractors?  Which Senators and Representatives?  And, yes, the easiest way to make progress to 2% is to tank the economy since it is all about spending relative to one's economy.  If one's economy grows pretty well, one might find one spending more money absolutely but not relative to that metric.  Canada is spending more on its military than it was a decade ago--more dollars, even if not a greater % of GDP.  More importantly input measures are dumb.  See Anessa Kimball's book for more on the craptastic nature of the 2% conversation.Canadian civil-military relations conversations don't really address the challenges posed by having retired senior officers take political stances the same way these are raised in the US.  But perhaps they should.  If JC Boucher and I get funding, we will be studying whether the signals sent by retired officers cause Canadians to think that they are speaking for the active military.  If so, well, damn.  Because then the military is seen, rightly or wrongly, as taking a partisan stance.  And that ain't good. Folks can say this is a bipartisan letter since it has both former Conservative and Liberal politicians signing it, but nope, that doesn't do the trick since this letter is calling on this government, this party, to do better.  It does not call on Parliament to get its house in order even as the role of parliament in Canadian defence is so much weaker than damn near any other democracy.  So, this is critical of this PM and the Liberal party because they are the ones in power.  Speaking of the former ministers, how many of them are responsible for the current mess?  How many of them cut spending, pushed back procurement processes, under-invested in procurement expertise, and so on?  Most of them?  All of them?  So much easier for them to criticize this stuff now that they are no longer beholden to parties and no longer running for office. Which gets to the part that is most unrealistic: "the Government must radically accelerate timelines for procurement..."  Um, through magic?  A great application of Green Lantern theory.  DND doesn't have enough people to do the procurement stuff to buy the
equipment and such.  So, that needs a heap of work to make happen before one can spend the money. If one were to magically allocate $15b more, the current staffing at DND couldn't spend it.   Ok, the larger context.  The letter is right that the latest budget is disappointing from a defence/security perspective as it had no new money.  In my humble opinion, the gravest threat to the Canadian military is its recruitment and retention crisis.  That being short 16k people means not only that the CAF can't do as much, but that those in the CAF are stressed.  Stressed by having to do multiple jobs, stressed by not being well served by various offices that are understaff, and so on.  These pressures are likely to make it harder to retain people and harder to recruit, which will exacerbate the crisis--a downward spiral.  It would seem to me that while throwing money at the problem won't solve it, it probably could help.  Increase pay, increase benefits, spend more money on recruiting efforts, improve military bases, etc.  I do wonder what is happening to the money that is supposed to be going to the 16k soldiers, sailors, and aviators who aren't in the CAF.  Anyhow, that is one place where the money should be going.  Another key part of the current context is that the Defence Policy Update is late and has generally been an opaque, underwhelming process.  Canada should have a quadrennial process--to review how well the last four years went and whether goals were attained, why DND/CAF fell short, and plans for improving as well as responding to new developments.  Instead, the DPU was going to be, from what folks have gleaned, a sales pitch for spending more money on NORAD modernization (which is necessary but won't actually lead to us being much safer due to that aforementioned missile defence problemo).  We will only be able to evaluate the DPU after it comes out.  The previous review was much better than expected.  Maybe people liked it since it didn't make any hard choices as it didn't force any real tradeoffs.  But it did cost out the spending for the various programs and was pretty transparent.  Of course, when rolled out, much was made of putting personnel first in the document to suggestion putting personnel first in reality, but then Trudeau kept around a Defence Minister who kept around a Chief of Defence Staff that was abusing his power and engaged in sexual misconduct.  So, the proof is in the doing, not in the words on the page.Finally, the political pressures run against most of this.  If we wanted good ships fast and less expensive, we'd buy them from countries that are good at that.  Instead, notice how the ship building is pitched by this government (and by the previous one, just not quite so starkly): That graphic is the cover for the 2015 Liberal Defence Platform.  Notice the purpose of naval investments--jobs.  Not ships.  Jobs.  Not defending maritime approaches.  This is one of the primary reasons why Canada doesn't have the equipment the CAF needs--that decisions are made about jobs and votes. Stephen Harper's plan was to capture Halifax and Vancouver via the shipbuilding program, but now all the parties are held hostage by Irving, Seaspan, and now Davie shipyards.  Folks can argue we need this capacity to maintain and upgrade the ships, but the choice to do it this way is incredibly expensive and ... no frigates (the AOPS ships the navy didn't really want are mostly broken).  When we do import stuff, there is an urge to Canadianize it to make it fit Canadian standards.  So, now we have helicopters that are too heavy.  Oy.  The military always wants to put as much stuff as they can, so that the equipment can operate in all kinds of scenarios since they can only get one type of plane, one type of ship, and so forth.  But that goldplating makes the systems more expensive and less effective.  Again, choices need to be made, which might mean that a ship is good at one thing and not so good at another.  Because you know.... 👉While this government is not great at delivering, most of this is hard-wired into Canadian politics.  Which party is going to get more votes by spending more money on defense?   "We believe this could be best accomplished on a non-partisan basis and would have broad public support."  Um, no.Structural problems can't be fixed with just a call to arms and a smidge more political will (whatever that is).  Maybe this letter might impact those writing the Defence Policy Update, but that impact is likely to be on the packaging as the money is already set.  Trudeau has already made the decision for this year, and given the context--the war in Ukraine, the DPU, etc--I doubt that next year will be any different as we get closer to the next election.  I get the frustration of those signing this letter. I share it.  I write blog posts out of frustration.  Other folks write open letters.  But move the policy needle?  I think not.          

Remember when the Fed's most pressing policy concern was missing their 2% inflation target from below for most of the decade following the financial crisis of 2008-09?  The concern never failed to puzzle me in all my time at the St. Louis Fed. I once let out how I really felt:All those years I was expecting low inflation and low interest rates to make the political opposition to ever-higher deficits melt away. As I recall explaining to my colleagues at the time "Either we'll get the biggest free-lunch of all time (increased government spending and/or tax cuts) or we'll get inflation." The inflation was inevitable, to my of thinking. I just didn't know when it would return. I certainly did not see the point of encouraging it! Well, inflation returned. But not exactly for the reasons I was expecting. What happened? ShocksWhat happened was COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war. These two shocks were large, disruptive, and persistent. A great many people died. Large parts of the economy were shut down with the hope of slowing the spread of the virus so as not to overwhelm our limited ICU capacity. The leisure and hospitality sector was crushed, and other sectors as well. There was a massive (and highly unusual) reallocation of production and consumption away from services to goods--a phenomenon that has not fully reversed to this day. We learned about the delicate and interconnected nature of global supply chains. People modified their behavior in dramatic ways. Work-from-home seems here to stay. And then, of course, as if a global pandemic was not enough, Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, leading to the usual sickening consequences of war: death, destruction, and displacement--as well as energy disruptions and food shortages that reverberated across the global economy. This is not, of course, the only thing that happened. We also had policy responses. Policy: What was neededI want to limit attention to economic policy here (health policy is another matter). The COVID-19 shock disrupted some sectors of the economy more than others. Some sectors, like leisure and hospitality were virtually shut down. But in many other parts of the economy, people were able to work from home. Since not many people purchased pandemic-insurance, a large number of Americans were in for a whole lot of economic hurt. Most of those adversely affected were in the bottom half of the income distribution. What could and should have been done?I should like to think that most Americans would have been in favor of a social insurance program that supported those most in need; i.e., targeted transfers for as long as the pandemic remained disruptive. Most people would have recognized that this is the right thing to do. And even those few who seemingly do not care much for their fellow Americans might have recognized how redistribution would have been desirable, perhaps even necessary, to maintain social cohesion. We should not have wanted a replay of what happened in the last crisis, where the financial sector was bailed out while American many households were largely left flailing in the foreclosure winds that blew in the aftermath of 2008-09. How might such a program be financed? A consumption tax would have been one way. Imagine a "transitory" 5% federal sales tax to fund a targeted transfer program. The program parameters could, in principle, be calibrated in a manner that requires little or no adjustment in the deficit. Ideally, such an emergency program would have already been put in place. (As far as I know, there is still no such plan in place--a significant policy failure, in my view.)How might things have
played out with such a policy, given the sequence of shocks that unfolded? To a
first approximation, my guess is "probably not much different." With the balanced-budget
policy described above, inflation would have almost surely been lower. Imagine
shaving 300-500bp off the "inflation hump" we've experienced so far:

We would almost surely still have had some inflation stemming from supply disruptions and energy
costs (associated with the war). But inflation would have been less pronounced. Naturally, rather than complaining about high inflation, people would instead have
been complaining about high consumption taxes. ("They told us they'd be
transitory!") There's no such thing as a free lunch. 

Under this higher-tax/lower-deficit policy, most Americans would have felt worse off relative to
2019. The blame for this feeling, however, properly lies with the shocks and
not the policy response. Yes, work-from-home types would not have received
transfers and they would have been paying more for goods and services. This is
the nature of redistribution, which I believe most people would have supported. Policy: What we gotTo a large extent--and all things considered--we pretty much got what was needed: a set of redistributive policies with transfers targeted (mostly) to the bottom half of the income distribution (yes, yes, we can talk at length about how things could have been done better). Except that there was no surtax to fund the transfers. Our representatives in Congress chose to deficit-finance the programs. The resulting large quantity of treasury paper had to be absorbed by the private sector at a time supply was constrained and interest rates were not permitted to rise (I'll get to monetary policy in a moment). How does one not expect some additional inflation in this case? So, instead of a "transitory" consumption tax, we got a "transitory" inflation tax. There's no free lunch. By the way, by "transitory" I mean to say that inflation is expected to revert to target, instead of remaining elevated or even increasing. In the fall of 2020, I expected a "temporary" inflation (see here) because I thought the supply disruptions and CARES Act were not permanent. Inflation turned out to be higher and more persistent than I expected. But the supply disruptions have largely alleviated and the ARP expired at the end of 2021 (though the RUS-UKR war continues). Up until recently, I remained optimistic that--absent further shocks and with responsible fiscal policy--inflation would make its way back down to target in 3-5 years without a recession. I'm not as optimistic today, but let me return to this below. What about monetary policy? Well, I was very pleased with the way the Fed calmed financial markets in March 2020, as I expected it would.Well done, Fed. But what about monetary (interest rate) policy?Well, to be honest, monetary policy seemed a bit bonkers. Lowering the policy rate in response to recession engineered by a manufactured shutdown did not make much sense to me. My view was more in line with Michael Woodford's, as expressed here in his 2020 Jean Monnet lecture. What was needed was insurance, not stimulus. And this insurance needs to be delivered through fiscal policy. My own view is that many economists could not resist interpreting the severe decline in output as reflecting a conventional "output gap." To be fair, there may very well have been a decline in aggregate demand in the first half of 2020. The economic outlook at the time was very uncertain, which likely increased the desire for precautionary savings. Remember, monthly inflation rates for March, April and May of 2020 were negative. The monthly inflation rate only became positive in June 2020 (5.4% annualized rate), though it remained fairly subdued for most of  2020. Heading into 2020, the Fed's policy rate was around 1.6%. Was it really necessary to lower it any further? Especially in light of the fiscal transfers taking place throughout 2020?  But apparently, in the minds of some, perhaps even most, the economy needed "stimulating." In any case, it seems clear now, in retrospect at least, that the cut should probably not have happened or, conditional on happening, should have been quickly reversed once the financial panic had subsided. The main effect of interest rate policy according to many was an undesirable asset-price boom (stocks, bonds, and real estate). The increase in private sector wealth coming from higher asset valuations surely added some fuel to the inflationary fire.  We can now see how that Fed-induced wealth effect is being undone. The rapidity of the rise in the Fed's policy rate is wreaking havoc on wealth portfolios. This is not a huge concern to the extent the policy is just reversing an undesirable asset-price inflation. But to the extent that these assets sit on bank balance sheets, to the extent these positions are not hedged against duration risk, to the extent that depositors are skittish, and to the extent that capital buffers are running low, then the banking system--or at least parts of it--are subject to runs. We are seeing this play out now in the United States. Where are we heading? I fear we may be in a bit of a pickle. One reason is China. To be more precise, the risk of the U.S. entering a long and costly proxy war with China. Let's hope it doesn't happen. But I can't help thinking of Rome vs. Persia. I'm not sure about the Persian perspective, but my reading of history suggests that the late Roman Empire devoted considerable resources to defending its eastern frontier against its great rival. Such a fiscal strain requires taxes (or inflation).  If the Sino-American proxy war scenario fails to materialize, then I think we stand a reasonable chance of getting out of this decade without a recession, but with inflation hovering above target for the indefinite future. The Fed might want to sell this as part of its "symmetric" inflation targeting regime. After all, we tolerated undershooting the target inflation rate for a decade (see here). In my view, much will depend on the course of fiscal policy--the deficit, in particular--in relation to the global demand for U.S. Treasury securities (see here). Needless to say, these are very difficult objects to forecast. (In fact, there's no point in forecasting them -- we should just make contingency plans instead.)There is a chance that the Fed overdoes its policy tightening and starts to "break things." Given the recent events in the U.S. banking sector, the FOMC would, in my view, be wise to pause and see how things play out. This is not an issue of "financial dominance." It is based on the deflationary impulse induced by the recent bank failures. I expect all banks to redouble their efforts to repair their balance sheets. This means a fear-induced tightening of lending standards and slower loan growth beyond what one might consider to be a normal reaction against higher policy interest rates.  If the Fed does pull a Paul Volcker, then we'll get a sharp recession. Inflation will come down--temporarily, at least. Where inflation goes from there will depend, as always (in my view), on fiscal policy.  If the proxy war scenario does come to pass, then get ready to pay the necessary taxes. And remember: wars are typically inflationary. In fact, an inflation tax may not be a bad way to finance a part of this endeavor. The U.S. would effectively be collecting a greater amount of seigniorage on its U.S. Treasury securities held abroad. And why shouldn't our allies be prepared to shoulder some of the expense? (There are other ways, of course.) A proxy war may or may not be worth fighting. Either way, remember: there ain't no such thing as free lunch.  As for monetary policy in a period in which the government has a set objective and wants to deficit-finance its spending, I'm afraid the Fed will just have to learn how to stop worrying and "love" inflation (in case you're unfamiliar with the reference, see here). Raising interest rates sharply can break things and create disinflation. But without fiscal reform, the respite on inflation is likely to be temporary. In fact, inflation is likely to reemerge even higher than before since the Treasury will now have to issue paper at an even faster pace, first, to cover the shortfall created by the recession, and second, to cover the higher interest expense of the debt. This is a version of Sargent and  Wallace's "unpleasant monetarist arithmetic," see here and here. Need I add that creating a recession is no way to win a proxy war.  How will U.S. policy evolve to meet our many challenges? No one knows how the future will unfold. Perhaps we can take some comfort in Winston Churchill's observation: "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing--but only after they've tried everything else." Alas, the quote is apocryphal. Nevertheless, I am hopeful that we will "do the right thing" eventually (and before it's too late). 

 It has taken me a long time to write a follow up to my first post on Bizarro World. That is because once you begin to think about the strange inversions in which the persecuted are made out to be threats, and the comfortable are made out to be threatened, it is hard to not see it. Our entire world seems reversed and inverted, those who are most subject to violence are made into violent threats, and those who are most comfortable have made the threats to their comfort our central concern with the claims of cancel culture. Bizarro world would be one of those "descriptive theories" that Althusser talks about, something that stops thinking because it seems to be such an accurate description of what one is thinking about. I have decided to approach the topic by breaking it up, by trying to grasp the specificity of the different reversals, following what I did earlier with the inversion of the relation of workers and capitalists to that of the relation of human capital and job providers I would now like to examine the way in which margins and mainstream have also become inverted, and what that inversion means for both terms in question, the dominant culture and the marginal subculture. In doing so I would like to start with a particular philosophy, or spontaneous philosophy, that characterized my life as a young teenager. As a nerdy kid interested in comic books, science fiction, and other things, I fostered the belief, shared by many of my kind, that our rather minor marginalization made us sympathetic to the marginalization of others. This was helped in large part by the fact that many of the dominant comic books when I was growing up, such as the X-Men, Spider-Man, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, were all in some sense allegories of oppression and exclusion. With respect to the first in the list, the idea that the X-Men stand in for an oppressed minority, complete with the conflict between Professor X's integrationist philosophy and Magneto's more militant position, is so entrenched in its reception that it ceases to be subtext (even if it is not true). Comic books were at least in the eighties, both in their culture and in their content, stories of the misunderstood, the maligned, and the excluded. One could raise two questions about this mythology. The first has to do with the allegorical distance of framing the stories of marginalization and exclusion through such science fiction content as genetic mutation, or, in other contexts, alien visitors or androids. In some sense these science fiction elements set up the necessary allegorical distance to make the stories palpable as entertainment. The condition of possibility is the condition of impossibility, however, in that the detouring of exclusion and marginalization through such allegories as the "mutant menace" always made it possible that some readers would miss the point. That people actually did is demonstrated by the twitter posts that ask in all sincerity "When did X become political?" where the X in question is some bit of pop culture such as X-Men or Star Trek that was always steeped in political subtexts. Such posts miss the point, but the possibility of missing the point is inscribed in the text in question and is a necessary condition of its popularity. Of course there are comics, television shows, and books that bridged this allegoric divide, more directly connecting the fictional exclusion of mutants and aliens with the actual history of oppression, but they are to some extent exceptions. There is something awkward, however, when the history of imagined exclusions confronts the real history of discrimination. There are the moments when we realize that the Nazis were an actual political ideology, and not just bad guys that seem ready for the four color word of comics. Second, and more importantly, one could argue that the marginalization I felt at the time was slight and temporary, I was (and remain) a white cis male, after all, and being bullied after school, or made fun of in the back of the bus, is nothing compared to what other adolescents face, nor does it really deserve a place in the ongoing history of persecution and discrimination. However, becoming an outcast of sorts, a nerd, and later a punk, can be understood as a becoming minor in Deleuze and Guattari's sense. For Deleuze and Guattari majority and minor are not simply quantitative matters, but the relation between constant and variable. As Deleuze and Guattari write, "Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language. It is obvious that "man" holds the majority even if he is less numerous than mosquitos, children, women, blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice, once in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is extracted."Since we are speaking of comic books, it is worth noting that superhero comics themselves illustrate this majority, not just in the proliferation of various prefixes appearing before the world "man"," bat, super, iron, spider, etc., man is the constant, the norm, but in the fact that white and male is the unstated norm from which the first "black," "Asian," or gay superhero takes their meaning. Marvel comics in particulr does not bother to create new characters and superpowers it is enough to add "-woman" or "she" to Spider or the Hulk to create a new character. The deviations appear meaningful because the norm is assumed. While this is true of comics, and begins to illustrate the limits of the social justice dimension I alluded to above, I think that becoming a comics nerd is itself a kind of becoming-minor. To quote Deleuze and Guattari again, "Minorities, of course, are objectively definable states, states of language, ethnicity, or sex with their own ghetto territorialities, but they must also be thought of as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority."Not to be too autobiographical, but I would describe my entire life as a passage through different minorities, different subcultures, comics, punk, philosophy, etc., all of these where very different territories, with different languages and cultures, but the overall movement was an attempt to evade majority, to not be the constant, a position which Deleuze and Guattari argue, is all the more oppressive because it is occupied by no one. If all of this language of major and minor seems a bit baroque, then I am reminded of a passage from Deleuze and Guattari that seems uncharacteristically direct. After a few lines that state "There is no subject of the becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority," they bring up a historical/literary example, writing, "As Faulkner said, to avoid ending up a fascist there was no other choice but to become black." This cuts through the particular neologism to make the stakes clear. Such an assertion has a lot to unpack, but I would argue here that a lot of subcultures, especially those that embrace their deviations and exclusions from the mainstream and are, it is worth saying primarily but not exclusively white, are attempts to avoid becoming fascist, to avoid being part of the majority. You cannot change the color of your skin, but you can change the color of your hair, and that seems like enough especially if it gets the same people to hate you. That is my all too glib summation of some of the politics of punk aesthetics. My main reason for bringing up this little theory of subcultures, as well as the subtext of comic books, now is that it seems to have completely exhausted itself. Comic books, or, more to the point, superheroes, have gone from the margins of our culture to the center. They are the dominant culture, have become majoritarian, and as much as one would like to think that they have carried with it their fundamental minoritarian political aspect the opposite seems to be the case. Love of mutants and other imaginary minorities has not extended to a support for actually existing marginalized groups, but has been mobilized to not only perpetuate exclusions but to become the voice of the majority.In part this happens through the politics of nostalgia, which demands that the present, the film adaptation, identically recalls the past, which in this case means that the film must resemble comics written in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, complete with the racial politics of those eras.  There have been online freak outs over the casting of Idris Elba to play Heimdall in Thor, of John Boyega playing a central role in Star Wars, of Moses Ingram appearing in Obi Wan Kenobi. These deviations from some supposed canon have all been met with vicious online hate campaigns that have led actors to shut down accounts and retreat from the digital public sphere. The demand to preserve the sanctity of one's childhood memories has led to absolute hostility towards any of the social change that has happened since one was a child. Lest this all seem incredibly minor (in the conventional sense) and all too online, I would argue that this cultural nostalgia, the demand that the present match the past, has been thoroughly weaponized into MAGA nostalgia. This hostility is not limited to changes to the canon, but is extended to include even new characters and stories that do not so much recast or change past memories but create new ones. Both Ms. Marvel and She Hulk have been "review bombed" on online review sites, hit with a flurry of negative reviews almost before they air primarily for the crime of casting a muslim woman or a woman in a comic book themed show. There seems to be an entire online niche of people who hate Brie Larson for not only playing Captain Marvel, but for speaking up for diversity in film and film criticism. We live in an age in which a film that was basically an hour and half long recruitment advertisement for the Air Force is seen by its critics as too woke, too concerned with social justice, because of its cast. All of this criticism coalesces in the online mantra, "Get Woke, Go Broke" which threatens companies and brands with boycotts for embracing "social justice."The world of comic book fans has been no less critical of those who criticize their beloved films for their artistic merits. Martin Scorsese famously declared that Marvel films are not cinema, and he has been ridiculed online ever since. It is not enough that these films, the Marvel films, be commercially dominant, being the most financially successful films that are released each year, and culturally dominant, reshaping all of popular culture in their image, they also most be loved and revered by everyone. Dissent cannot be tolerated. Blockbusters must be acknowledged as art. It is at this point that we get our bizarro world inversion of the comic book nerd. The fan of comic book movies is now something of a "sore winner," who continues to act the victim, marginalized, even in his dominance. I would argue that this "sore winner" idea is integral to our contemporary version of the majority, and even fascism to recall the quote about Faulkner. We are far from Deleuze and Guattari's image of a majority that is all the more powerful in being unstated, in being assumed, now dominance, cultural, political, and economic, focuses on its apparent marginalization in order precisely to reassert its dominance. The inversion is not just that comic books have gone  from margins to mainstream, but that marginalization has gone from being the basis of empathy to an expression of dominance. Victimhood is the language of domination. The bizarro world that we are living in is not just that what was once the obsession of a few has become the culture of many, that Moon Knight is now practically a household name, but that grievance against perceived marginalization has become the language of the majority. 

"Of course, a little bit of force is needed when doing push-backs."Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, ehemalige kroatische PräsidentinKroatien, ein Staat, der gemeinsam mit Slowenien am 25. Juni 1991 seine Unabhängigkeit vom jugoslawischen Bundesstaat erklärte und damit einer der Akteure der schwersten Kriege in Europa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg wurde, ist seit 2013 Mitglied der Europäischen Union, die vor allem als Friedens- und Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft gegründet wurde. Doch viele Stimmen äußern sich kritisch gegenüber dem Beitritt des Staates und sind der Meinung, dass Kroatien besonders im gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Kontext noch nicht bereit dazu wäre, Mitglied der Gemeinschaft zu sein.Die Europäische Kommission sieht das allerdings anders und ist der Meinung, dass die kroatische Politik große Fortschritte macht. Sie äußert sich bereits zuversichtlich über den kommenden Beitritt in den Schengen-Raum, der Bürger*innen der EU die Freiheit gibt, ohne ein Visum in viele Länder der Welt reisen zu dürfen. Doch an den kroatischen Grenzen gibt es Berichten zufolge immer wieder Fälle von Gewalt und Rechtswidrigkeiten von Seiten der Polizei gegenüber Asylsuchenden. Die ehemalige kroatische Präsidentin Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović äußert sich in einem Interview mit dem oben aufgeführten Zitat zu den Menschenrechtsverletzungen.Wenn die kroatische Wirtschaft betrachtet wird, können einige Problematiken beobachtet werden, vor denen kroatische Politiker*innen stehen, wie beispielsweise die Arbeitsmigration von kroatischen Jugendlichen aufgrund von Umständen wie niedrigen Löhnen.Der folgende Beitrag soll auf diese und weitere Aspekte der kroatischen Politik näher eingehen und damit eine Bilanz nach 8 Jahren EU-Mitgliedschaft Kroatiens ziehen. Wie kam es zum Beitritt Kroatiens in die EU und welche Kriterien mussten erfüllt werden? Vor welchen Hindernissen steht der Staat und wie geht die Europäische Union mit diesen um? Diese Fragen sollen im Anschluss geklärt werden, bevor die Frage gestellt werden kann: Ist Kroatien überhaupt bereit für die Europäische Union?EU-Beitritt2003 ging das Beitrittsgesuch Kroatiens nach Brüssel und 10 Jahre später wurde das Land schließlich Mitglied der Europäischen Union. 2011 unterschrieb die Regierungschefin Jadranka Kosor den Beitrittsvertrag und legte damit den Grundstein für den 2013 in Kraft getretenen Beitritt des Landes in die Europäische Union. In diesem langen Prozess kam es zu einigen Hindernissen, die die Beitrittsverhandlungen herauszögerten und nach wie vor die Problematiken innerhalb des Landes widerspiegeln. (vgl. BPB 2013)Die Bevölkerung Kroatiens wurde erst nach dem unterschriebenen Beitrittsvertrag zu der Thematik befragt. Dabei stimmten 67% für einen Beitritt in die Europäische Union. Die Wahlbeteiligung fiel allerdings sehr gering aus, was unter anderem daran liegen könnte, dass die Abstimmung nur sechs Wochen zuvor angekündigt wurde. (vgl. ebd)Der 2011 unterschriebene Beitrittsvertrag war mit einigen Bedingungen verbunden, die bis zum letztendlichen Beitritt im Jahr 2013 erfüllt werden sollten. Hierbei ging es darum, grundlegende Defizite innerhalb des Landes zu beseitigen. Beispielsweise musste der Justizapparat gestärkt werden. Außerdem sollte stärker gegen Korruption vorgegangen sowie eine effizientere Verwaltung gewährleistet werden. Der letzte Punkt umfasst die Privatisierung der Staatsbetriebe. (vgl. ebd)Im Großen und Ganzen möchte die Europäische Union durch die Eingliederung Kroatiens den Übergang zu Marktwirtschaft und Demokratie vorantreiben. Denn Kroatien war Teil des blockfreien, sozialistischen Jugoslawiens mit all den Folgewirkungen (vgl. Kušić 2013).Kopenhagener KriterienAuf dem EU-Gipfel in Kopenhagen wurden im Jahr 1993 Kriterien aufgestellt, anhand derer geprüft wird, ob ein Land dazu bereit ist, in die Europäische Union aufgenommen zu werden. Zusammengefasst sind das folgende Faktoren:Die Gesamtlage innerhalb des Landes muss stabil sein. Das heißt, politische Institutionen, der Rechtsstaat und die Demokratie muss gesichert sein. Außerdem müssen Menschen- und Minderheitsrechte gewahrt werden. (vgl. Grosse-Hüttmann 2004, S. 7)Zudem muss eine funktionierende Marktwirtschaft vorhanden sein, die auf Wettbewerb und Privateigentum beruht. Dadurch sollen die Staaten in der Lage sein, dem Konkurrenzdruck im Binnenmarkt standhalten zu können. (vgl. ebd., S. 7)Der Aquis Communautaire, also alle Verträge der Europäischen Gemeinschaft sowie alle europäischen Gesetze, müssen in nationales Recht übernommen werden. Alle Pflichten und Regeln müssen von dem jeweiligen Staat akzeptiert und eingehalten werden. (vgl. ebd., S. 7 f.)Der Staat muss mit den weitreichenden Zielen der EU sowie der Währungs- und Wirtschaftsunion einverstanden sein, wie sie im Vertrag von Maastricht estgelegt wurden. Dadurch soll verhindert werden, dass neue Mitglieder einen anderen Weg einschlagen als die Europäische Union. (vgl. ebd., S. 8)Da Kroatien nun seit 8 Jahren Mitglied der Europäischen Union ist, scheinen diese Kriterien aus Sicht der Institutionen der Europäischen Union erfüllt zu sein. Dennoch musste der Staat zunächst an einigen Stellen arbeiten, um dieses Ziel erreichen zu können.Flüchtlingsrückkehr und KriegsverbrecherprozesseEine wichtige Bedingung, die im Jahr 2005 gestellt wurde und ein großes Hindernis für den Beitritt darstellte, war der Umgang mit kroatischen Kriegsverbrechern, die in den Unabhängigkeitskriegen Verbrechen begangen haben und zu diesem Zeitpunkt noch nicht ausreichend sanktioniert wurden. Die Europäische Union forderte volle Kooperation mit dem Internationalen Strafgerichtshof. Vor allem ging es dabei um die Auslieferung von Ante Gotovina, der in der kroatischen Offensive Operation "Oluja" Kriegsverbrechen begangen hat. (vgl. Kušić 2021)Gerade wenn es um die Ahndung von Kriegsverbrechern sowie um die Flüchtlingspolitik geht, kann bisher nur ein eher mäßiger Erfolg verzeichnet werden. Die Problematik kann darauf zurückgeführt werden, dass die Staatswerdung Kroatiens mit kriegerischen Auseinandersetzungen erfolgt ist, so dass sich nationalistische Strukturen innerhalb der Gesellschaft und der Politik verfestigt haben. (vgl. Richter 2009, S. 7) Trotz alledem gilt Kroatien als eines der stabilsten Länder auf dem Balkan, der sich derzeit innerhalb eines Prozesses der Wechselwirkung zwischen innenpolitischer Demokratisierung und Stabilisierung befindet. (vgl. Richter 2009, S. 19)Die Premierminister Ivica Račan (2000-2003) und Ivo Sanader (2003-2009) haben versucht, die Wünsche der Europäischen Union im Bereich Flüchtlingsrückkehrer und Kriegsverbrechen umzusetzen. Dabei ging es hauptsächlich um Aspekte wie den Koalitionsfrieden, einen parteiübergreifenden Konsens zugunsten der Union, Stabilisierung und Konsolidierung. Der Preis waren allerdings Reformdefizite im Justizsektor, die die EU ebenfalls zuvor bemängelte.Durch blockierte Anträge, nicht veröffentlichte Fristen oder nicht ausgeführte richterliche Anweisungen kam es schließlich zu Defiziten im Bereich der Rückkehrpolitik und Kriegsverbrechen. Diese Politik führte zwar zu mehr Stabilität und Kontinuität des innenpolitischen Reformprozesses, jedoch wurden die Kopenhagener Kriterien vernachlässigt, so dass sich Defizite im Justiz- und Verwaltungsprozess verfestigen konnten. (vgl. Richter 2009, S. 19)Die von der Europäischen Union anerkannte Genfer Flüchtlingskonvention soll Flüchtlingen auf der ganzen Welt Schutz bieten. Doch oftmals sieht die Realität, auch innerhalb der EU anders aus. Vor allem an der kroatischen Grenze zu Bosnien und Herzegowina berichten Menschen davon, über die grüne Grenze zurückgeschickt zu werden. Ihnen zufolge haben sie keinen Zugang zu Asyl und erfahren oftmals exzessive Gewalt von Seiten der kroatischen Polizei. (vgl. Strippel 2021)Dieses Phänomen wird auch Push-Back genannt und bedeutet, dass Menschen, die auf Asyl in Kroatien hoffen, wieder nach Bosnien und Herzegowina abgeschoben werden, wo sie ebenfalls nicht empfangen werden. Diese Verfahren sollten im Normalfall zur Kenntnis genommen und geprüft werden, doch die kroatische Regierung dementiert das Vorgehen der Polizei. Es wird lediglich betont, dass die kroatischen Außengrenzen geschützt werden.Dadurch, dass es keine Einigkeit über diese Vorfälle gibt, werden diese von der Europäischen Union nicht sanktioniert beziehungsweise zur Kenntnis genommen, obwohl es sich hierbei um die Verletzung von Menschenrechten und Missachtung der Genfer Flüchtlingskonvention handeln würde. (vgl. Strippel 2021) Einen interessanten Podcast zu dieser Thematik wurde vom Bayerischen Rundfunk veröffentlicht, dieser ist unter diesem Link zu finden.Kroatien und der SchengenraumLänder, die Teil des Schengen-Raums der EU sein wollen, müssen sich einer Vielzahl von Evaluierungen unterziehen, die prüfen, ob alle für den Schengen-Raum erforderlichen Vorschriften erfüllt worden sind. Die Evaluierungen bewerten, ob das jeweilige Land in der Lage ist, Verantwortung für die Außengrenzen im Namen der anderen Mitglieder des Raumes zu übernehmen. (vgl. Europäische Kommission 2019)2016 wurde der Schengen-Evaluierungsprozess eingeleitet, der bewerten soll, ob Kroatien die Schengen-Vorschriften und Normen erfüllt. Die Europäische Kommission ist dabei der Auffassung, dass Kroatien Fortschritte bei der Erfüllung der Voraussetzungen gemacht hat, weiterhin aber an deren Erfüllung, insbesondere am Management der Außengrenzen, arbeiten muss. (vgl. ebd.) Der Kommissar Dimitris Avramopoulos, welcher für Migration, Bürgerschaft und Inneres zuständig ist, äußert sich im folgenden Zitat über den voraussichtlichen Beitritt Kroatiens zum Schengen-Raum:"Schengen ist eine der größten und greifbarsten Errungenschaften der europäischen Integration. Seine Stärke hängt jedoch von seiner Aufnahmebereitschaft ab. Kroatien hat nun die Maßnahmen zur Erfüllung der notwendigen Bedingungen ergriffen, und wir müssen dies anerkennen. Als vollwertiges Schengen-Mitglied wird das Land zu einer weiteren Stärkung des Schengen-Raums beitragen und dafür sorgen, dass die EU-Außengrenzen besser geschützt werden." (Dimitris Avramopoulos, Europäische Kommission 2019)Das gesamte Statement der Europäischen Kommission zu dieser Thematik wurde auf deren Internetseite veröffentlicht.Wirtschaftliche Maßnahmen im EU-KontextNach Weidenfeld und Wessels (2002) hat die Europäische Union zusammengefasst drei grundlegende Ziele, wenn es um die Struktur ihrer Mitgliedstaaten und vor allem um Regionen mit Entwicklungsrückstand geht. Zum einen sollen diese Regionen und Länder besonders gefördert werden. Nach Auffassung der Europäischen Union besteht dann ein Rückstand, wenn sich das BIP je Bürger*in auf weniger als 75% des EU-Durchschnitts beläuft. Dieses Ziel gilt als Priorität, weshalb mehr als zwei Drittel der Strukturfonds zur Beseitigung dieser Rückstände verwendet werden. (vgl. Weidenfeld/Wessels 2002)Als zweites Ziel gilt die soziale und wirtschaftliche Umstellung von Gebieten, deren Entwicklungsniveau über dem Durchschnitt liegt. Dennoch weisen diese Gebiete Strukturprobleme, wie beispielsweise Deindustrialisierung, eine hohe Arbeitslosenquote, Bevölkerungsrückgang oder Krisensituationen auf, die mit Hilfe der Mittel der Europäischen Union aufgefangen werden sollen. Das dritte Ziel ist die Anpassung und Modernisierung von Ländern und Regionen. (vgl. ebd.)Das EU-Förderprogramm für den Staat Kroatien beinhaltet 10,74 Milliarden Euro und soll die kroatische Wirtschaft unterstützen. Dabei gehen 40% in Fonds für regionale Entwicklung, 24% in Kohäsionsfonds, 19% in Landwirtschaftsfonds, 14% in Sozialfonds und der Rest in Meeres- und Fischereifonds sowie in eine Jugendbeschäftigungsinitiative. (vgl. Holzner/Vidovic 2018, S. 10)Ziel der Unterstützung ist es vor allem, die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung Kroatiens voranzutreiben, die Armut innerhalb der Gesellschaft zu bekämpfen und den Arbeitsmarkt zu verbessern. Die Inanspruchnahme ist im Vergleich zu anderen EU-Ländern allerdings gering, nimmt aber immer weiter zu. Das langsame Vorgehen könnte damit zusammenhängen, dass die Entwicklungsfähigkeit des Landes derzeit noch nicht so weit ausgeprägt ist, dass die Fonds angemessen verwaltet werden können. (vgl. ebd., S. 25)Ein wichtiges Infrastrukturprojekt, das sich derzeit in Baumaßnahmen befindet und von der kroatischen Regierung mithilfe der EU-Fonds gestartet wurde, ist der Bau der Pelješac-Brücke, welche das Festland mit der vorgelagerten Halbinsel verbinden soll. 357 Millionen von 550 Millionen Kosten werden von der EU getragen. Allerdings erhielt der chinesische Staatskonzern Communications Construction Company den Zuschlag für den Bau, was vielerorts für Erstaunen sorgte. (vgl. Mihm 2021)Weitere Ziele, die die EU-Mitgliedschaft mit sich bringen soll, sind die Ansiedlung einer EU-Einrichtung, die Einführung der goldenen Investitionsregel sowie vor allem der Eintritt in den Schengenraum. (vgl. Holzner, Vidovic 2018)Einfluss des BrexitDas Vereinigte Königreich selbst führte den Euro als Währung nicht ein und trotzdem hat der Austritt Großbritanniens aus der Europäischen Union einen großen Einfluss auf die Währungsintegration und somit auch auf die Währungspolitik Kroatiens und das Verhältnis zur Europäischen Union.Bei den acht Mitgliedsstaaten, die den Euro noch nicht eingeführt haben, den so genannten "Euro-Outs", kann zunehmend die Befürchtung beobachtet werden, dass ihr Einfluss auf den Willensbildungsprozess innerhalb der Union verringert wird. Als Folge dieser Sorge hat sich eine Art Koalition von Staaten entwickelt, die die Interessen einiger Mitglieder vereint. Der Brexit kann also als Auslöser für eine neue Dynamik und Treiber für die Ausdehnung der Eurozone gesehen werden. (vgl. Tokarski; Funk 2018, S. 1)Kroatien gehört zu der Gruppe der "Euro-Outs". Sie sind eine heterogene Gruppe von Staaten, die verschiedenen Wirtschaftsmodellen folgen und sich in unterschiedlichen Stadien ihrer Entwicklung befinden. Rumänien und Kroatien sind darunter die Staaten, die ein Wechselkursregime mit kontrolliertem, variablem Wechselkurs unterhalten. Die Problematik hinsichtlich der ungleichen ökonomischen Bedingungen ist, dass diese die Kooperation zwischen den Mitgliedsstaaten erschweren. Allerdings gilt Kroatien als Spezialfall, denn auch wenn der Euro als Währung noch nicht eingeführt wurde, ist die Wirtschaft weitgehend "euroisiert", da 67% der Verbindlichkeiten und 75% der Anlagen auf dem Euro basieren. (vgl. ebd., S. 1 f.) Die Einführung der europäischen Währung ist also nur eine Frage der Zeit und eine Frage des politischen Fortschritts.ArbeitsmarktAufgrund der Überbewertung des realen Wechselkurses befand sich die Wirtschaft Kroatiens zwischen 2009 und 2014 in einer tiefen Rezession, was dazu führte, dass die Beschäftigungszahlen sanken und das BIP um fast 13% einbrach. Seit dieser Zeit sinken die Zahlen der Arbeitslosen, somit erreichte die Arbeitslosenquote innerhalb des Landes im Mai 2017 den niedrigsten Wert mit 11,7%. (vgl. Holzner, Vidovic 2018, S. 2 f.)Bis heute ist der kroatische Arbeitsmarkt gekennzeichnet durch geringe Erwerbstätigkeit und niedrige Beschäftigung, was ein massives Problem darstellt. Die Beschäftigtenrate ist niedriger als der EU-Durchschnitt. Neben Italien und Rumänien hat Kroatien den höchsten Anteil an inaktiven Bürger*innen innerhalb der Europäischen Union. (vgl. ebd., S. 4 f.)Besonders Jugendliche und Kroat*innen mit primären Ausbildungen sind von Arbeitslosigkeit betroffen. Personen mit Sekundärbildung können die geringste Arbeitslosigkeit aufweisen. Trotzdem wird oft der Mangel an Arbeitskräften vor allem in touristischen Gebieten bemängelt. (vgl. ebd., S. 5 f.)Zur Lösung dieser Problematik fordern Gewerkschaften höhere Löhne für Arbeiter*innen. Einige Vertreter*innen von Unternehmen fordern allerdings die Erhöhung der Quoten für Arbeitsplätze aus dem Ausland. (vgl. ebd., S. 6)ArbeitsmigrationBereits seit den 60er Jahren, in denen viele Gastarbeiter*innen vom Balkan in Länder wie Deutschland und Österreich immigrierten, um ihre Familien zu ernähren, spielt die Thematik Arbeitsmigration in Kroatien eine wichtige Rolle. Bis heute nutzen viele Kroat*innen die besseren Arbeitsumstände und Löhne in Ländern wie Deutschland, um ihren Familien ein besseres Leben ermöglichen zu können.Seit dem Beitritt Kroatiens zur Europäischen Union sind die Zahlen der Migrant*innen aus Kroatien um 38% gestiegen. Insbesondere war hierfür die Öffnung des kroatischen Arbeitsmarktes verantwortlich, der es kroatischen Staatsbürger*innen ermöglichte, in anderen Mitgliedsländern der Europäischen Union ihren Lebensunterhalt zu verdienen. Die Mehrheit der Kroat*innen ist im Alter zwischen 25 und 54 Jahren und findet Beschäftigung in der Industrie sowie in der Bauwirtschaft. (vgl. Holzer, Vidovic 2018)Aufgrund von Faktoren wie der unterdurchschnittlichen Entlohnung hat Kroatien der Auswanderung dieser Bürger*innen wenig entgegenzusetzen. Dem Regierungsprogram 2016-2020 ist lediglich ein vages Statement zu der Auswanderung kroatischer Jugendliche und junger Erwachsenen zu entnehmen. Das Ziel ist es, mehr Arbeitsplätze zu schaffen und dadurch junge Leute dazu zu bewegen, in Kroatien zu bleiben. (vgl. ebd., S. 9)EuroskeptizismusSeit einiger Zeit befindet sich die gesamte Europäische Union in einer Krise, die mehrere Teilkrisen umfasst und deshalb auch Polykrise genannt wird. Dazu zählt unter anderem auch der Euroskeptizismus, der in allen Mitgliedsländern zunehmend wahrzunehmen ist. Dieser kann mit einzelnen Politiken oder dem Erhalt von Souveränitätsrechten begründet werden. (vgl. Weiss, S. 14)Auch wenn der Euroskeptizismus mittlerweile weit verbreitet ist, gibt es zwischen den Mitgliedsstaaten Unterschiede in der Ausprägung. Besonders neue Mitgliedstaaten, wie auch Kroatien, empfinden die Thematik des Kompetenz- und Souveränitätstransfers an die Europäische Union problematisch. Dieser Machtverlust wird als sensibel, historisch abrufbar aber auch politisch instrumentalisierbar wahrgenommen. (vgl. ebd., S. 14)LegitimitäskriseDie Europäische Union leidet also derzeit unter einem Stimmungstief, das mehrere Ursachen hat. Vor allem aber hagelt es immer mehr Kritik zum Thema Demokratiedefizit, Handlungsunfähigkeit und mangelnder Bürgernähe. Viele Bürger*innen begegnen der EU misstrauisch, da sie für sie sehr intransparent und wenig demokratisch erscheint. (vgl. Höreth 2004, S. 41)Aufgrund dessen machte es sich die EU bereits im Jahr 2002 zum Ziel, verfassungsmäßige und institutionelle Voraussetzungen zu schaffen, die demokratische Grundsätze innerhalb der erweiterten EU sowie die Steuerungsfähigkeit nach innen und die Handlungsfähigkeit nach außen ermöglichen sollen. Dieses ambitionierte Ziel konnte allerdings bislang nicht erreicht werden, da einzelne Mitgliedsstaaten auf die Gewichtung ihrer Stimmen im Ministerrat nicht verzichten wollten. (vgl. ebd., S. 41) Nach Höreth (2004) basiert das Demokratiedefizit nicht nur auf technische Probleme des Politikmanagements, sondern auf grundlegende Legitimitätsprobleme, die die Anerkennungswürdigkeit der EU in Frage stellen.FazitWie auch die anderen Mitgliedstaaten der Europäischen Union hat Kroatien mit den Hindernissen der Polykrise zu kämpfen. Doch die Gesamtsituation des Staates zeigt, dass das Land sich vor allem mit Themen wie dem Umgang mit Flüchtlingen im Rückstand befindet, was damit zusammenhängen könnte, dass sich politische, soziale und ideologische Strukturen, die sich im Laufe der Geschichte, aber vor allem während der Unabhängigkeitskriege gebildet haben, verfestigt haben.Die geringe Wahlbeteiligung und die 67%ige Zustimmung zum Beitritt in die Europäische Union lässt relativ offen, wie die kroatische Gesellschaft zu der Europäischen Union steht. Zunächst konnte allerdings das Gefühl geweckt werden, dass eine gewisse EU-Euphorie in der Gesellschaft Kroatien zu beobachten war. Nun aber äußern sich, wie in der gesamten Europäischen Union erkennbar, immer mehr Menschen skeptisch gegenüber der EU. Es erscheint immer noch so, als ob die Gesellschaft den Entscheidungsprozessen der Europäischen Union nur schwer folgen kann und sie sich damit unsicher fühlen.Die kroatische Regierung hat einige Maßnahmen getroffen, um den EU-Beitritt des Staates zu ermöglichen. Trotzdem gibt es Kritiker*innen, die der Meinung sind, die EU habe es Kroatien zu einfach gemacht. Nach ihr wurden die Kopenhagener Kriterien erfüllt, sonst hätte das Land nicht zu einem offiziellen Mitglied der Europäischen Union werden können.Doch ein genauerer Blick in die Strukturen des Staates und vor allem auf die Grenze zu Bosnien und Herzegowina zeigen: das Land muss weiterhin an sich arbeiten, um den Kriterien gerecht werden zu können. Die Europäische Union darf die Augen nicht verschließen, wie es derzeit getan wird, indem zuversichtlich über den Beitritt in den Schengen-Raum diskutiert wird. Als Friedensgemeinschaft ist die Aufgabe der Europäischen Union, Menschenrechte zu wahren und dort genauer hinzuschauen, wo diese verletzt werden. Allerdings setzt der Beitritt Kroatiens in die Europäische Union gleichzeitig auch ein wichtiges Zeichen und bringt den Staat, als einer der stabilsten Länder auf dem Balkan, dazu, aktiv zu werden und als Vorbild für den restlichen Balkan zu fungieren.Auch wenn der Beitritt kritisch hinterfragt werden kann, sollte also gesagt werden, dass der Staat durchaus Schritte macht, die ohne die Europäische Union wahrscheinlich nicht stattgefunden hätten. Kroatien profitiert sowohl wirtschaftlich, als auch gesellschaftlich von den Vorteilen der EU. Allerdings verlangsamen Defizite innerhalb der Politik, wie beispielsweise lange Verwaltungsverfahren die Fortschritte, so dass die Europäische Union zum einen Geduld zeigen, aber zum anderen die Problematiken innerhalb des Landes nicht ignorieren sollte.LiteraturverzeichnisBundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2013): 1. Juli: Kroatien tritt der EU bei. Online verfügbar unter https://www.bpb.de/politik/hintergrund-aktuell/164274/1-juli-kroatien-tritt-der-eu-bei-28-06-2013, zuletzt geprüft am 14.09.2021.Europäische Kommission (2019): Schengen-Beitritt: Kroatien vor dem Beitritt zum Schengen-Raum. Online verfügbar unter https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/de/IP_19_6140, zuletzt geprüft am 30.09.2021.Holzner, Mario (2018): Wirtschaftliche Perspektiven für Kroatien. wiiw Forschungsbericht. Wien: The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies.Horeth, Marcus (2004): Die erweiterte EU in der Legitimitätskrise. In: Der Bürger im Staat 54 (1), S. 41–48.Kušić, Siniša (2021): Kroatiens Weg in die EU . Hg. v. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Online verfügbar unter https://www.bpb.de/apuz/158164/kroatiens-weg-in-die-eu, zuletzt geprüft am 14.09.2021.Mihm, Andreas (2021): Chinesen bauen Brücke in Kroatien, die EU zahlt. Hg. v. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Online verfügbar unter https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/kroatien-china-baut-peljesac-bruecke-und-die-eu-zahlt-17461739.html, zuletzt geprüft am 30.09.2021.Richter, Solveig (2009): Zielkonflikte der EU-Erweiterungspolitik? Kroatien und Makedonien zwischen Stabilität und Demokratie. Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik.Schrooten, Mechthild (2004): Ökonomische Perspektiven der EU-Osterweiterung. In: Der Bürger im Staat 54 (1), S. 17–20.Steindorf, Ludwig (2013): Ein kurzer Gang durch die Geschichte Kroatiens. Hg. v. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Online verfügbar unter https://www.bpb.de/apuz/158166/ein-kurzer-gang-durch-die-geschichte, zuletzt geprüft am 30.09.2021.Tokarski, P.; Funk, S. (2018): Die Nicht-Euro-Staaten in der EU nach dem Brexit. In: SWP-Aktuell (68), S. 1–8.Weidenfeld, W.; Wessels, W. (2002): Jahrbuch der Europäischen Integration 2002/2003. Bonn: Europa Union Verlag.Weiss, S. (2004): Die Erweiterung aus der Sicht der Beitrittskandidaten. In: Der Bürger im Staat 54 (1), S. 11–17.

"To this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me… The time I spent in Abu Ghraib — it ended my life. I'm only half a human now." That's what Abu Ghraib survivor Talib al-Majli had to say about the 16 months he spent at that notorious prison in Iraq after being captured and detained by American troops on October 31, 2003. In the wake of his release, al-Majli has continued to suffer a myriad of difficulties, including an inability to hold a job thanks to physical and mental-health deficits and a family life that remains in shambles.He was never even charged with a crime — not exactly surprising, given the Red Cross's estimate that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country's War on Terror.The Abu Ghraib "Scandal"On April 28th, 2004, CBS News's 60 Minutes aired a segment about Abu Ghraib prison, revealing for the first time photos of the kinds of torture that had happened there. Some of those now-infamous pictures included a black-hooded prisoner being made to stand on a box, his arms outstretched and electrical wires attached to his hands; naked prisoners piled on top of each other in a pyramid-like structure; and a prisoner in a jumpsuit on his knees being threatened with a dog. In addition to those disturbing images, several photos included American military personnel grinning or posing with thumbs-up signs, indications that they seemed to be taking pleasure in the humiliation and torture of those Iraqi prisoners and that the photos were meant to be seen.Once those pictures were exposed, there was widespread outrage across the globe in what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, that word "scandal" still puts the focus on those photos rather than on the violence the victims suffered or the fact that, two decades later, there has been zero accountability when it comes to the government officials who sanctioned an atmosphere ripe for torture.Thanks to the existence of the Federal Tort Claims Act, all claims against the federal government, when it came to Abu Ghraib, were dismissed. Nor did the government provide any compensation or redress to the Abu Ghraib survivors, even after, in 2022, the Pentagon released a plan to minimize harm to civilians in U.S. military operations. However, there is a civil suit filed in 2008 — Al Shimari v. CACI — brought on behalf of three plaintiffs against military contractor CACI's role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Though CACI tried 20 times to have the case dismissed, the trial — the first to address the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees — finally began in mid-April in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. If the plaintiffs succeed with a ruling in their favor, it will be a welcome step toward some semblance of justice. However, for other survivors of Abu Ghraib, any prospect of justice remains unlikely at best.The Road to Abu Ghraib"My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture… And therefore, I'm not going to address the 'torture' word." So said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in 2004. He failed, of course, to even mention that he and other members of President George W. Bush's administration had gone to great lengths not only to sanction brutal torture techniques in their "Global War on Terror," but to dramatically raise the threshold for what might even be considered torture.As Vian Bakir argued in her book Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building Struggles, his comments were part of a three-pronged Bush administration strategy to reframe the abuses depicted in those photos, including providing "evidence" of the supposed legality of the basic interrogation techniques, framing such abuses as isolated rather than systemic events, and doing their best to destroy visual evidence of torture altogether.Although top Bush officials claimed to know nothing about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the war on terror they launched was built to thoroughly dehumanize and deny any rights to those detained. As a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, "The Road to Abu Ghraib," noted, a pattern of abuse globally resulted not from the actions of individual soldiers, but from administration policies that circumvented the law, deployed distinctly torture-like methods of interrogation to "soften up" detainees, and took a "see no evil, hear no evil," approach to any allegations of prisoner abuse.In fact, the Bush administration actively sought out legal opinions about how to exclude war-on-terror prisoners from any legal framework whatsoever. A memorandum from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to President Bush argued that the Geneva Conventions simply didn't apply to members of the terror group al-Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Regarding what would constitute torture, an infamous memo, drafted by Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, argued that "physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Even after the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials never relented when it came to their supposed inapplicability. As Rumsfeld put it in a television interview, they "did not apply precisely" in Iraq.In January 2004, Major General Anthony Taguba was appointed to conduct an Army investigation into the military unit, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which ran Abu Ghraib, where abuses had been reported from October through December 2003. His report was unequivocal about the systematic nature of torture there: "Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison."Sadly, the Taguba report was neither the first nor the last to document abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, prior to its release, the International Committee of the Red Cross had issued multiple warnings that such abuse was occurring at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.Simulating AtonementOnce the pictures were revealed, President Bush and other members of his administration were quick to condemn the violence at the prison. Within a week, Bush had assured King Abdullah of Jordan, who was visiting the White House, that he was sorry about what those Iraqi prisoners had endured and "equally sorry that people who've been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America."As scholar Ryan Shepard pointed out, Bush's behavior was a classic case of "simulated atonement," aimed at offering an "appearance of genuine confession" while avoiding any real responsibility for what happened. He analyzed four instances in which the president offered an "apologia" for what happened — two interviews with Alhurra and Al Arabiya television on May 5, 2004, and two appearances with the King of Jordan the next day.In each case, the president also responsible for the setting up of an offshore prison of injustice on occupied Cuban land in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 managed to shift the blame in classic fashion, suggesting that the torture had not been systematic and that the fault for it lay with a few low-level people. He also denied that he knew anything about torture at Abu Ghraib prior to the release of the photos and tried to restore the image of America by drawing a comparison to what the regime of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had done prior to the American invasion.In his interview with Alhurra, for example, he claimed that the U.S. response to Abu Ghraib — investigations and justice — would be unlike anything Saddam Hussein had done. Sadly enough, however, the American takeover of that prison and the torture that occurred there was anything but a break from Hussein's reign. In the context of such a faux apology, however, Bush apparently assumed that Iraqis could be easily swayed on that point, regardless of the violence they had endured at American hands; that they would, in fact, as Ryan Shepard put it, "accept the truth-seeking, freedom-loving American occupation as vastly superior to the previous regime."True accountability for Abu Ghraib? Not a chance. But revisiting Bush's apologia so many years later is a vivid reminder that he and his top officials never had the slightest intention of truly addressing those acts of torture as systemic to America's war on terror, especially because he was directly implicated in them.Weapons of American ImperialismOn March 19th, 2003, President Bush gave an address from the Oval Office to his "fellow citizens." He opened by saying that "American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." The liberated people of Iraq, he said, would "witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military."There was, of course, nothing about his invasion of Iraq that was honorable or decent. It was an illegally waged war for which Bush and his administration had spent months building support. In his State of the Union address in 2002, in fact, the president had referred to Iraq as part of an "axis of evil" and a country that "continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror." Later that year, he began to claim that Saddam's regime also had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn't and he knew it.) If that wasn't enough to establish the threat Iraq supposedly posed, in January 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that it "aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda."Days after Cheney made those claims, Secretary of State Colin Powell falsely asserted to members of the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, had used them before, and would not hesitate to use them again. He mentioned the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" 17 times in his speech, leaving no room to mistake the urgency of his message. Similarly, President Bush insisted the U.S. had "no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people."The false pretenses under which the U.S. waged war on Iraq are a reminder that the war on terror was never truly about curbing a threat, but about expanding American imperial power globally.When the United States took over that prison, they replaced Saddam Hussein's portrait with a sign that said, "America is the friend of all Iraqis." To befriend the U.S. in the context of Abu Ghraib, would, of course, have involved a sort of coerced amnesia.In his essay "Abu Ghraib and its Shadow Archives," Macquarie University professor Joseph Pugliese makes this connection, writing that "the Abu Ghraib photographs compel the viewer to bear testimony to the deployment and enactment of absolute U.S. imperial power on the bodies of the Arab prisoners through the organizing principles of white supremacist aesthetics that intertwine violence and sexuality with Orientalist spectacle."As a project of American post-9/11 empire building, Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners there should be viewed through the lens of what I call carceral imperialism — an extension of the American carceral state beyond its borders in the service of domination and hegemony. (The Alliance for Global Justice refers to a phenomenon related to the one I'm discussing as "prison imperialism.") The distinction I draw is based on my focus on the war on terror and how the prison became a tool through which that war was being fought. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the capture, detention, and torture through which Iraqis were contained and subdued was a primary strategy of the U.S. colonization of Iraq and was used as a way to transform detained Iraqis into a visible threat that would legitimize the U.S. presence there. (Bagram prison in Afghanistan was another example of carceral imperialism.)Beyond Spectacle and Towards JusticeWhat made the torture at Abu Ghraib possible to begin with? While there were, of course, several factors, it's important to consider one above all: the way the American war not on, but of terror rendered Iraqi bodies so utterly disposable.One way of viewing this dehumanization is through philosopher Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer, which defines a relationship between power and two forms of life: zoe and bios. Zoe refers to an individual who is recognized as fully human with a political and social life, while bios refers to physical life alone. Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were reduced to bios, or bare life, while being stripped of all rights and protections, which left them vulnerable to uninhibited and unaccountable violence and horrifying torture.Twenty years later, those unforgettable images of torture at Abu Ghraib serve as a continuous reminder of the nature of American brutality in that Global War on Terror that has not ended. They continue to haunt me — and other Muslims and Arabs — 20 years later. They will undoubtedly be seared in my memory for life.Whether or not justice prevails in some way for Abu Ghraib's survivors, as witnesses – even distant ones — to what transpired at that prison, our job should still be to search for the stories behind the hoods, the bars, and the indescribable acts of torture that took place there. It's crucial, even so many years later, to ensure that those who endured such horrific violence at American hands are not forgotten. Otherwise, our gaze will become one more weapon of torture — extending the life of the horrific acts in those images and ensuring that the humiliation of those War on Terror prisoners will continue to be a passing spectacle for our consumption.Two decades after those photos were released, what's crucial about the unbearable violence and horror they capture is the choice they still force viewers to make — whether to become just another bystander to the violence and horror this country delivered under the label of the War on Terror or to take in the torture and demand justice for the survivors.This piece has been republished with permission from TomDispatch.

Yes, it's already time to be worried — very worried. As the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shown, the earliest drone equivalents of "killer robots" have made it onto the battlefield and proved to be devastating weapons. But at least they remain largely under human control. Imagine, for a moment, a world of war in which those aerial drones (or their ground and sea equivalents) controlled us, rather than vice-versa. Then we would be on a destructively different planet in a fashion that might seem almost unimaginable today. Sadly, though, it's anything but unimaginable, given the work on artificial intelligence (AI) and robot weaponry that the major powers have already begun. Now, let me take you into that arcane world and try to envision what the future of warfare might mean for the rest of us.By combining AI with advanced robotics, the U.S. military and those of other advanced powers are already hard at work creating an array of self-guided "autonomous" weapons systems — combat drones that can employ lethal force independently of any human officers meant to command them. Called "killer robots" by critics, such devices include a variety of uncrewed or "unmanned" planes, tanks, ships, and submarines capable of autonomous operation. The U.S. Air Force, for example, is developing its "collaborative combat aircraft," an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) intended to join piloted aircraft on high-risk missions. The Army is similarly testing a variety of autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), while the Navy is experimenting with both unmanned surface vessels (USVs) and unmanned undersea vessels (UUVs, or drone submarines). China, Russia, Australia, and Israel are also working on such weaponry for the battlefields of the future.The imminent appearance of those killing machines has generated concern and controversy globally, with some countries already seeking a total ban on them and others, including the U.S., planning to authorize their use only under human-supervised conditions. In Geneva, a group of states has even sought to prohibit the deployment and use of fully autonomous weapons, citing a 1980 U.N. treaty, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, that aims to curb or outlaw non-nuclear munitions believed to be especially harmful to civilians. Meanwhile, in New York, the U.N. General Assembly held its first discussion of autonomous weapons last October and is planning a full-scale review of the topic this coming fall.For the most part, debate over the battlefield use of such devices hinges on whether they will be empowered to take human lives without human oversight. Many religious and civil society organizations argue that such systems will be unable to distinguish between combatants and civilians on the battlefield and so should be banned in order to protect noncombatants from death or injury, as is required by international humanitarian law. American officials, on the other hand, contend that such weaponry can be designed to operate perfectly well within legal constraints.However, neither side in this debate has addressed the most potentially unnerving aspect of using them in battle: the likelihood that, sooner or later, they'll be able to communicate with each other without human intervention and, being "intelligent," will be able to come up with their own unscripted tactics for defeating an enemy — or something else entirely. Such computer-driven groupthink, labeled "emergent behavior" by computer scientists, opens up a host of dangers not yet being considered by officials in Geneva, Washington, or at the U.N.For the time being, most of the autonomous weaponry being developed by the American military will be unmanned (or, as they sometimes say, "uninhabited") versions of existing combat platforms and will be designed to operate in conjunction with their crewed counterparts. While they might also have some capacity to communicate with each other, they'll be part of a "networked" combat team whose mission will be dictated and overseen by human commanders. The Collaborative Combat Aircraft, for instance, is expected to serve as a "loyal wingman" for the manned F-35 stealth fighter, while conducting high-risk missions in contested airspace. The Army and Navy have largely followed a similar trajectory in their approach to the development of autonomous weaponry.The Appeal of Robot "Swarms"However, some American strategists have championed an alternative approach to the use of autonomous weapons on future battlefields in which they would serve not as junior colleagues in human-led teams but as coequal members of self-directed robot swarms. Such formations would consist of scores or even hundreds of AI-enabled UAVs, USVs, or UGVs — all able to communicate with one another, share data on changing battlefield conditions, and collectively alter their combat tactics as the group-mind deems necessary."Emerging robotic technologies will allow tomorrow's forces to fight as a swarm, with greater mass, coordination, intelligence and speed than today's networked forces," predicted Paul Scharre, an early enthusiast of the concept, in a 2014 report for the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). "Networked, cooperative autonomous systems," he wrote then, "will be capable of true swarming — cooperative behavior among distributed elements that gives rise to a coherent, intelligent whole."As Scharre made clear in his prophetic report, any full realization of the swarm concept would require the development of advanced algorithms that would enable autonomous combat systems to communicate with each other and "vote" on preferred modes of attack. This, he noted, would involve creating software capable of mimicking ants, bees, wolves, and other creatures that exhibit "swarm" behavior in nature. As Scharre put it, "Just like wolves in a pack present their enemy with an ever-shifting blur of threats from all directions, uninhabited vehicles that can coordinate maneuver and attack could be significantly more effective than uncoordinated systems operating en masse."In 2014, however, the technology needed to make such machine behavior possible was still in its infancy. To address that critical deficiency, the Department of Defense proceeded to fund research in the AI and robotics field, even as it also acquired such technology from private firms like Google and Microsoft. A key figure in that drive was Robert Work, a former colleague of Paul Scharre's at CNAS and an early enthusiast of swarm warfare. Work served from 2014 to 2017 as deputy secretary of defense, a position that enabled him to steer ever-increasing sums of money to the development of high-tech weaponry, especially unmanned and autonomous systems.From Mosaic to ReplicatorMuch of this effort was delegated to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's in-house high-tech research organization. As part of a drive to develop AI for such collaborative swarm operations, DARPA initiated its "Mosaic" program, a series of projects intended to perfect the algorithms and other technologies needed to coordinate the activities of manned and unmanned combat systems in future high-intensity combat with Russia and/or China."Applying the great flexibility of the mosaic concept to warfare," explained Dan Patt, deputy director of DARPA's Strategic Technology Office, "lower-cost, less complex systems may be linked together in a vast number of ways to create desired, interwoven effects tailored to any scenario. The individual parts of a mosaic are attritable [dispensable], but together are invaluable for how they contribute to the whole."This concept of warfare apparently undergirds the new "Replicator" strategy announced by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks just last summer. "Replicator is meant to help us overcome [China's] biggest advantage, which is mass. More ships. More missiles. More people," she told arms industry officials last August. By deploying thousands of autonomous UAVs, USVs, UUVs, and UGVs, she suggested, the U.S. military would be able to outwit, outmaneuver, and overpower China's military, the People's Liberation Army (PLA). "To stay ahead, we're going to create a new state of the art… We'll counter the PLA's mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat."To obtain both the hardware and software needed to implement such an ambitious program, the Department of Defense is now seeking proposals from traditional defense contractors like Boeing and Raytheon as well as AI startups like Anduril and Shield AI. While large-scale devices like the Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft and the Navy's Orca Extra-Large UUV may be included in this drive, the emphasis is on the rapid production of smaller, less complex systems like AeroVironment's Switchblade attack drone, now used by Ukrainian troops to take out Russian tanks and armored vehicles behind enemy lines.At the same time, the Pentagon is already calling on tech startups to develop the necessary software to facilitate communication and coordination among such disparate robotic units and their associated manned platforms. To facilitate this, the Air Force asked Congress for $50 million in its fiscal year 2024 budget to underwrite what it ominously enough calls Project VENOM, or "Viper Experimentation and Next-generation Operations Model." Under VENOM, the Air Force will convert existing fighter aircraft into AI-governed UAVs and use them to test advanced autonomous software in multi-drone operations. The Army and Navy are testing similar systems.When Swarms Choose Their Own PathIn other words, it's only a matter of time before the U.S. military (and presumably China's, Russia's, and perhaps those of a few other powers) will be able to deploy swarms of autonomous weapons systems equipped with algorithms that allow them to communicate with each other and jointly choose novel, unpredictable combat maneuvers while in motion. Any participating robotic member of such swarms would be given a mission objective ("seek out and destroy all enemy radars and anti-aircraft missile batteries located within these [specified] geographical coordinates") but not be given precise instructions on how to do so. That would allow them to select their own battle tactics in consultation with one another. If the limited test data we have is anything to go by, this could mean employing highly unconventional tactics never conceived for (and impossible to replicate by) human pilots and commanders.The propensity for such interconnected AI systems to engage in novel, unplanned outcomes is what computer experts call "emergent behavior." As ScienceDirect, a digest of scientific journals, explains it, "An emergent behavior can be described as a process whereby larger patterns arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties." In military terms, this means that a swarm of autonomous weapons might jointly elect to adopt combat tactics none of the individual devices were programmed to perform — possibly achieving astounding results on the battlefield, but also conceivably engaging in escalatory acts unintended and unforeseen by their human commanders, including the destruction of critical civilian infrastructure or communications facilities used for nuclear as well as conventional operations.At this point, of course, it's almost impossible to predict what an alien group-mind might choose to do if armed with multiple weapons and cut off from human oversight. Supposedly, such systems would be outfitted with failsafe mechanisms requiring that they return to base if communications with their human supervisors were lost, whether due to enemy jamming or for any other reason. Who knows, however, how such thinking machines would function in demanding real-world conditions or if, in fact, the group-mind would prove capable of overriding such directives and striking out on its own.What then? Might they choose to keep fighting beyond their preprogrammed limits, provoking unintended escalation — even, conceivably, of a nuclear kind? Or would they choose to stop their attacks on enemy forces and instead interfere with the operations of friendly ones, perhaps firing on and devastating them (as Skynet does in the classic science fiction Terminator movie series)? Or might they engage in behaviors that, for better or infinitely worse, are entirely beyond our imagination?Top U.S. military and diplomatic officials insist that AI can indeed be used without incurring such future risks and that this country will only employ devices that incorporate thoroughly adequate safeguards against any future dangerous misbehavior. That is, in fact, the essential point made in the "Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy" issued by the State Department in February 2023. Many prominent security and technology officials are, however, all too aware of the potential risks of emergent behavior in future robotic weaponry and continue to issue warnings against the rapid utilization of AI in warfare.Of particular note is the final report that the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence issued in February 2021. Co-chaired by Robert Work (back at CNAS after his stint at the Pentagon) and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, the commission recommended the rapid utilization of AI by the U.S. military to ensure victory in any future conflict with China and/or Russia. However, it also voiced concern about the potential dangers of robot-saturated battlefields."The unchecked global use of such systems potentially risks unintended conflict escalation and crisis instability," the report noted. This could occur for a number of reasons, including "because of challenging and untested complexities of interaction between AI-enabled and autonomous weapon systems [that is, emergent behaviors] on the battlefield." Given that danger, it concluded, "countries must take actions which focus on reducing risks associated with AI-enabled and autonomous weapon systems."When the leading advocates of autonomous weaponry tell us to be concerned about the unintended dangers posed by their use in battle, the rest of us should be worried indeed. Even if we lack the mathematical skills to understand emergent behavior in AI, it should be obvious that humanity could face a significant risk to its existence, should killing machines acquire the ability to think on their own. Perhaps they would surprise everyone and decide to take on the role of international peacekeepers, but given that they're being designed to fight and kill, it's far more probable that they might simply choose to carry out those instructions in an independent and extreme fashion.If so, there could be no one around to put an R.I.P. on humanity's gravestone.This article was republished with permission from Tom Dispatch

2023 was a year marked by devastating conflicts from Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine to Hamas's horrific terror attacks on Israel, from that country's indiscriminate mass slaughter in Gaza to a devastating civil war in Sudan. And there's a distinct risk of even worse to come this year. Still, there was one clear winner in this avalanche of violence, suffering, and war: the U.S. military-industrial complex.In December, President Biden signed a record authorization of $886 billion in "national defense" spending for 2024, including funds for the Pentagon proper and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. Add to that tens of billions of dollars more in likely emergency military aid for Ukraine and Israel, and such spending could well top $900 billion for the first time this year.Meanwhile, the administration's $100-billion-plus emergency military aid package that failed to pass Congress last month is likely to slip by in some form this year, while the House and Senate are almost guaranteed to add tens of billions more for "national defense" projects in specific states and districts, as happened in two of the last three years.Of course, before the money actually starts flowing, Congress needs to pass an appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2024, clearing the way for that money to be spent. As of this writing, the House and Senate had indeed agreed to a tentative deal to sign onto the $886 billion that was authorized in December. A trillion-dollar version of such funding could be just around the corner. (If past practice is any guide, more than half of that sum could go directly to corporations, large and small.)A trillion dollars is a hard figure to process. In the 1960s, when the federal budget was a fraction of what it is now, Republican Senator Everett Dirksen allegedly said, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Whether he did or not, that quote neatly captures how congressional attitudes toward federal spending have changed. After all, today, a billion dollars is less than a rounding error at the Pentagon. The department's budget is now hundreds of billions of dollars more than at the height of the Vietnam War and over twice what it was when President Eisenhower warned of the "unwarranted influence" wielded by what he called "the military-industrial complex."To offer just a few comparisons: annual spending on the costly, dysfunctional F-35 combat aircraft alone is greater than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, Lockheed Martin's contracts with the Pentagon were worth more than the budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined, and its arms-related revenues continue to rival the government's entire investment in diplomacy. One $13 billion aircraft carrier costs more than the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Overall, more than half of the discretionary budget Congress approves every year — basically everything the federal government spends other than on mandatory programs like Medicare and Social Security — goes to the Pentagon.It would, I suppose, be one thing if such huge expenditures were truly needed to protect the country or make the world a safer place. However, they have more to do with pork-barrel politics and a misguided "cover the globe" military strategy than a careful consideration of what might be needed for actual "defense."Congressional FolliesThe road to an $886-billion military budget authorization began early last year with a debt-ceiling deal negotiated by President Biden and then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. That rolled back domestic spending levels, while preserving the administration's proposal for the Pentagon intact. McCarthy, since ousted as speaker, had been pressed by members of the right-wing "Freedom Caucus" and their fellow travelers for just such spending cuts. (He had little choice but to agree, since that group proved to be his margin of victory in a speaker's race that ran to 15 ballots.)There was a brief glimmer of hope that the budget cutters in the Freedom Caucus might also go after the bloated Pentagon budget rather than inflict all the fiscal pain on domestic programs. Prominent right-wing Republicans like Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) pledged to put Pentagon spending reductions "on the table," but then only went after the military's alleged "woke agenda," which boiled down to cutting a few billion dollars slated for fighting racism and sexual harassment while supporting reproductive freedom within the armed forces. Oh wait, Jordan also went after spending on the development of alternative energy sources as "woke." In any case, he focused on just a minuscule share of the department's overall budget.Prominent Republicans outside Congress expressed stronger views about bringing the Pentagon to heel, but their perspectives got no traction on Capitol Hill. For instance, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, perhaps America's most influential conservative think tank, made the case for reining in the Pentagon at American Conservative magazine:"In the past, Congress accepted the D.C. canard that a bigger budget alone equals a stronger military. But now, facing down a record debt to the tune of $242,000 per household, conservatives are ready to tackle an entrenched problem and confront the political establishment, unaccountable federal bureaucrats, and well-connected defense contractors all at once in order to keep the nation both solvent and secure."Even more surprising, former Trump Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller released a memoir in which he called for a dramatic slashing of the Pentagon budget. "We could," he argued, "cut our defense budget in half and it would still be twice as big as China's."Ultimately, however, such critiques had zero influence over the Pentagon budget debate in the House, which quickly degenerated into a fight about a series of toxic amendments attacking reproductive freedom and LGTBQ and transgender rights in the military. Representative Colin Allred (D-TX) rightly denounced such amendments as a "shameful display of extremism" and across-the-board opposition by Democrats ensured that the first iteration of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2024 would be defeated and some of the most egregious Republican proposals eliminated later in the year. In the meantime, virtually all mainstream press coverage and most congressional debate focused on those culture war battles rather than why this country was poised to shove so much money at the Pentagon in the first place.Threat Inflation and the "Arsenal of Democracy"Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that the strategic rationales put forward for the flood of new Pentagon outlays don't faintly hold up to scrutiny. First and foremost in the Pentagon's argument for virtually unlimited access to the Treasury is the alleged military threat posed by China. But as Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight has pointed out, that country's military strategy is "inherently defensive":"[T]he investments being made [by China] are not suited for foreign adventurism but are instead designed to use relatively low-cost weapons to defend against massively expensive American weapons. The nation's primary military strategy is to keep foreign powers, and especially the United States, as far away from its shores as possible in a policy the Chinese government calls 'active defense.'"The greatest point of potential conflict between the U.S. and China is, of course, Taiwan. But a war over that island would come at a staggering cost for all concerned and might even escalate into a nuclear confrontation. A series of war games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that, while the United States could indeed "win" a war defending Taiwan from a Chinese amphibious assault, it would be a Pyrrhic victory. "The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers," it reported. "Taiwan saw its economy devastated. Further, the high losses damaged the U.S. global position for many years." And a nuclear confrontation between China and the United States, which CSIS didn't include in its assessment, would be a first-class catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions.The best route to preventing a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be to revive Washington's "One China" policy that calls for China to commit itself to a peaceful resolution of Taiwan's status and for the U.S. to forswear support for that island's formal independence. In other words, diplomacy, rather than increasing the Pentagon budget to "win" such a war, would be the way to go.The second major driver of higher Pentagon budgets is allegedly the strain on this country's arms manufacturing base caused by supplying tens of billions of dollars of weaponry to Ukraine, including artillery shells and missiles that are running short in American stockpiles. The answer, according to the Pentagon and the arms industry, is to further supersize this country's already humongous military-industrial complex to produce enough weaponry to supply Ukraine (and now Israel, too), while acquiring sufficient weapons systems for a future war with China.There are two problems with such arguments. First, supplying Ukraine doesn't justify a permanent expansion of the U.S. arms industry. In fact, such aid to Kyiv needs to be accompanied by a now-missing diplomatic strategy designed to head off an even longer, ever more grinding war.Second, the kinds of weapons needed for a war with China would, for the most part, be different from those relevant to a land war in Ukraine, so weaponry sent to Ukraine would have little relevance to readiness for a potential war with China (which Washington should, in any case, be working to prevent, not preparing for). The Disastrous Costs of a Militarized Foreign PolicyBefore investing ever more tax dollars in building an ever-expanding garrison state, the military strategy of the United States in the current global environment should be seriously debated. Just buying ever more bombs, missiles, drones, and next-generation artificial intelligence-driven weaponry is not, in fact, a strategy, though it is a boon to the military-industrial complex and an invitation to a destabilizing new arms race.Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the Biden administration seems inclined to seriously consider an approach that would emphasize investing in diplomatic and economic tools over force or the threat of force. Given this country's staggeringly expensive failures in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century (which cost trillions of dollars), resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, and leaving staggering numbers of American veterans with physical and psychological injuries (as extensively documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University), you might think a different approach to the use of your tax dollars was in order, but no such luck.There are indeed a few voices in Congress advocating restraint at the Pentagon, including Representatives Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Barbara Lee (D-CA), who have proposed a $100 billion reduction in that department's budget as a first step toward a more balanced national security policy. Such efforts, however, must overcome an inhospitable political environment created by the endlessly exaggerated military threats facing this country and the political power of the arms industry, as well as its allies in Washington. Those allies, of course, include President Biden, who has labeled the U.S. an "arsenal of democracy" in his efforts to promote a new round of weapons aid to Ukraine. Not unlike his predecessor, he is touting the potential benefits of arms-production investments in companies in electoral swing states.Sadly, throwing more money at the arms industry sacrifices future needs for short-term economic gains that are modest indeed. Were that money going into producing green jobs, a more resilient infrastructure, improved scientific and technical education, and a more robust public health system, we would find ourselves in a different world. Those should be the pillars of any American economic revival rather than the all-too-modest side effects of weapons development in fueling economic growth. Despite huge increases in funding since the 1980s, actual jobs in the arms manufacturing industry have, in fact, plummeted from three million to 1.1 million — and, mind you, those figures come from the arms industry's largest trade association. The United Auto Workers, one of the unions with the most members working in the arms industry, has recognized this reality and formed a Just Transition Committee. As noted by Spencer Ackerman at the Nation, it's designed to "examine the size, scope, and impact of the U.S. military-industrial complex that employs thousands of UAW members and dominates the global arms trade." According to Brandon Mancilla, director of the UAW's Region 9A, which represents 50,000 active and retired workers in New York, New England, and Puerto Rico, the committee will "think about what it would mean to actually have a just transition, what used to be called a 'peace conversion,' of folks who work in the weapons and defense industry into something else."The UAW initiative parallels a sharp drop in unionization rates at major weapons makers (as documented by journalist Taylor Barnes). To cite two examples: in 1971, 69% of Lockheed Martin workers were unionized, while in 2022 that number was 19%; at Northrop Grumman today, a mere 4% of its employees are unionized, a dip that reflects a conscious strategy of the big weapons-making firms to outsource work to non-union subcontractors and states with anti-union "right to work" laws, while exporting tens of thousands of jobs overseas as part of multinational projects like the F-35 program. So much for the myth that defense industry jobs are more secure or have better pay and benefits than jobs in other parts of the economy.A serious national conversation is needed on what a genuine defense strategy would look like, rather than one based on fantasies of global military dominance. Otherwise, the overly militarized approach to foreign and economic policy that has become the essence of Washington budget-making could be extended endlessly and disastrously into the future, something this country literally can't afford to let happen.This story was republished, with permission, from Tom Dispatch

On a picturesque beach in central Gaza, a mile north of the now-flattened Al-Shati refugee camp, long black pipes snake through hills of white sand before disappearing underground. An image released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shows dozens of soldiers laying pipelines and what appear to be mobile pumping stations that are to take water from the Mediterranean Sea and hose it into underground tunnels. The plan, according to various reports, is to flood the vast network of underground shafts and tunnels Hamas has reportedly built and used to carry out its operations. "I won't talk about specifics, but they include explosives to destroy and other means to prevent Hamas operatives from using the tunnels to harm our soldiers," said IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi. "[Any] means which give us an advantage over the enemy that [uses the tunnels], deprives it of this asset, is a means that we are evaluating using. This is a good idea…"While Israel is already test-running its flood strategy, it's not the first time Hamas's tunnels have been subjected to sabotage by seawater. In 2013, neighboring Egypt began flooding Hamas-controlled tunnels that were allegedly being used to smuggle goods between the country's Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. For more than two years, water from the Mediterranean was flushed into the tunnel system, wreaking havoc on Gaza's environment. Groundwater supplies were quickly polluted with salt brine and, as a result, the dirt became saturated and unstable, causing the ground to collapse and killing numerous people. Once fertile agricultural fields were transformed into salinated pits of mud, and clean drinking water, already in short supply in Gaza, was further degraded.Israel's current strategy to drown Hamas's tunnels will no doubt cause similar, irreparable damage. "It is important to keep in mind," warns Juliane Schillinger, a researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, "that we are not just talking about water with a high salt content here — seawater along the Mediterranean coast is also polluted with untreated wastewater, which is continuously discharged into the Mediterranean from Gaza's dysfunctional sewage system."This, of course, appears to be part of a broader Israeli objective — not just to dismantle Hamas's military capabilities but to further degrade and destroy Gaza's imperiled aquifers (already polluted with sewage that's leaked from dilapidated pipes). Israeli officials have openly admitted their goal is to ensure that Gaza will be an unlivable place once they end their merciless military campaign."We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly," Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said shortly after the Hamas attack of October 7th. "We will eliminate everything — they will regret it."And Israel is now keeping its promise.As if its indiscriminate bombing, which has already damaged or destroyed up to 70% of all homes in Gaza, weren't enough, filling those tunnels with polluted water will ensure that some of the remaining residential buildings will suffer structural problems, too. And if the ground is weak and insecure, Palestinians will have trouble rebuilding.Flooding tunnels with polluted groundwater "will cause an accumulation of salt and the collapse of the soil, leading to the demolition of thousands of Palestinian homes in the densely populated strip," says Abdel-Rahman al-Tamimi, director of the Palestinian Hydrologists Group, the largest NGO monitoring pollution in the Palestinian territories. His conclusion couldn't be more stunning: "The Gaza Strip will become a depopulated area, and it will take about 100 years to get rid of the environmental effects of this war."In other words, as al-Tamimi points out, Israel is now "killing the environment." And in many ways, it all started with the destruction of Palestine's lush olive groves.Olives No MoreDuring an average year, Gaza once produced more than 5,000 tons of olive oil from more than 40,000 trees. The fall harvest in October and November was long a celebratory season for thousands of Palestinians. Families and friends sang, shared meals, and gathered in the groves to celebrate under ancient trees, which symbolized "peace, hope, and sustenance." It was an important tradition, a deep connection both to the land and to a vital economic resource. Last year, olive crops accounted for more than 10% of the Gazan economy, a total of $30 million.Of course, since October 7th, harvesting has ceased. Israel's scorched earth tactics have instead ensured the destruction of countless olive groves. Satellite images released in early December affirm that 22% of Gaza's agricultural land, including countless olive orchards, has been completely destroyed."We are heartbroken over our crops, which we cannot reach," explains Ahmed Qudeih, a farmer from Khuza, a town in the Southern Gaza Strip. "We can't irrigate or observe our land or take care of it. After every devastating war, we pay thousands of shekels to ensure the quality of our crops and to make our soil suitable again for agriculture."Israel's relentless military thrashing of Gaza has taken an unfathomable toll on human life (more than 22,000 dead, including significant numbers of women and children, and thousands more bodies believed to be buried under the rubble and so uncountable). And consider this latest round of horror just a particularly grim continuation of a 75-year campaign to eviscerate the Palestinian cultural heritage. Since 1967, Israel has uprooted more than 800,000 native Palestinian olive trees, sometimes to make way for new illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank; in other instances, out of alleged security concerns, or from pure, visceral Zionist rage.Wild groves of olive trees have been harvested by inhabitants of the region for thousands of years, dating back to the Chalcolithic period in the Levant (4,300-3,300 BCE), and the razing of such groves has had calamitous environmental consequences. "[The] removal of trees is directly linked to irreversible climate change, soil erosion, and a reduction in crops," according to a 2023 Yale Review of International Studies report. "The perennial, woody bark acts as a carbon sink … [an] olive tree absorbs 11 kg of CO2 per liter of olive oil produced."Besides providing a harvestable crop and cultural value, olive groves are vital to Palestine's ecosystem. Numerous bird species, including the Eurasian Jay, Green Finch, Hooded Crow, Masked Shrike, Palestine Sunbird, and Sardinian Warbler rely on the biodiversity provided by Palestine's wild trees, six species of which are often found in native olive groves: the Aleppo pine, almond, olive, Palestine buckhorn, piny hawthorne, and fig.As Simon Awad and Omar Attum wrote in a 2017 issue of the Jordan Journal of Natural History:"[Olive] groves in Palestine could be considered cultural landscapes or be designated as globally important agricultural systems because of the combination of their biodiversity, cultural, and economic values. The biodiversity value of historic olive groves has been recognized in other parts of the Mediterranean, with some proposing these areas should receive protection because they are habitat used by some rare and threatened species and are important in maintaining regional biodiversity."An ancient, native olive tree should be considered a testament to the very existence of Palestinians and their struggle for freedom. With its thick spiraling trunk, the olive tree stands as a cautionary tale to Israel, not because of the fruit it bears, but because of the stories its roots hold of a scarred landscape and a battered people that have been callously and relentlessly besieged for more than 75 years.White Phosphorus and Bombs, Bombs, and More BombsWhile contaminating aquifers and uprooting olive groves, Israel is now also poisoning Gaza from above. Numerous videos analyzed by Amnesty International and confirmed by the Washington Post display footage of flares and plumes of white phosphorus raining down on densely populated urban areas. First used on World War I battlefields to provide cover for troop movements, white phosphorus is known to be toxic and dangerous to human health. Dropping it on urban environments is now considered illegal under international law, and Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth. "Any time that white phosphorus is used in crowded civilian areas, it poses a high risk of excruciating burns and lifelong suffering," says Lama Fakih, director for the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch (HRW).While white phosphorus is highly toxic to humans, significant concentrations of it also have deleterious effects on plants and animals. It can disrupt soil composition, making it too acidic to grow crops. And that's just one part of the mountain of munitions Israel has fired at Gaza over the past three months. The war (if you can call such an asymmetrical assault a "war") has been the deadliest and most destructive in recent memory, by some estimates at least as bad as the Allied bombing of Germany during World War II, which annihilated 60 German cities and killed an estimated half-million people.Like the Allied forces of World War II, Israel is killing indiscriminately. Of the 29,000 air-to-surface munitions fired, 40% have been unguided bombs dropped on crowded residential areas. The U.N. estimates that, as of late December, 70% of all schools in Gaza, many of which served as shelters for Palestinians fleeing Israel's onslaught, had been severely damaged. Hundreds of mosques and churches have also been struck and 70% of Gaza's 36 hospitals have been hit and are no longer functioning.A War That Exceeds All Predictions"Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history," claims Robert Pape, a historian at the University of Chicago. "It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever."It's still difficult to grasp the toll being inflicted, day by day, week by week, not just on Gaza's infrastructure and civilian life but on its environment as well. Each building that explodes leaves a lingering cloud of toxic dust and climate-warming vapors. "In conflict-affected areas, the detonation of explosives can release significant amounts of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter," says Dr. Erum Zahir, a chemistry professor at the University of Karachi.Dust from the collapsed World Trade Center towers on 9/11 ravaged first responders. A 2020 study found that rescuers were "41 percent more likely to develop leukemia than other individuals." Some 10,000 New Yorkers suffered short-term health ailments following the attack, and it took a year for air quality in Lower Manhattan to return to pre-9/11 levels.While it's impossible to analyze all of the impacts of Israel's nonstop bombing, it's safe to assume that the ongoing leveling of Gaza will have far worse effects than 9/11 had on New York City. Nasreen Tamimi, head of the Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority, believes that an environmental assessment of Gaza now would "exceed all predictions."Central to the dilemma that faced Palestinians in Gaza, even before October 7th, was access to clean drinking water and it's only been horrifically exacerbated by Israel's nonstop bombardment. A 2019 report by UNICEF noted that "96 percent of water from Gaza's sole aquifer is unfit for human consumption."Intermittent electricity, a direct result of Israel's blockade, has also damaged Gaza's sanitation facilities, leading to increased groundwater contamination, which has, in turn, led to various infections and massive outbreaks of preventable waterborne diseases. According to HRW, Israel is using a lack of food and drinking water as a tool of warfare, which many international observers argue is a form of collective punishment — a war crime of the first order. Israeli forces have intentionally destroyed farmland and bombed water and sanitation facilities in what certainly seems like an effort to make Gaza all too literally unlivable."I have to walk three kilometers to get one gallon [of water]," 30-year-old Marwan told HRW. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Gazans, Marwan fled to the south with his pregnant wife and two children in early November. "And there is no food. If we are able to find food, it is canned food. Not all of us are eating well."In the south of Gaza, near the overcrowded city of Khan Younis, raw sewage flows through the streets as sanitation services have ceased operation. In the southern town of Rafah, where so many Gazans have fled, conditions are beyond dire. Makeshift U.N. hospitals are overwhelmed, food and water are in short supply, and starvation is significantly on the rise. In late December, the World Health Organization (WHO) documented more than 100,000 cases of diarrhea and 150,000 respiratory infections in a Gazan population of about 2.3 million. And those numbers are likely massive undercounts and will undoubtedly increase as Israel's offensive drags on, having already displaced 1.9 million people, or more than 85% of the population, half of whom are now facing starvation, according to the U.N."For over two months, Israel has been depriving Gaza's population of food and water, a policy spurred on or endorsed by high-ranking Israeli officials and reflecting an intent to starve civilians as a method of warfare," reports Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch.Rarely, if ever, have the perpetrators of mass murder (reportedly now afraid of South Africa's filing at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, accusing Israel of genocide) so plainly laid out their cruel intentions. As Israeli President Isaac Herzog put it in a callous attempt to justify the atrocities now being faced by Palestinian civilians, "It's an entire nation out there that is responsible [for October 7th]. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it's absolutely not true. They could've risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime."The violence inflicted on Palestinians by an Israel backed so strikingly by President Biden and his foreign policy team is unlike anything we had previously witnessed in more or less real-time in the media and on social media. Gaza, its people, and the lands that have sustained them for centuries are being desecrated and transformed into an all too unlivable hellscape, the impact of which will be felt — it's a guarantee — for generations to come.This article has been republished with permission from TomDispatch.

Alex Nowrasteh


The recent Supreme Court case about affirmative action in university admissions (SFFA v. Harvard) paralleled a broader social debate over meritocracy. Those opposed to affirmative action broadly say they are supportive of meritocracy. They believe individual achievement should be more prominent in university admissions, at least when the government is involved in university funding. The debate over affirmative action and meritocracy intersects with the immigration debate in two ways. First, immigration restrictions are the most destructive form of affirmative action. Second, immigrants and their descendants have been essential in reducing the scope of affirmative action in the United States over the last 30 years.
Meritocrats believe that individuals should rise or fall on their achievements. Those supportive of affirmative action are more skeptical of meritocracy, at least how it exists under the current system. They argue that meritocracy is bad, a myth, unfair, or that current means of identifying merit are insufficient because systemic rules or practices hold back some people in specific racial, ethnic, or other categories.
I'm a supporter of meritocracy, but a compelling point raised by skeptics is that the design of meritocratic systems can select wildly different types of merit. In other words, there's a principal-agent problem whereby the most meritocratic people design methods of gauging merit that favor themselves and people like them.
This problem could be to the detriment of specific organizations relying on merit and, eventually, to the rest of society.
Hard work, fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, personality, luck, physical attractiveness, and other characteristics contribute to merit in different endeavors and extents. A one-size-fits-all approach across all organizations doesn't make sense and is slightly less bad in organizations in the same industry. That doesn't mean some of the factors listed above aren't good predictors of merit in most endeavors, some certainly are, but their relative weights are important.
For instance, the combination of characteristics that make a successful film actor differs from those required to be a successful astrophysicist, CEO, or farmer. But that's just the supply side of merit; there's also a demand side. What consumers demand of people in different endeavors changes over time. Consumers want the best over time, but what they think is best changes.
That's why I favor the "competitive meritocracy;" that is, the meritocracy of the market over alternatives like massive government examination systems that exist in other countries. Under competitive meritocracy, firms and individuals seeking to increase profits, economic efficiency, and consumer surplus under competitive market conditions are incentivized to develop means to identify meritorious individuals that deliver. Otherwise, firm profits shrink, they go bankrupt, and consumers are left unsatisfied.
One of the beneficial results of a competitive market system is the identification and use of merit. Of course, government rules and regulations reduce the effectiveness of new merit identification techniques, but the market is better at identifying and producing meritocratic identification methods than other alternatives because it best aligns incentives to do so on the supply and demand sides.
U.S. immigration restrictions are the most anti-meritocratic policies today, and they are intended as affirmative action for native-born Americans. Ignore the myriad ways that immigration laws disadvantage certain immigrants relative to others, such as with the per-country quotas that make immigrants from populous countries wait longer for green cards. Just peruse nativist websites, and you'll see many arguments about immigrants taking jobs from more Americans who are more deserving because of where they were born. When people think of anti-meritocratic policies, they rightly jump to quotas, race-based affirmative action, or class-based affirmative action.
It's true; those are all anti-meritocratic and likely wouldn't exist in a free market outside of a handful of organizations in the non-profit sector. But U.S. immigration restrictions are worse. The U.S. population is about 4.2 percent of the global population. Immigration laws prevent the other 95.8 percent of the world from trying their hand in the U.S. market meritocracy. The cost of immigration restrictions is in the trillions of dollars, which makes the real costs of affirmative action seem small by comparison. Those who truly favor meritocracy and oppose affirmative action on principle should reject the anti-meritocratic affirmative action of American immigration laws.
Nativists agree with my analysis. They argue that the U.S. government exists to protect Americans from market competition, so it should do so with immigration restrictions. Nationalist affirmative action is still affirmative action. And lest you accuse me of hypocrisy, of working behind the protection of immigration restrictions while others labor exposed to the brutality of globalist labor competition, the sector of the economy where I labor is more exposed to legal immigrant competition than yours is.
One of the main arguments for immigration restrictions is to protect Americans. That makes sense when protecting Americans from criminals, terrorists, national security threats, or those with severe contagious diseases, because they could physically harm Americans or their property. It makes sense in the same way that the NYPD exists to protect the life, liberty, and private property of New Yorkers and shouldn't be enforcing laws in North Dakota.
But protecting jobs and wages or shielding people from the market doesn't make sense. On a purely principled opposition to preferences, meritocrats should oppose almost all immigration restrictions regardless of the wage effects. Immigration restrictions don't even work well to protect American workers. Ironically, immigration restrictions do more to protect the wages of immigrant workers in the United States than native-born workers. Affirmative action likely helps the beneficiaries more than immigration restrictions help American workers.
The idea of shielding Americans from market competition to protect them under the theory that that would make them better is silly. Industries protected behind tariffs and trade barriers tend to stagnate because they have no incentive to innovate or improve. Why would they when the government removes competition by legal fiat? Americans similarly shielded from immigration have less of a reason to get more skills, improve their human capital, or be more productive. As I wrote in my review of Reihan Salam's Melting Pot or Civil War?, labor protectionism incentivizes stagnation among American workers.
Salam fails to draw additional connections between wages and education. He worries about low levels of educational attainment among the descendants of immigrants but also favors restricting low-skilled immigration to raise the wages of high school dropouts. He does not explain how raising the wages for dropouts relative to other educational cohorts will incentivize workers to spend more time in school (hint: it won't). Salam is worried that automation will destroy lots of jobs, so he wants to stop low-skilled immigration by raising wages for low-skilled Americans and immigrants already here, which will just make it more likely that their jobs will be automated.

Maybe you favor meritocracy in university admissions and affirmative action through immigration restrictions. You wouldn't be the first person to have inconsistent policy opinions, but you support less meritocracy than you probably believe. Most people recognize that Texas' "Top 10 Percent Law" is thinly disguised affirmative action because it guarantees admission to the University of Texas to all students in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class. Since students are geographically clustered in Texas by race, this law advantages some students based on race who otherwise wouldn't be admitted.
Harvard tried something similar when it adopted an admissions policy that accepted top-ranking students nationwide under geographic quotas rather than relying on admissions exam scores. The intent was to reduce Harvard's Jewish population. The Harvard freshman class was 21 percent Jewish in 1922, up from about 7 percent in 1900. Harvard's President Abbott Lawrence Lowell wanted to bring their percentage down to 15 percent and faced fierce opposition from Jewish students, the Boston press, and the meritocrats of his day. The geographic distribution system discriminated against Jewish students and reduced their numbers to 15 percent of the student body by 1931. Harvard later eased the geographic system and then ended it altogether. One should view the admissions policy as anti-Semitic, and the effect was identical to a policy that favored the admission of other groups like white Protestants. Regardless, the geographic admissions system was anti-meritocratic.
Despite restrictions on immigration, immigrants and their descendants are already indirectly improving meritocracy in the United States. Edward Blum, the attorney behind numerous challenges to affirmative action, including SFFA v. Harvard, lost a challenge to affirmative action in 2015 when he had a white female plaintiff. There are many reasons why that challenge failed, but afterward, Blum said, "I needed Asian plaintiffs." Law and the Constitution always matter to the Court, but politics and optics also matter for major controversial questions. When the issues are controversial and Congress or the President don't want to resolve conflicts or are otherwise at loggerheads, the Court steps in as a sort of super-legislature to decide the issue. Sometimes they rule to maintain their own institutional power in an environment where the power of Congress is declining, and that of the Presidency is increasing. Viewing the Court as a sometimes-super-legislature makes it clear that political narratives, public opinion, and other normal tools of political persuasion are important to ruling in a certain way. Without Asian American plaintiffs, it's hard to see how SCOTUS would have struck down affirmative action this time. It may have happened eventually because the arguments are good, but sympathetic plaintiffs and damning facts are just as important.
Beyond the plaintiffs in SFFA v. Harvard, immigrants, their descendants, and the diversity they bring to the United States have greatly helped reduce affirmative action through politics. As I wrote in 2022:
Voters in California—the most diverse state and the one with the highest immigrant share of the population—first voted to ban affirmative action when presented with Proposition 209 in 1996. Since then, progressives in the state have attempted to revive the issue. But in 2011, Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have weakened the affirmative-action ban. Another proposal to re-institute affirmative action failed in 2014 after several Asian-American state senators defected from the effort in response to opposition from their constituents. "As lifelong advocates for the Asian-American and other communities," Democratic state senators Ted Lieu, Carol Liu, and Leland Yee wrote, "we would never support a policy that we believed would negatively impact our children." In 2020, voters affirmed the state's ban on affirmative action by a wider margin than the original vote to ban it 24 years earlier.

Asian Americans are the most likely to be foreign-born of any racial group. In 2019, two-thirds of Asian Americans in California were immigrants. As is clear to all after SFFA v. Harvard, Asians are the biggest losers in any race-based affirmative action system. Without them, it would be tougher to make the case that affirmative action is unjust. That's an unfortunate commentary on the state of political debate in the United States because the arguments against affirmative action are convincing regardless of who wins or loses, but those are the facts.
Furthermore, states with a higher foreign-born share of the population are likelier to have banned affirmative action than states with a lower foreign-born share. Interestingly, the share of the non-citizen population is best correlated with a state banning affirmative action. According to a piece I coauthored a few years ago, a 1 percent increase in the share of non-citizens is associated with a 27–34 percent increase in the probability of the state banning affirmative action. The share of the white population is not statistically significant in any regression we ran, and the measure of population-wide diversity is only significant at the 10 percent level in the 3‑and‐​5‐​year lags.
Affirmative action is more politically stable when they are two groups, one of which is large and the other that is small. Malaysia has a Chinese minority punished by affirmative action and a Malaysian majority aided. Apartheid South Africa punished blacks and favored whites, which was then reversed after the end of apartheid. The United States, with blacks favored and whites punished before large waves of immigrants in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, are such cases.
Of the above examples, only the United States has a substantial immigrant-induced demographic change that upended that relatively stable institutional dynamic by adding mainly Asian and Hispanic immigrants. Suddenly, Asians became the biggest losers of affirmative action, whites the second biggest, and Hispanics moderate beneficiaries. The goals of affirmative action became murkier – why would the U.S. government help Hispanic immigrants and their descendants with a program designed to help the descendants of black slaves?
Even more so, competition between disadvantaged groups seeking affirmative action lessened the benefits. Worse for the supporters of affirmative action, the biggest victims became a large and growing immigrant group and their children, a group whose ancestors were also targeted by racist laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, various Alien Land Laws that barred Asians from owning land, and Japanese Internment.
There are three significant motivations for supporting redistribution, of which affirmative action is a type. They are self-interest, compassion, and malicious envy. Self-interest and compassion are obvious. Malicious envy is hatred toward a group that has done better. Immigration weakens all three supports for affirmative action. Immigration weakens self-interest by spreading the benefits among more groups, it weakens compassion because new beneficiaries have dubious claims to racial preferences under the justifications for the schemes, and malicious envy is weakened because the biggest victims are no longer whites.
Immigrants weakened affirmative action in the United States by being the specific plaintiffs in SFFA v. Harvard and changing the politics of the issue. But a far more substantial and destructive apparatus of affirmative action operates today through our immigration laws that bar about 96 percent of the world's population from participating in the American market meritocracy. Opponents of affirmative action should rest on their laurels by embracing just a touch more meritocracy just among Americans; they should embrace a true global meritocracy.

Two attacks, and one defense, of classical liberal ideas appeared over the weekend. "War and Pandemic Highlight Shortcomings of the Free-Market Consensus" announces Patricia Cohen on p.1 of the New York Times news section.  As if the Times had ever been part of such a "consensus." And Deirdre McCloskey reviews Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu's "Power and Progress," whose central argument is, per Deirdre, "The state, they argue, can do a better job than the market of selecting technologies and making investments to implement them." (I have not yet read the book. This is a review of the review only.) I'll give away the punchline. The case for free markets never was their perfection. The case for free markets always was centuries of experience with the failures of the only alternative, state control. Free markets are, as the saying goes, the worst system; except for all the others. In this sense the classic teaching of economics does  a disservice. We start with the theorem that free competitive markets can equal -- only equal -- the allocation of an omniscient benevolent planner. But then from week 2 on we study market imperfections -- externalities, increasing returns, asymmetric information -- under which markets are imperfect, and the hypothetical planner can do better. Regulate, it follows. Except econ 101 spends zero time on our extensive experience with just how well -- how badly -- actual planners and regulators do. That messy experience underlies our prosperity, and prospects for its continuance. Starting with Ms. Cohen at the Times, The economic conventions that policymakers had relied on since the Berlin Wall fell more than 30 years ago — the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade and maximum efficiency — look to be running off the rails.During the Covid-19 pandemic, the ceaseless drive to integrate the global economy and reduce costs left health care workers without face masks and medical gloves, carmakers without semiconductors, sawmills without lumber and sneaker buyers without Nikes.That there ever was a "consensus" in favor of "the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade and maximum efficiency" seems a mighty strange memory. But if the Times wants to think now that's what they thought then, I'm happy to rewrite a little history. Face masks? The face mask snafu in the pandemic is now, in the Times' rather hilarious memory, the prime example of how a free and unfettered market fails. It was  a result of "the ceaseless drive to integrate the global economy and reduce costs?" (Here, I have a second complaint -- the ceaseless drive to remove subjects from sentences. Who is doing this "ceaseless drive?" Where is the great conspiracy, the secret meeting of old white men "driving" the economy? Nowhere. That's the point of free markets.)The free market has a plan, imperfect as it might be, for masks in a pandemic. Prices rise. People who really want and need masks -- doctors, nurses, police -- pay what it takes to get them. People who don't really need them -- nursery schools -- look at the price, think about the benefit, and say, "maybe not," or take other measures. People reuse masks. Producers, seeing high prices, work day and night to produce more masks. Others, knowing that every 10 years there is a spike in prices, pay the costs of storing masks to make great profits when the time comes. The actual story of masks in the pandemic is the exact opposite. Price controls, of course. Instantly, governments started prosecuting businesses for "price gouging" who dared to raise the price of toilet paper. Governments redistribute income; markets allocate resources efficiently. As usual, the desire to redistribute tiny amounts of income to those willing to stand in line to get toilet paper won out. An entrepreneur tried to start producing masks. The FDA shut him down. (I hope I recall that story right, send comments if not.) China wanted to ship us masks. Yes, China the new villain of globalization gone mad. But their masks were certified and labeled by EU rules, not US rules, so like baby formula they couldn't be imported and sold. More deeply, even I, devoted free-marketer; even at the late night beer sessions at the CATO institute, nobody puts mask distribution in a pandemic as the first job of free markets. There is supposed to be a public health function of government; infectuous diseases are something of an externality; safety protocols in government labs doing government funded research are not a free-market function. As we look at the covid catastrophe, do we not see failures of government all over the place, not failures of some hypothetical free market? California even had mobile hospitals after H1N1. Governor Brown shut them down to save money for his high speed train. We might as well blame free markets for the lines at the DMV.  The idea that trade and shared economic interests would prevent military conflicts was trampled last year under the boots of Russian soldiers in Ukraine.Does anyone think a prime function of free market economics is to stops wars, usually prosecuted by, eh, governments? The standard history of WWI is enough. We do allege that free markets, and free markets alone, make a country wealthy enough to fight and win wars, if the country has the will and desire to do so. The US and NATO military budget vs. Russia's, larger by a factor of 10 at least, seems to bear that out, along with the much greater quality of our weapons.  Heaven help us militarily once the protectionists lead us to state-directed penury. inflation, thought to be safely stored away with disco album collections, returned with a vengeance.Did anyone every vaguely hint that inflation control is a function of free markets? Inflation comes from government monetary and fiscal policy.  And increasing bouts of extreme weather that destroyed crops, forced migrations and halted power plants has illustrated that the market's invisible hand was not protecting the planet.Doe the Times even vaguely think of news as fact not narrative? There have been a lot of migrations. "Forced?" Many due to violence, poverty, ill government. None due to temperature. Halted power plants (more passive voice)? Yes, it was that pesky unfettered free market that shut down power plants... The favored economic road map helped produce fabulous wealth, lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and spur wondrous technological advances.Well, a peek of sunlight, an actual correct fact! But there were stunning failures as well. Globalization hastened climate change and deepened inequalities. More fact free narrative spinning. How are "inequalities" plural? Globalization brought the sharpest decline in global inequality in the history of our species. Perhaps it "hastened climate change" in that if China had stayed desperately poor they wouldn't be building a new coal fired power plant a week. US emissions went down because of... choose 1: enlightened policy 2: fracking, a shift to natural gas made only possible by the curious US property rights system absent in Europe, and pretty much over the dead body of the entire energy regulatory apparatus. ***Meanwhile over at WSJ, Deirdre is in classic form. (Again, I have not read the book, so this is Deirdre coverage.) The paragraph that caught my attention and demanded a blog post: We need [according to Acemoglu and Johnson] ... the legislation currently being pushed by left and right to try again the policies of antitrust, trade protection, minimum wage and, above all, subsidy for certain technologies. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson are especially eager to regulate digital technologies such as artificial intelligence. "Technology should be steered in a direction that best uses a workforce's skills," they write, "and education should . . . adapt to new skill requirements." How the administrators of the Economic Development Administration at the Department of Commerce would know the new direction to steer, or the new skills required, remains a sacred mystery."Technology should be steered." There it is, the full glory of the regulatory passive voice. Steered by who? Deirdre answers the question with that gem of rhetoric, specificity.  "Administrators of the Economic Development Administration at the Department of Commerce" for example. The theme uniting the two essays: If there is one lesson of the last 20 years it is this: The catastrophic failure of our government institutions. From bungled wars, a snafu of financial regulation in 2008 just now repeated in FTX, SVB, and inflation the evident collapse of the FDA CDC and plain commonsense in the pandemic, the free market is bravely forestalling a collapse of government (and associated, i.e. universities) institutions. we need the state to use its powers "to induce the private sector to move away from excessive automation and surveillance, and toward more worker-friendly technologies." Fear of surveillance is a major theme of the book; therefore "antitrust should be considered as a complementary tool to the more fundamental aim of redirecting technology away from automation, surveillance, data collection, and digital advertising."The question what institution has the technical competence to do this seems to be begging.  "Government subsidies for developing more socially beneficial technologies," the authors declare, "are one of the most powerful means of redirecting technology in a market economy." Well, interpreting the sentence literally,  you have to give it to them. Government subsidies are powerful means of "redirecting technology." Usually to ratholes. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson warmly admire the U.S. Progressive Movement of the late 19th century as a model for their statism: experts taking child-citizens in hand.Their chapters then skip briskly through history...seeking to show how at each turn new innovations tended to empower certain sections of society at the expense of others. The "power" that concerns them, in other words, is private power.This is, in fact, the central question dividing free-marketers and others. Private power being subject to competition, we worry more about state power. The essence of state power is monopoly, and a monopoly of coercion, fundamentally violence.  The heart of the book is that technological gains create winners and losers, and Acemoglu and Johnson want that directed by a nebulous bureaucracy. Which will somehow never be infected by, oh, Republicans, or turn in to the endless stagnation of most of the last millennium which actually did pursue policies that forbade technological improvement in order to sustain the incomes of incumbents. Deirdre, who coined the lovely phrase "trade tested betterment" takes it on.  During the past two centuries, the world has become radically better off, by fully 3,000% inflation adjusted. Even over the past two decades the lives of the poor have improved. The "great enrichment" after 1800 and its resulting superabundance has brought us out of misery. Even the poor workers who did not benefit in the short run have done so enormously in the long run. In 1960, 4 billion of the 5 billion people on the planet lived on $2 a day. Now it's fallen to 1 billion out of 8, and the income average is $50 a day. The state didn't do it, and forcing short-run egalitarianism or handing power to the Office of Economic Development can kill it, as it regularly has. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson see great imperfections in the overwhelmingly private sources of the enrichment. With such imperfections, who needs perfection?Another way to see the problem is to remember the common sense, refined in Economics 101 and Biology 101, of entry at the smell of profit. ...The great fortunes they deprecate have the economic function of encouraging entry into the economy by other entrepreneurs who want to get rich. This competition cheapens goods and services, which then accrues to the poor as immense increases in real income.Many fortunes, for instance, were made by the invention of the downtown department store. The profit attracted suburban competitors, and at the mall the department-store model began to fail. Jeff Bezos reinvented the mail-order catalog. He is imitated, and the fortunes are dissipated in enormous benefit to consumers called workers. .... It's what happened and happens in a liberal economy.The book uses a lot of history, surveyed by McCloskey. As before, it's criticized a bit as history lite. The history Deirdre covers has the usual imperfections of the free market. I wonder if the book has any history of success of this plan, of governments successfully guiding technological transformations to protect the rights and incomes of incumbents, without in the process killing technical change.  Governments habitually screw up basics like rent control. Figuring out what new technology will do is pretty much beyond the capacity of private investors and book-writing economists. The  idea that bureaucracy has the capacity to figure out not just what new technology will work, but to guide its social and distributional consequences seems... far beyond the historical record of bureaucratic accomplishment. But I am straying beyond my promise to review the review, not the book, before reading the latter. ****I recognize the desire on both sides. Partisan politics needs "new" ideas and a "new" propaganda. In particular, the right is aching for something shiny and new that it can sell to voters, which it regards with the same sort of noblesse-oblige intellectual disdain as the left does. Mind the store, mend the institutions, freedom, rights, opportunity and make your own prosperity are, apparently, not sexy enough. So both sides need new initiatives, expanded governments, to excite the rabble. But we're not here to supply that demand, merely to meditate on actual cause-and-effect truth of what works. Beware the temptation. Update:  In retrospect, perhaps the issue is much simpler. The bulk of economic regulation serves exactly the purpose McCloskey basically alleges of Acemoglu and Johnson: Preserve rents of incumbents against the threats of technological improvements. From medieval guilds to trade protection to taxis vs. Ubers, that is really its main function. So we have an extensive bureaucracy that is very good at it, and extensive experience of just how well it works. Which is, very well, at protecting rents and stifling growth.  

"Da die demokratischen Institutionen und Haltungen weiterhin existieren, merken wir nicht, dass die Demokratie geschwächt und die Macht innerhalb des politischen Systems auf eine kleine Elite aus Politikern und Konzernen übergegangen ist, die eine Politik nach den Wünschen Letzterer betreiben."Dieses drastische Zitat, welches eine dramatische Betrachtung der gegenwärtigen Lage der westlichen Demokratien darstellt, ist nicht etwa aus dem Wahlprogramm einer populistischen Partei entnommen. Ebenso wenig sind es Auszüge aus einer Wutrede von Alice Weidel oder Sarah Wagenknecht. Diese rigorosen Worte stammen vom britischen Sozialwissenschaftler Colin Crouch und fassen weite Teile seiner Postdemokratie-These pointiert zusammen (Crouch 2021, S. 21).Die vermeintliche Nähe zu rechten Verschwörungsmythen und populistischen Narrativen von korrupten Eliten in angeblichen Scheindemokratien rückt Crouch auf den ersten Blick in kein gutes Licht (vgl. Mudde 2020, S. 55 f.). Ist er durch seine Kritik am Zustand der westlichen Demokratien womöglich als latenter Komplize der aufsteigenden Kräfte des rechtsradikalen Spektrums auszumachen?Hinsichtlich der evidenten Defizite in der Entwicklungsrichtung etablierter Demokratien der westlichen Hemisphäre erscheint eine kritische Analyse als durchaus sinnvoll. So bestätigt die Realität durch Wahlergebnisse und zahlreiche Umfragen beispielsweise zunehmend das vielzitierte Phänomen der Politikverdrossenheit sowie das verbreitete Misstrauen der Bürger*innen in Politik und deren Institutionen (vgl. Best et al. 2023, S. 18-21). Daher möchte der vorliegende Beitrag folgenden Fragestellungen nachgehen:Ist die Postdemokratie-These notwendige Kritik an politischen Missständen oder Wasser auf die Mühlen des Rechtspopulismus?Sind die Ausführungen Crouchs damit als Chance oder Gefahr für die Demokratie zu bewerten? Aus Gründen des begrenzten Umfangs beziehen sich die folgenden Ausführungen explizit auf den Rechtspopulismus und klammern den durchaus existierenden Populismus des politisch linken Spektrums aus. Angesichts des fortwährend wachsenden Einflusses politischer Akteur*innen der Neuen Rechten sowie der Verbreitung einschlägiger rechtsradikaler Narrative im öffentlichen Diskurs scheint dieser Fokus aktuell von ungleich größerer Bedeutung zu sein (vgl. Mudde 2020, S. 13-17).Der inhaltliche Gedankengang des Beitrags sei an dieser Stelle knapp skizziert: Die Leitfrage soll aus verschiedenen Perspektiven bearbeitet werden, um den ambivalenten Potenzialen der These Colin Crouchs gerecht zu werden. Dabei wird der schmale Grat zwischen angebrachter Kritik, welche zu einer verbesserten Demokratie beitragen kann, und der Nähe zu rechtspopulistischen Narrativen mit gegenteiliger Wirkung thematisiert.Insbesondere die zentralen Unterscheidungsmerkmale zwischen Crouchs analytischen Ausführungen und rechtspopulistischer Eliten-Kritik sollen anschließend als sinnvolle Abgrenzung herausgearbeitet werden. Dies wird als Schlüssel zu einer gewinnbringenden praktischen Verwertung der Postdemokratie-These betrachtet, um sie als Chance im Sinne einer konstruktiven Kritik an negativen Entwicklungen der westlichen Demokratien fruchtbar werden zu lassen.Colin Crouch: "Postdemokratie"Der britische Politikwissenschaftler und Soziologe Colin Crouch sorgte bereits in den frühen 2000er Jahren mit Veröffentlichungen um seine These der Postdemokratie für internationales Aufsehen. Seine Gegenwartsanalyse beschreibt einige Tendenzen, die insbesondere in den etablierten Demokratien der westlichen Welt zu beobachten sind und durch komplexe Zusammenhänge eine zunehmende Schwächung der Demokratie bedeuten.Gemäß der Wortneuschöpfung mit der bedeutungsschweren Vorsilbe "post" charakterisiert er den aktuellen Zustand als Niedergang der lebhaften Demokratie nach der politischen und gesellschaftlichen Hochphase demokratischer Prozesse. Solch ein vergangener "Augenblick der Demokratie" (Crouch 2021, S. 22) zeichne sich in der Theorie durch die Verwirklichung sämtlicher demokratischer Ideale aus. Insbesondere eine lebendige Zivilgesellschaft partizipiert dabei öffentlich am politischen Prozess, wobei die aktive Beteiligung der gleichberechtigten Bürger*innen über den regelmäßigen Gebrauch des Wahlrechts hinausgeht. Eine angemessene und wirkungsvolle Verbindung zwischen dem Staat und seinen Bürger*innen gewährleistet eine funktionierende Repräsentation der Bevölkerung durch demokratisch legitimierte politische Amtsträger*innen (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 22 f.).Die neoliberale Vorherrschaft in grundlegenden politischen Entscheidungen und Handlungen seit den 1980er Jahren führte zu wachsender Ungleichheit, die auch im politischen Diskurs spürbar wurde. So dominieren in Folge von ökonomischer Globalisierung und der Entstehung mächtiger Megakonzerne wirtschaftliche Eliten zunehmend den politischen Diskurs sowie durch gezielten Lobbyismus den Raum der politischen Entscheidungsfindung.Demokratische Prozesse werden subtil ausgehöhlt, indem Wirtschaftseliten den Platz von formal gleichberechtigten Bürger*innen als bedeutendste Instanz im demokratischen Raum einnehmen. Dies führe mitunter zu einer folgenschweren einseitigen Zuwendung politischer Akteur*innen hin zu wirtschaftlichen Eliten und deren Interessen der Profitsteigerung, was mit einer symptomatischen Entfremdung der Volksvertreter*innen von der zu repräsentierenden Bevölkerung einhergehe (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 9 f.; S. 24-26). Der renommierte Philosoph und Soziologe Jürgen Habermas fasst die Zusammenhänge der These bezüglich der vorherrschenden neoliberalen Ideologie pointiert zusammen:"Ich habe den Begriff 'Postdemokratie' nicht erfunden. Aber darunter lassen sich gut die politischen Auswirkungen der sozialen Folgen einer global durchgesetzten neoliberalen Politik bündeln." (Habermas 2022, S. 87)Ein weiterer einschneidender Umbruch ist in der Zivilgesellschaft selbst verortet. So nimmt die herkömmliche Bindung an soziale Klassen und Kirchen als gesellschaftliche und politische Verortung der kollektiven Milieus innerhalb einer Gesellschaft seit Jahrzehnten massiv ab. Damit gehe in vielen Fällen auch ein Raum der politischen Betätigung und Meinungsbildung verloren, was zuweilen zur politischen Orientierungslosigkeit der Bürger*innen führe. Dies erschwere das Aufrechterhalten der Bindung politischer Akteur*innen an deren Basis in vielerlei Hinsicht. Denn nicht zuletzt orientiert sich auch die etablierte Parteienlandschaft an den einst zentralen sozialen Zugehörigkeiten der Bürger*innen (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 26-30).Rund 20 Jahre nach den ersten einschlägigen Veröffentlichungen erneuerte Crouch seine These mit einigen Ergänzungen und Korrekturen, welche vor dem Hintergrund zeitgeschichtlicher Entwicklungen durch den Abgleich mit der politischen Realität notwendig erschienen. Doch die Kernthese der Postdemokratie blieb grundlegend erhalten (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 10-17):

















Als knapper inhaltlicher Exkurs am Rande der Kernthematik sei an dieser Stelle ein kritischer Vermerk bezüglich relevanter politischer Entwicklungen seit 2020 eingefügt. Nach der Veröffentlichung der Originalausgabe des Buches "Postdemokratie revisited", welches die damals aktualisierte Version der Postdemokratie-These von Colin Crouch hinsichtlich veränderter politischer Umstände enthält, sind einschneidende weltpolitische Ereignisse zu bedeutenden Prägefaktoren der transnationalen und nationalen Politiken geworden.Die Corona-Pandemie und der anhaltende russische Angriffskrieg auf die Ukraine führten zu politischen Entscheidungen, welche mitunter unmittelbar spürbar für große Teile der Bürger*innen waren und dies noch immer sind. Damit einhergehend wurde eine zunehmende Politisierung der Bevölkerung einiger demokratischer Staaten beobachtet (vgl. Beckmann/Deutschlandfunk 2021). In der deutschen Gesellschaft sind zudem seit einigen Wochen zahlreiche Demonstrationen gegen Rechtsextremismus zu verzeichnen, welche vom Soziologen und Protestforscher Dieter Rucht bereits als "größte Protestwelle in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik" bezeichnet wurden (Fuhr/FAZ.NET 2024).Crouch spricht in diesem Kontext aktuell von einer durchaus verbreiteten Abneigung gegenüber den rechtsextremen Strategien von Hass und Hetze in entwickelten demokratischen Gesellschaften. Diese müsse aktiviert und politisch mobilisiert werden im Sinne einer gestärkten Demokratie gegen rechtsextreme Bestrebungen. Doch könne dies lediglich einhergehend mit ökonomischen Lösungen der wachsenden sozialen Ungleichheit seitens der politischen Akteur*innen nachhaltig wirksam werden (vgl. Hesse/fr.de 2024). Nicht außer Acht zu lassen sind diese zuweilen folgenschweren Ereignisse in der politischen und zeitgeschichtlichen Gesamtschau, wenngleich die zahlreichen raschen politischen sowie demoskopischen Wendungen der vergangenen Jahre in den folgenden Ausführungen nicht umfänglich Berücksichtigung finden können.Relevanz der AnalyseWie bereits das zustimmende Zitat des namhaften zeitgenössischen Philosophen Habermas im vorausgehenden Abschnitt anklingen lässt, treffen Crouchs Ausführungen hinsichtlich zahlreicher analysierter Missstände politischer und gesellschaftlicher Art durchaus zu. So wird die Relevanz der kritischen Gegenwartsanalyse bezüglich einiger Aspekte in Teilen angesichts der Studienergebnisse zum Thema "Demokratievertrauen in Krisenzeiten" der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung aus dem Jahr 2023 deutlich.Unter Berücksichtigung der multiplen Krisen der Gegenwart wurden in einer repräsentativen Zufallsstichprobe volljährige wahlberechtigte Deutsche zu Themen befragt, welche die Funktionalität des repräsentativ-demokratischen Systems sowie den gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt betreffen (vgl. Best et al. 2023, S. 5 f.). Dabei konnte ermittelt werden, dass etwas mehr als die Hälfte der Befragten unzufrieden ist mit dem gegenwärtigen Funktionieren der Demokratie. Obgleich in der Gegenüberstellung mit der Vorgängerstudie aus dem Jahr 2019 ein leichter Rückgang dieses Prozentsatzes auszumachen ist, muss ein anhaltend hohes Niveau der generellen Unzufriedenheit bezüglich der Funktionalität unseres politischen Systems diagnostiziert werden (vgl. Best et al. 2023, S. 17 f.).Dass der soziale Status der befragten Bürger*innen als einflussreicher Parameter in dieser Frage herausgestellt werden konnte, lässt sich widerspruchsfrei in Crouchs Analyse der zunehmend elitär gestalteten Politik einfügen. Denn es erscheint folgerichtig, dass Menschen aus unteren sozialen Schichten mit vergleichsweise wenig Einkommen häufiger unzufrieden sind mit dem politischen System, in welchem vermehrt die Interessen höherer sozio-ökonomischer Gruppen begünstigt werden (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 44-47).Außerdem beklagen deutliche Mehrheiten in der Befragung die Undurchschaubarkeit komplexer Politik sowie unzureichende Möglichkeiten der politischen Partizipation, was Crouchs Ausführungen zur Entpolitisierung der Mehrheitsgesellschaft im Zuge der zunehmenden Politikverdrossenheit bestärkt (vgl. Best et al. 2023, S. 18-20). Vor die Wahl verschiedener Regierungsmodelle gestellt, bevorzugt lediglich ein Drittel der Befragten die repräsentative Demokratie, während beinahe die Hälfte zur direkten Demokratie tendiert (vgl. Best et al. 2023, S. 21 f.).Passend dazu ist das Vertrauen in die politischen Institutionen lediglich hinsichtlich der Judikative, dem Bundesverfassungsgericht, bei der großen Mehrheit unter den befragten Bürger*innen in hohem Ausmaß vorhanden. Der eklatant angestiegene Anteil der Menschen ohne jegliches Vertrauen in das Parlament und die Bundesregierung könnte im Sinne Colin Crouchs als Folge der Entfremdung der politischen Akteur*innen vom Großteil der Bevölkerung gekennzeichnet werden (vgl. Best et al. 2023, S. 26-31; Crouch 2021, S. 216 f.).Ein weiterer zentraler Kritikpunkt Crouchs wird sinngemäß durch die Frage nach konkreten Problemen der deutschen Demokratie angesprochen. So sehen über 70 Prozent der Befragten den Einfluss von Lobbygruppen als problematisch an, wobei sich diese Ansicht in vergleichbarer Weise durch alle politischen Lager zieht. Colin Crouchs kritischer Blick bezüglich eines überbordenden Lobbyismus mit unverhältnismäßigem Einfluss im politischen Prozess wird somit durch diese Studie demoskopisch gestützt (vgl. Best et al. 2023, S. 32 f.; Crouch 2021, S. 68 f.).Auch andere wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen, wie der aktuelle "Transformationsindex BTI 2024" der Bertelsmann-Stiftung, analysieren einen ähnlichen Zustand der politischen und gesellschaftlichen Lage westlicher Demokratien im Sinne einer akuten Krise des Liberalismus vor dem Hintergrund der neoliberalen Vorherrschaft.Das positive Potential der Postdemokratie-These liegt angesichts der ernstzunehmenden Problematiken in einer möglichen Stärkung der Demokratie durch praktische Konsequenzen auf Grundlage dieser kritischen Befunde. Praktische Ansätze im Bereich der strenger regulierten Lobbyarbeit sowie neue Formen der Bürger*innenbeteiligung sind bereits Teil der politischen Agenda und werden erprobt. Ob diese den Zweck einer erstarkenden Demokratie real erfüllen werden, ist aktuell noch offen. Im besten Falle können gestärkte demokratische Strukturen nicht zuletzt demokratiegefährdende Akteur*innen aus dem rechtspopulistischen und rechtsextremen Spektrum zurückdrängen.Jedoch klingt an dieser Stelle ein Widerspruch an. Denn stärkt nicht gerade Crouchs Framing der Kritik an politischen Eliten und an der Entwicklung des politischen Systems die antidemokratischen radikalen Kräfte am rechten Rand angesichts der vermeintlichen narrativen Überschneidungen?Parallelen zu rechtspopulistischen NarrativenCrouch selbst schreibt in seinem Buch von neuen "Bewegungen […], die ähnliche Klagen über die heutigen Demokratien vorzubringen scheinen, wie ich sie in Postdemokratie geäußert habe, und insbesondere den Vorwurf äußern, dass die Politik von Eliten dominiert werde, während normale Bürger kein Gehör mehr fänden." (Crouch 2021, S. 136).Gemeint sind aufsteigende populistische Gruppierungen und Parteien, wovon jenen aus dem rechtsradikalen Lager aktuell die höchste politische Relevanz beigemessen wird. Um die Leitfrage des Beitrags angemessen multiperspektivisch zu beleuchten, sollen nun die vermeintlichen Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen den Erkenntnissen des britischen Sozialwissenschaftlers und rechtspopulistischen Narrativen herausgestellt sowie kritisch betrachtet werden.Die augenscheinlichste Parallele liegt im Bereich der Elitenkritik, wie Crouch es im angeführten Zitat selbst andeutet. Politische Entscheidungsträger*innen und wirtschaftliche Eliten handeln überwiegend im eigenen Interesse und entfernen sich dabei immer mehr von den Bürger*innen, insbesondere von jenen mit geringem sozialen Status, und deren Anliegen. Diese Analyse Crouchs erinnert an die rechtspopulistische Dichotomie, welche die abgehobene Elite dem normalen Volk gegenüberstellt. Der Wille des Volkes werde gemäß diesem Narrativ von der etablierten Politik bewusst übergangen (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 41 f.; Mudde 2020, S. 55 f.).Doch bereits in der Formulierung wird ein zentraler Unterschied hinsichtlich der Vorstellung der regierten Bürger*innen deutlich. So wird im rechtspopulistischen Narrativ das Volk als homogene Masse mit einheitlichem Willen angesehen, während Crouch von Bürger*innen mit verschiedenen sozioökonomischen Hintergründen und pluralen Interessen spricht (vgl. Wodak/bpb 2023; Crouch 2021, S. 258 f.).Die Globalisierung als nach wie vor prägende Entwicklung mit Auswirkungen auf alle gesellschaftliche Sphären ist Anhaltspunkt einer weiteren vermeintlichen Schnittmenge. Als hintergründige Ursache für die zunehmende Entfremdung politischer Akteur*innen von weiten Teilen der Bevölkerung sowie für den unverhältnismäßig hohen Einfluss kapitalorientierter Großkonzerne konstatiert Crouch die Globalisierung der Wirtschaft.Des Weiteren führe die Tatsache, dass Wirtschaftspolitik vor diesem Hintergrund weitgehend auf transnationaler Ebene betrieben wird, zu einem Bedeutungsverlust der nationalstaatlichen Politik. Debatten im nationalen Kontext seien somit laut Crouch oftmals als politisch gegenstandslose Scheindebatten zu kennzeichnen (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 25 f.). Diese Beschneidung des Nationalstaats durch eine zunehmende Globalisierung wird von Akteur*innen der Neuen Rechten im Sinne ihres charakteristischen Nationalismus massiv beklagt. Damit einher geht eine misstrauische bis konsequent ablehnende Haltung gegenüber transnationaler Politik insbesondere bezüglich einschlägiger Institutionen wie der Europäischen Union (vgl. Mudde 2020, S. 56-59; S. 132 f.).Populist*innen gerieren sich grundsätzlich als wahre Stimme des Volkes, welches exklusiv durch sie vertreten werde in einem von eigennützigen Eliten regierten System (vgl. Mudde 2020, S. 46). Hinsichtlich der Postdemokratie-These lässt dies vermuten, dass populistische Bewegungen als basisdemokratischer Stachel im Fleisch der Postdemokratie charakterisiert werden können. Mitunter würde das die massive Abneigung der etablierten Parteien ihnen gegenüber erklären (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 139-141).An dieser Stelle könnte auf eine zumindest teilweise Zustimmung Colin Crouchs hinsichtlich rechtspopulistischer Narrative geschlossen werden. Im Vorgriff auf die Ausführungen der folgenden Abschnitte sei jedoch vor einer voreiligen Gleichsetzung ohne die notwendige politikwissenschaftliche Differenzierung gewarnt. So weist Crouch selbst deutlich auf die Diskrepanz hin, welche die antidemokratischen Tendenzen rechtspopulistischer Bewegungen zweifellos von einer zukunftsorientierten Kritik an postdemokratischen Problemen trennt (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 139).GefahrenpotentialIst Crouchs These angesichts der verwandten Anklagen Wasser auf die Mühlen der Rechtspopulist*innen? Trägt die Publizierung seiner massiven Kritikpunkte womöglich zur fortschreitenden Enttabuisierung radikaler Positionen im öffentlichen Diskurs bei?In der aktuellen politischen und gesellschaftlichen Debatte lässt sich eine einflussreiche rechtspopulistische Strategie der Diskursverschiebung beobachten. Einschlägige illiberale Narrative werden hierbei im politischen Diskurs salonfähig durch schrittweises Verrücken der roten Linien, welche das legitime demokratische Meinungsspektrum umgrenzen. Das "Perpetuum mobile des Rechtspopulismus" (Wodak/bpb 2023) lässt in einem schleichenden Prozess xenophobe und diskriminierende Haltungen durch kalkulierte rhetorische Grenzüberschreitungen rechtspopulistischer Akteur*innen zunehmend vertretbar erscheinen.Des Weiteren wird so Einfluss auf die Themensetzung im demokratischen Diskurs genommen, was nicht zuletzt durch die partielle Übernahme seitens ursprünglich gemäßigter konservativer Parteien des politischen Establishments befördert wird. Die beobachtbare Diskursverschiebung stellt eine ernstzunehmende Gefahr für liberale Demokratien dar, wie bereits an autokratischen Entwicklungen in einigen Ländern mit Regierungen des äußerst rechten Spektrums abzulesen ist (vgl. Wodak/bpb 2023).Crouchs Ausführungen bezüglich postdemokratischer Tendenzen bergen insbesondere mit Blick auf die Elitenkritik das Gefahrenpotential einer narrativen Instrumentalisierung durch illiberale Akteur*innen. Doch hinsichtlich eines entscheidenden Aspekts eignet sich die Argumentation Colin Crouchs nur schwerlich als Hilfestellung zur Enttabuisierung rechtsradikaler Positionen. So sind vereinfachende Schuldzuweisungen mitnichten Teil der analytischen Ausführungen Crouchs, und es werden keine Feindbilder unter gesellschaftlichen Minderheiten ausgemacht, was der zentralen Ideologie der äußersten Rechten entgegensteht (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 143 f.). Vortrag von Ruth Wodak über Rechtsruck und Normalisierung: Die von Crouch geforderte Politisierung der Zivilgesellschaft sollte in diesem Zusammenhang nicht mit der fortschreitenden Polarisierung der Öffentlichkeit einhergehen oder gar gleichgesetzt werden. Dies würde gefährliche aktuelle Tendenzen der gesellschaftlichen Spaltung verstärken und somit den gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt zusätzlich gefährden. In jener Hinsicht kann enorme politische und gesellschaftliche Polarisierung Demokratien destabilisieren, wie dies beispielsweise in der US-Amerikanischen Gesellschaft zu beobachten ist (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 150-154). Unter Berücksichtigung dieses Gesichtspunktes können soziale Bewegungen der äußersten Rechten kaum als anerkennenswerte Belebung der Demokratie gewertet werden, ganz zu schweigen von der antidemokratischen Ideologie, welche dahintersteht (vgl. Mudde 2020, S. 152-155).Crouch selbst geht im Buch in einem eigenen Kapitel auf die "Politik des nostalgischen Pessimismus" (Crouch 2021, S. 136) ein und stellt durch eine eingehende Analyse der populistischen Strategien und Inhalte eine kritische Distanz zu einschlägigen Bewegungen heraus. Insbesondere den Rechtspopulismus heutiger Akteur*innen der Neuen Rechten ergründet der Soziologe als antipluralistisch, antiegalitär und im Kern antidemokratisch, wenngleich diese Ausrichtungen in vielfältiger Weise öffentlich verschleiert werden (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 169-172).ZwischenfazitDie Postdemokratie-These hat Potenziale für beide politischen Stoßrichtungen, welche in der Leitfrage des Beitrags pointiert gegenübergestellt wurden. Entscheidend sind ein reflektierter Umgang mit den Analysen sowie die gebotene Einordnung der Schlussfolgerungen im jeweiligen politischen Kontext. Zweifelsfrei ist dabei die Maxime zu beachten, niemals den Populismus antidemokratischer Kräfte zu stärken. Gleichermaßen darf die mögliche Angst vor dem schmalen Grat zwischen reflektierter sozialwissenschaftlicher Kritik und rechtspopulistischer Aufwiegelung keinesfalls zur Ignoranz postdemokratischer Missstände führen. Denn im Sinne von Jan-Werner Müllers Definition von Populismus sind "[a]lle Populisten [..] gegen das »Establishment« – aber nicht jeder, der Eliten kritisiert, ist ein Populist." (Müller 2016, S. 18 f.).Um die missbräuchliche argumentative Übernahme von Crouchs These durch demokratiefeindliche Rechtspopulist*innen wirksam zu verhindern, ist eine differenzierte Klarstellung im Sinne der politischen Einordnung von Crouchs Analysen erforderlich.Lösungsansatz: DifferenzierungAls Schlüssel zur fruchtbaren Berücksichtigung von Crouchs These im politikwissenschaftlichen und gesamtgesellschaftlichen Diskurs kann die Differenzierung zur Abgrenzung von rechtspopulistischen Narrativen dienen. Eine deutliche Unterscheidung ist im Sinne Colin Crouchs herauszustellen und in der Argumentation im Kontext der öffentlichen Debatte stets zu beachten, um sich deutlich von rechtspopulistischen Parolen abzugrenzen. So kann einer drohenden Enttabuisierung radikaler Positionen vorgebeugt werden, um diese Gefahr für die liberale Demokratie nicht zusätzlich argumentativ zu stützen. Zentrale Unterscheidungsmerkmale sollen nachfolgend erläutert werden.Rechtspopulistische Bewegungen sind lediglich vordergründig für mehr Demokratie und Mitbestimmung des Volkes. Denn im Kern widersprechen ihre kennzeichnenden Ideologeme liberaldemokratischen Werten, wie insbesondere der Antipluralismus deutlich macht. Die antipluralistische Ideologie steht in enger Verbindung mit dem exklusivistischen Vertretungsanspruch des Volkes und deren homogenen Interessen. Alle Gruppen und Individuen, welche sich aus diversen Gründen nicht diesem normalen Volk zurechnen lassen, werden rhetorisch exkludiert und sind Feindbilder der Rechtspopulist*innen. Dieser xenophobe Antipluralismus veranlasst die grundlegende Einordnung jener Bewegungen als illiberal und antidemokratisch (vgl. Wodak/bpb 2023).Crouch dagegen plädiert für die plurale Interessensvertretung heterogener Gruppen und Individuen als gleichberechtigte Teile einer demokratischen Gesellschaft. Darüber hinaus wird die Emanzipation jeglicher unterdrückter Gruppen innerhalb Crouchs Theorie als erstrebenswerter Moment der Demokratie angesehen, was in diametralem Gegensatz zum ideologischen Antifeminismus und Rassismus sowie zur Queerfeindlichkeit der äußersten Rechten steht (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 22 f.).Das Verhältnis zum neoliberalen Kapitalismus markiert ebenfalls eine signifikante Differenz zwischen Crouchs Thesen und vorherrschenden Denkweisen der äußersten Rechten. Akteur*innen rechtspopulistischer Politik weisen deutliche antiegalitäre Überzeugungen auf, was programmatisch beispielsweise im angestrebten faktischen Abbau des Sozialstaats ersichtlich wird. Politisch forcierte Umverteilung im Sinne stärkerer sozialer Gerechtigkeit und striktere Regulierung von Lobbyarbeit, wie es von Crouch gefordert wird, steht dieser antiegalitären Haltung entgegen. Der sozialpolitisch im linken Spektrum einzuordnende Soziologe Crouch zeigt sich deutlich kritisch gegenüber neoliberal dominierter Politik und der Macht von Wirtschaftseliten. Als grundlegender zentraler Angriffspunkt der politischen Entwicklungen seit mehreren Jahrzehnten gilt der Neoliberalismus innerhalb seiner gesamten Analyse (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 143; S. 234-238).Die Art der Beschreibung von Ursachen hinter beklagten Problemen der aktuellen politischen Situation stellt ein weiteres Unterscheidungsmerkmal dar. So weisen rechtspopulistische Narrative zuvörderst liberale Eliten und Migrant*innen als schuldige Sündenböcke aus, wobei diesen Akteur*innen prinzipiell unlautere Absichten unterstellt werden. Die vereinfachende Personifizierung von Schuld fungiert als bedeutender Aspekt der rechtspopulistischen Kommunikationsstrategien (vgl. Mudde 2020, S. 49-56).Die kritische Auseinandersetzung Crouchs mit postdemokratischen Tendenzen hingegen ist geprägt von der Darstellung komplexer Zusammenhänge von multiplen Ursachen. Simple Schuldzuweisungen werden dabei vermieden (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 9; S. 24-26). Generell unterscheiden sich die Ausführungen Colin Crouchs im Charakter diametral von rechtspopulistischen Narrativen. Die nüchterne sozialwissenschaftliche Analyse beinhaltet die Herausarbeitung komplexer Entwicklungen und Zusammenhänge, während der Rechtspopulismus von allgemeiner Vereinfachung mit personalisierten Schuldzuweisungen und Feindbildern geprägt ist, welche zentrale Bestandteile rechtspopulistischer Kommunikation sind (vgl. Wodak/bpb 2023).FazitZusammenfassend ist zunächst die Relevanz der kritischen Ausführungen Crouchs zu rekapitulieren. Um die Zukunftsvision einer verbesserten Demokratie mit konkreten Maßnahmen anzustreben, ist eine analytische Grundlage bezüglich gegenwärtiger Probleme von Nöten, welche in der Postdemokratie-These gefunden werden kann. Die Ambivalenz der These angesichts einer möglichen Instrumentalisierung durch Populist*innen wurde verdeutlicht, wenngleich keine konkreten Zusammenhänge zwischen Crouchs These und dem Aufstieg der neuen Rechten nachgewiesen werden konnten.Die anschließende Erläuterung der Unterscheidungsmerkmale stellt eine unzweifelhafte Abgrenzung der Postdemokratie-These von der polemischen Ideologie der Rechtspopulist*innen dar. Dies verdeutlicht die aktuelle Notwendigkeit, im gesellschaftlichen Diskurs auf differenzierte Weise Entwicklungen des politischen Systems zu kritisieren, ohne dabei Wasser auf die Mühlen des Rechtspopulismus zu geben. Denn die Gefahr, haltlose rechtspopulistische Parolen durch unangemessene Gleichsetzungen mit sachlichen Gegenwartsanalysen soziologisch aufzuladen und damit substantiell zu überhöhen, ist schließlich nicht zu missachten. Wenn jedoch die sozialwissenschaftlichen Analysen der Postdemokratie-These Crouchs wahrheitsgetreu Eingang in die politische Debatte finden, könnten sie der polemischen Argumentation vom rechten Rand die Substanz entziehen und diese als antidemokratisch entlarven, ohne dabei angezeigte Kritik am Status Quo der etablierten Demokratien auszuklammern.Die Fähigkeit zu einer solchen Differenzierung stellt insbesondere für angehende politische Bildner*innen eine bedeutende Kompetenz dar. Neben der stetigen Arbeit an den eigenen Fähigkeiten in diesem bedeutsamen Bereich kommt Lehrkräften die elementare Aufgabe zu, die Kompetenz der reflektierten Differenzierung an Schüler*innen zu vermitteln. Denn diese ist unerlässlich hinsichtlich der übergeordneten Zielperspektive, sie zu mündigen Bürger*innen als Teil einer lebendigen Demokratie werden zu lassen. Insbesondere angesichts der zunehmenden Polarisierung sämtlicher politischer und gesellschaftlicher Themen, die nicht zuletzt durch den Einfluss von Sozialen Medien und deren einschlägigen Mechanismen gefördert wird, ist dieser Ansatz nicht zu unterschätzen (vgl. Crouch 2021, S. 259 f.).Außerdem sind neue politische und gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen stets mitzudenken, was die Notwendigkeit einer fortwährenden Aktualisierung der sozialwissenschaftlichen Gegenwartsanalyse Colin Crouchs hervorhebt und eine stetige kritische Prüfung der Postdemokratie-These vor dem Hintergrund neuartiger Entwicklungen zweifellos miteinschließt.LiteraturBeckmann, Andreas (2021): Pandemie und Demokratie. Wurde der Kurs in der Corona-Politik ausreichend ausgehandelt? (Deutschlandfunk vom 02.09.2021), https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/pandemie-und-demokratie-wurde-der-kurs-in-der-corona-100.html [25.03.2024].Best, Volker; Decker, Frank; Fischer, Sandra et al. (2023): Demokratievertrauen in Krisenzeiten. Wie blicken die Menschen in Deutschland auf Politik, Institutionen und Gesellschaft? Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung e.V. (Hrsg.), Bonn.Crouch, Colin (2021): Postdemokratie revisited, Suhrkamp: Berlin.Fuhr, Lukas (2024): Protestforscher Dieter Rucht: "Der Höhepunkt der Demowelle liegt wohl hinter uns" (FAZ.NET vom 16.02.2024), https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/demos-gegen-rechtsextremismus-werden-laut-protestforscher-nachlassen-19518795.html#void [20.03.2024].Habermas, Jürgen (2022): Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik, Suhrkamp: Berlin.Hesse, Michael (2024): "Im Westen hält die Brandmauer noch": Politologe Colin Crouch über Rechtsextremismus (Frankfurter Rundschau vom 12.02.2024), https://www.fr.de/kultur/gesellschaft/rechtsextremismus-politologe-colin-crouch-im-westen-haelt-die-brandmauer-noch-populismus-92826654.html [20.03.2024].Mudde, Cas (2020): Rechtsaußen. Extreme und radikale Rechte in der heutigen Politik weltweit, Dietz: Bonn.Müller, Jan-Werner (2016): Was ist Populismus?, Suhrkamp: Berlin.Wodak, Ruth (2023): Rechtspopulistische Diskursverschiebungen, in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (bpb.de vom 20.10.2023), https://www.bpb.de/shop/zeitschriften/apuz/diskurskultur-2023/541849/rechtspopulistische-diskursverschiebungen/ [26.03.2024].

Karin Prien ist Bildungsministerin von Schleswig-Holstein und stellvertretende CDU-Bundesvorsitzende. Nach den miesen PISA-Ergebnissen fordert sie Deutschlands Umbau zum "sozialen Bildungsstaat", will eine neue Rolle für die Kultusministerkonferenz, kritisiert Bundesbildungsministerin Stark-Watzinger – und sieht einen Paradigmenwechsel in der Bildungspolitik ihrer Partei.






Karin Prien (CDU) ist seit 2017 Ministerin für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur Schleswig-Holsteins seit 2022
stellvertretende CDU-Vorsitzende. Foto: Frank Peter.






Frau Prien, als vor einem Jahr Ihre Zeit als Präsidentin der Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) zu Ende ging, sagten Sie im Interview hier im Blog: Wenn die KMK künftig eine prägende Rolle spielen wolle
in der Bildungspolitik, "wird das nur mit noch mehr Kooperation gehen, nicht weniger. Aber umso dringlicher muss die KMK ran an ihre Gremienstrukturen und Arbeitsprozesse." Vergangene Woche haben
Sie und Ihre Kollegen beschlossen, bis März konkrete Reform-Maßnahmen ausarbeiten zu lassen. Ist es das, was Sie unter "umso dringlicher" verstehen? 



 



Zunächst einmal bin ich wirklich froh, dass die KMK als eine der wenigen Entscheidungsstrukturen in unserem föderalen Staat die Kraft und den Mut hat, eine Strukturreform anzugehen und sich damit
auch eingesteht, dass ihre Strukturen überkommen sind. Und mit dem Eckpunkte-Beschluss von vergangener Woche haben wir jetzt eine gute Grundlage, um die zentralen Fragen zu beantworten und die
KMK zukunftsfähig zu machen. Wie definieren wir die Aufgabe der KMK neu, und was folgt aus dieser Aufgabe für die Arbeit ihrer Gremien, aber auch für die Organisation des KMK-Sekretariats? 



 



Die Strukturkommission zur Reform der KMK wurde 2021 eingesetzt. Wie lange wird es noch dauern, bis Sie und Ihre Kollegen sich auf die Antworten einigen?



 



An der grundlegenden Debatte und einer zeitnahen Entscheidung führt jetzt kein Weg mehr vorbei, auch wenn sich die Positionen zwischen den Ländern zur Rolle der KMK unterscheiden mögen. Meine
feste Überzeugung ist, dass wir politischer und strategischer werden müssen. Was bedeutet: Mithilfe der Ständigen Wissenschaftlichen Kommission (SWK) identifizieren wir in der KMK die
Handlungsbedarfe in unserem föderalen Bildungssystem, daraus leiten wir gemeinsame Ziele ab, deren Erreichung nachweisbar und messbar sein muss. Und dann verständigen wir uns auf
länderübergreifende Strategien zur Umsetzung dieser Ziele. Das bedeutet überhaupt nicht, dass die KMK zu einer zentralen Steuerungseinheit der gesamten Bildungspolitik wird, aber in den wirklich
entscheidenden Fragen, die uns alle angehen, sollte sie genau das sein. 



 



Welche Fragen sind das?



 



Das weitere Definieren, Implementieren und Erreichen von Bildungsstandards. Die Senkung der Schulabbrecherquoten und die Unterstützung von Kindern und Jugendlichen aus prekären Familien mit und
ohne Zuwanderungsgeschichte. Das sind alles Themen, bei denen wir als föderaler Staat nur gemeinsam erfolgreich sein werden. Was nicht heißt, dass ich als Landesbildungsministerin so lange warte,
bis die KMK da ist, wo ich sie mir wünsche. Sondern ich arbeite mit Hochdruck dran. Bevorzugt mit der ganzen KMK, und wenn das nicht geht, mit einzelnen Ländern, ob mit Hamburg,
Baden-Württemberg, Hessen oder Rheinland-Pfalz. 



 



"Das Engagement des Bundes
in der Bildung ist ein Trauerspiel."



 



Wenn Sie sagen, die Erreichung dieser Ziele sollte messbar sein, dann fordern Sie eine Transparenz, die wir an vielen Stellen in unserem Bildungssystem bislang nicht haben. 



 



Weil wir nicht alle die nötigen Daten erheben und weil wir sie nicht nach einheitlichen Standards erheben. Auch die Definition dieser Standards sollte Aufgabe der KMK sein. 



 



Bundesbildungsministerin Bettina Stark-Watzinger (FDP) will, wenn es nicht anders geht, künftig ebenfalls auf "eine Koalition der Willigen" setzen. Der Frankfurter Allgemeinen
Sonntagszeitung sagte sie: "Ich würde mir wünschen, dass das Grundgesetz uns eine Zusammenarbeit zwischen dem Bund und einem Teil der Bundesländer erlaubt", so könne man schneller Projekte
anstoßen, denn: "Wir müssen schneller handeln können, um Bildung gut zu organisieren. PISA zeigt, dass die Zeit drängt."



 



 Die Zeit drängt für ein stärkeres und merklich verlässliches Engagement des Bundes. Dafür braucht es erstmal keine Grundgesetzänderung, sondern einen ernsthaften politischen Willen. Der
Bund hat das Aufholprogramm nach Corona gegen den dringenden rat der Länder schon 2022 eingestellt, hat das Sprachkita-Programm eingestellt und die Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung. Das
Startchancenprogramm ist noch immer nicht auf dem Weg und kann kaum noch zum Schuljahr 24/25 in der erforderlichen Qualität starten. Die endgültige Finanzierung fehlt bisher sowohl für das
Startchancenpaket als auch für den Digitalpakt 2.0. Das Engagement des Bundes in der Bildung ist trotz aller anders lautenden Rhetorik ein Trauerspiel.



 



Reden wir erstmal über die Perfomance der Länder. Apropos fehlende Daten: Über das Ziel besseren Bildungsstatistiken reden die Kultusminister auch schon seit Jahren, trotzdem bekamen sie
von der SWK bei deren Lehrerbildungs-Gutachten gerade erst wieder ins Stammbuch geschrieben, dass die Datenqualität mies ist – oder die Daten gar nicht vorhanden. Wenn zugleich die
PISA-Ergebnisse historisch schlecht ausfallen, macht Sie das nicht auch ungeduldig?



 



Natürlich bin ich ungeduldig. Und ich verstehe die Ungeduld anderer. Umgekehrt würde ich mir a manchmal mehr Aufrichtigkeit wünschen bei den Kritikern der KMK – zumindest bei denen, die wissen
sollten, wie der politische Betrieb funktioniert. Die KMK bewegt sich genau in die Richtung, die ich eben skizziert habe. In den vergangenen zwei, drei Jahren sind in der Hinsicht ganz
entscheidende Dinge passiert. Wir haben jetzt die SWK und ein gemeinsames Arbeitsprogramm, und sie gibt uns Empfehlungen zu zentralen Fragen von der Reform der Grundschule über die
Digitalisierung des Bildungssystems bis zur Weiterentwicklung der Lehrkräftebildung. Wir bekommen von den Wissenschaftlern Handlungsempfehlungen vorgelegt, beschließen sie als Kultusminister und
gehen in die qualitative Umsetzung. Die KMK-Strukturreform dauert, aber wir befinden uns eben nicht in einem politischen Vakuum, in der realen Welt kommen wir gut voran. 



 



Ihre erste Stellungnahme zu den neuen PISA-Ergebnissen hörte sich allerdings selbst so an, als reiche es Ihnen langsam. "Deutschland muss den Weg vom Sozialstaat zum sozialen
Bildungsstaat einschlagen", haben Sie da gefordert. Und: "Der soziale Bildungsstaat muss als Ideal über allen politischen Debatten stehen."



 



Ja, das geht aber weit über die Kompetenz der KMK hinaus. Damit wollte ich ausdrücken, dass wir in Deutschland keine ausreichenden politischen Strategien haben, um unsere offensichtlichen
Probleme zu lösen. Zu diesen offensichtlichen Problemen gehört, dass wir seit langem ein Einwanderungsland sind, dass wir aber weder unsere sozialen Sicherungssysteme noch unser Bildungssystem
entsprechend ausgerichtet haben. Das ist zu null Prozent Schuld der Kinder und Jugendlichen, die zu uns kommen. Das liegt allein an der Unentschlossenheit unserer Gesellschaft und der politischen
Entscheidungsträger. 



 



"Meine Partei trägt mit Sicherheit
ihren Teil der Verantwortung."



 



Sagen Sie als stellvertretende Bundesvorsitzende einer Partei, die lange eben nicht an der Seite derjenigen standen, die schon vor 20, 25 Jahren offensiv gesagt haben: "Deutschland ist
ein Einwanderungsland." 



 



Meine Partei trägt mit Sicherheit ihren Teil der Verantwortung. Aber ehrlich gesagt kann ich auch bei den Parteien, die sich vor der CDU rhetorisch zur Einwanderung bekannt haben, nicht erkennen,
dass sie ihr politisches Handeln dadurch wesentlich geändert hätten. Die Ampel-Parteien etwa sind mit einem sehr ehrgeizigen bildungspolitischen Anspruch angetreten, den ich in vielen Bereichen
unterstützt habe. Aber was ist davon übriggeblieben? Allenfalls ein Startchancen-Programm, das es erstens noch nicht gibt und zweitens frühestens zum Schuljahr 2024/25 in Kraft treten kann, also
kurz vor Ende der Legislatur, wobei auch das zunehmend unwahrscheinlich wird. Noch dazu mit einem finanziellen Umfang, bei dem ich nur sagen kann: Dieses Programm wird die Welt nicht retten, es
wird kaum noch der Tropfen auf dem heißen Stein sein, und die großen strukturellen Themen packt es auch nicht an. Die freundliche Rhetorik von der Chancen-Gesellschaft an sich hilft keinem Kind,
die Chancen zu erhalten, die es unabhängig von seiner Herkunft verdient. Die Taten sind entscheidend, und da tun wir als Gesellschaft bislang alle zu wenig. Es gibt andere Länder, die bekommen
das hin. Ein gerechteres Bildungssystem ist keine Raketenwissenschaft, sondern eine Frage des politischen Willens. 



 



Bei Ihnen stimmt die Rhetorik auch, kann man sagen. "Wir müssen mehr in Bildung investieren", haben Sie nach PISA gesagt. Aber wie sieht es denn in Schleswig-Holstein mit den Taten aus,
in dem Land, in dem Sie Bildungsministerin sind? Ihre Landesregierung hat den Haushaltsnotstand ausgerufen nach dem Urteil des Bundesverfassungsgerichts, weil es auch bei Ihnen problematische
Haushaltskonstrukte gab. Nehmen Sie die Bildung beim Kürzen aus, legen womöglich noch etwas drauf?



 



Leider müssen wir in Schleswig-Holstein im Gesamthaushalt erheblich einsparen. Trotzdem gelingt es uns, die Bildungsausgaben im Schul- und Wissenschaftsbereich zu steigern, auch wenn die
Aufwüchse geringer ausfallen, als ich mir das wünschen würde. Deshalb werden wir priorisieren und Strukturen hinterfragen, aber wir planen als Landesregierung auch knapp 420 Stellen im
Schulbereich zu schaffen. Das ist eine große Anstrengung für Schleswig-Holstein.



 



Mehr geht nicht?



 



Das Problem ist, dass ein Landeshaushalt sehr wenig freie Masse enthält, weil er so viele Pflichtaufgaben abdeckt, die übrigens wiederum zu einem guten Teil auf Gesetzesänderungen und
Anforderungen zurückgehen, die vom Bund kommen. Wenn der Bund Wohngelderhöhungen oder Steuererleichterungen beschließt, holt er die Länder zu einem erheblichen Teil mit in die Haftung. Und wenn
die Ampel bei allen neuen Förderprogrammen auch in der Bildung künftig einen 50-Prozent-Anteil von den Ländern verlangt, schränkt das unsere landesseitigen Spielräume weiter ein. Dann wird einem
vergleichsweise finanzschwachen Land wie Schleswig-Holstein die Luft zu Atmen genommen. Und das in einer Situation, in der wir dringend mehr Ressourcen in der Bildung bräuchten angesichts massiv
wachsender Schülerzahlen, aber auch um eine bessere Bildungsqualität in den Kitas und Schulen zu ermöglichen.



 



"Natürlich ist es immer
eine Frage der Priorisierung."



 



Sie sagen also, als Land sind Sie am Ende der Möglichkeiten angekommen, aber der Bund nicht? Das sehen die Bundespolitiker auch in Ihrer Partei anders. 



 



Natürlich ist es immer eine Frage der Priorisierung, darum bin ich ja froh, dass wir in Schleswig-Holstein bei den Kitas und Schulen weniger beim Zuwachs einsparen, als es im Verhältnis zum
Gesamthaushalt eigentlich erforderlich wäre. Darum haben wir in Schleswig-Holstein und in anderen Bundesländern zum Beispiel auch das Sprachkita-Programm weiterfinanziert, nachdem der Bund
plötzlich und entgegen seinen Aussagen im Ampel-Koalitionsvertrag ausgestiegen ist. Aber am Ende können wir auch nicht völlig aussteigen, etwa in Krankenhäuser, den Hochschulbau, die Polizei oder
in den Personennahverkehr zu investieren, denn dann werden wir unsere Klimaschutzziele nicht erreichen. 




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An wen richtet sich denn dann Ihr Appell für einen sozialen Bildungsstaat und Mehrausgaben für Bildung? 



 



Der richtet sich an alle staatlichen Ebenen, an Bund, Länder und Kommunen. Es geht mir ja um zweierlei: um mehr Ausgaben für Bildung und um die richtigen Ausgaben für Bildung. Indem wir
wissenschaftlich überprüfen müssen, was hilft und was nicht. Und wenn ich das so für die Bildung einfordere, muss dasselbe für den Sozialbereich gelten. Wir müssen endlich anfangen, die
Wirksamkeit aller sozialen Transferleistungen dahingehend zu evaluieren, ob sie ein Mehr an sozialem Aufstieg ermöglichen oder nicht. Was bezogen auf die Kindergrundsicherung bedeuten kann, dass
es am Ende sinnvoller sein kann, einen Teil des Geldes in die – bewiesen wirkungsvolle – frühkindliche Bildung oder in die Sprachförderung zu stecken, als alles in ein neues soziales
Transferinstrument, das Bürokratie schafft, dessen Wirkung aber völlig offen ist. 



 



Damit würden Sie aber nur Geld verschieben, das ohnehin für Kinder und Familien vorgesehen ist. Liegt nicht genau darin das Problem in unserer alternden Gesellschaft? Dass es uns nicht
gelingt, einen größeren Teil der Staatsausgaben für die junge Generation einzusetzen? 



 



Sie haben Recht: Dieser Frage müssen wir uns stellen. Tatsächlich glaube ich, dass man der älteren Generation erklären kann, dass massive Investitionen in die Bildung ihr auch nützen. Weil nur
eine leistungsfähige junge Generation in der Lage sein wird, die Renten zu finanzieren, was schon durch den demographischen Wandel schwierig genug wird. Ich bin davon überzeugt, dass die
eigentliche soziale Frage von heute die Frage der Bildungsgerechtigkeit ist. Und wenn man das offen anspricht, verstehen die meisten Menschen das auch. Nur genau daran mangelt es in der heutigen
Politik: die Themen offen anzusprechen und auch die möglichen Einschränkungen, die daraus folgen, nicht zu verschweigen.



 



"Die Einführung der Rente mit 63 wie auch der Mütterrente war in ihrer Breite ein Fehler."



 



Klingt wieder stimmig, und wieder der Blick zurück: Es war eine CDU-Bundeskanzlerin, unter der die Rente mit 63 und die Mütterrente eingeführt wurden, die den Bundeshaushalt inzwischen
jedes Jahr mehr als 40 Milliarden Euro kosten. Doppelt so viel, wie der gesamte BMBF-Haushalt umfasst. Man könnte sagen: Da hat Ihre Partei auch eine Priorisierung vorgenommen. Zugunsten der
Älteren.



 



Es gab gute Gründe für die Einführung der Rente mit 63 und auch für die Einführung der Mütterrente, wobei das ein Geben und Nehmen war zwischen SPD und vor allem der CSU. Richtig ist aber auch,
dass bereits zu dem Zeitpunkt absehbar war, dass beides aufgrund der demographischen Situation auf Dauer nicht finanzierbar sein würde. Hinzu kommt, dass uns als Gesellschaft jetzt zunehmend die
Kompetenzen derer fehlen, die mit 63 in Rente gehen. Gerade die sehr gut Qualifizierten machen davon Gebrauch, das fällt uns inmitten des Fachkräftemangels auf die Füße. Also ja: Die Einführung
der Rente mit 63 wie auch der Mütterrente war in ihrer Breite ein Fehler, der uns jetzt massiv haushaltspolitisch einschränkt. Stärker als die Schuldenbremse.



 



War deren Einführung auch ein Fehler?



 



Die Schuldenbremse ist ein wirksames Instrument zur nachhaltigen Organisation der Staatsfinanzen zugunsten der
kommenden Generationen – damit die auch noch Gestaltungsspielräume haben. Und ich weiß genau, wovon ich rede – was es bedeutet, wenn wie bei uns in Schleswig-Holstein solche Gestaltungsspielräume
erstmal weg sind. Hinzu kommt: Die junge und die kommende Generation haben einen Anspruch darauf, dass wir die heutigen Steuermittel dafür einsetzen, ihnen möglichst gute Ausgangsbedingungen zu
verschaffen. Das bedeutet, dass wir vor zusätzlichen Schulden erst einmal alle Staatsausgaben auf ihre Sinnhaftigkeit und, ich sagte es, auf ihre Wirksamkeit überprüfen, inklusive aller sozialer
Transferausgaben – und dann entsprechende Strukturreformen vornehmen. Als nächste müssen wir schauen: An welchen Stellen brauchen wir tatsächlich den Staat? Wo kann privates Kapital einspringen,
ohne dass es den sozialen Zusammenhalt gefährdet? Und erst wenn wir das alles gewissenhaft getan haben und trotzdem noch nicht genug Geld da ist, um die großen Zukunftsausgaben richtig zu
organisieren, dann können wir gern über eine Reform der Schuldenbremse reden. Über den Einbau einer Investitionskomponente. Aber erst am Ende. Am Anfang steht die
Priorisierung. 



In eigener Sache: Blog-Finanzierung














Wie dieser Blog finanziell aufgestellt ist, warum er Ihre Unterstützung braucht – und welche Artikel im November am meisten gelesen
wurden. 



 



Mehr lesen...



Apropos Priorisierung: Was genau meinen Sie eigentlich, wenn Sie vom "sozialen Bildungsstaat" sprechen?



 



Damit meine ich das Konzept einer aktivierenden Sozial- und Bildungspolitik. Auf der Grundlage eines Menschenbildes mit dem Ziel, dass Menschen Bildung, Arbeit und Qualifizierung bekommen und
eine aktive Teilhabe an unserer Gesellschaft leben können. Genau darauf ist Bildung ja ausgerichtet: auf ein erfolgreiches und erfülltes Leben und Berufsleben und auf eine Beteiligung an unserer
Demokratie. 



 



Einer Demokratie, die im Augenblick massiv unter Druck steht, weshalb viele in der Politik noch mehr Angst haben, den Menschen etwas zuzumuten. 



 



Das ist das, was ich vorhin meinte: Wir müssen offen mit den Menschen sprechen. Dazu gehört für mich, dass wir eine bundesweite Kitapflicht für alle Kinder brauchen, die mit viereinhalb Jahren
nicht ausreichend Deutsch sprechen. Außerdem müssen wir den Zeitraum, den Menschen in sozialen Transfersystemen sind, verkürzen. Aber das eine geht nicht ohne das andere. Genau deshalb muss es
uns doch darum gehen, allen Kindern den denkbar besten Start zu ermöglichen – egal, wo sie herkommen. Alle Kinder, die heute hier sind, sind unsere Kinder, um Hendrik Wüst zu zitieren. Natürlich
gehört dazu, die Eltern viel mehr in die Pflicht zu nehmen, sich an der Bildung und Erziehung ihrer Kinder zu beteiligen, als es heute zum Teil der Fall ist. Aber wenn die Eltern das nicht tun
oder tun können, können wir dafür nicht die Kinder bestrafen. Sie alle müssen bekommen, was es heute braucht, und das ist viel mehr als die Vermittlung von Wissen oder Kompetenzen. Alle Kinder
müssen die deutsche Sprache beherrschen, bevor sie in die Schule kommen. Alle Kinder müssen sozialemotional auf die Schule vorbereitet sein, und für all das sind wir als Gesellschaft
verantwortlich. Dafür brauchen wir nicht nur mehr Lehrer, wir brauchen mehr Therapeuten, Schulsozialarbeiter und Schulassistenten. Wir brauchen eine andere Personalstruktur an den Schulen.
Kurzum, und das ist für mich die wichtigste Schlussfolgerung aus PISA: Wir müssen uns endlich so verhalten wir ein Land mit hohen Zuwanderungsquoten, das darauf angewiesen, aber auch entschlossen
ist, jedes Kind bestmöglich auszubilden. Dazu müssen wir um die Kinder und Eltern herum ein System von Hilfen und Angeboten bauen. Und es eilt.



 



"Das wird bis August kaum
noch zu schaffen sein."



 



Eigentlich wollten Bund und Länder die Bund-Länder-Vereinbarung zu den Startchancen Anfang Dezember beschließen.



 



Was schon spät gewesen wäre. Dafür hätte der Bund aber rechtzeitig vorher einen einigermaßen vollständigen Entwurf vorlegen müssen, was er aber nicht getan hat. Keiner von den noch offenen
Punkten ist unlösbar, doch jetzt wird es wohl frühestens Ende Januar etwas mit der Unterzeichnung. So ein Programm braucht aber eine gute Begleitung, Sie können nicht einfach Geld in die Schulen
geben, sondern Sie müssen ihnen die nötige Unterstützungsstrukturen dazu liefern. Das wird bis August kaum noch zu schaffen sein, wenn es nach Abschluss einer Vereinbarung erfahrungsgemäß zwei,
drei Monate dauert, bis alle Länder die parlamentarischen und rechtlichen Grundlagen geschaffen haben. Dann erst, im März oder April, könnten die Förderrichtlinien mit den kommunalen
Spitzenverbänden vereinbart und aufgestellt werden. So dass es Mai oder Juni wäre, bevor die Schulen überhaupt in die Beantragung gehen könnten. Dann müsste das Auswahlverfahren stattfinden, und
das soll bis August durch sein? Und selbst wenn, die Schulen sollen aus dem Stand loslaufen und bis Jahresende die ihnen bewilligten Gelder sinnvoll einsetzen? Das kann ich mir kaum vorstellen.
Aber natürlich werden wir alles versuchen und jetzt auch schon alles vorbereiten, ohne dass es dafür schon die rechtliche Grundlage gibt. 



 



Warum mussten die Verhandlungen überhaupt so lange dauern?



 



Der Bund hat versucht, ein sehr kleinteiliges Programm für Schulen in herausfordernden Lagen zu stricken, ohne zu wissen, wie man das eigentlich macht. In der Folge war er angewiesen auf die
Erfahrung der wenigen Bundesländer wie Hamburg oder Schleswig-Holstein, die solche Programme schon selbst aufgesetzt haben. Erschwerend kam hinzu, dass das BMBF in den Verhandlungen mit den
Ländern nie die Prokura zu haben schien, es also bei praktisch jedem Punkt nochmal Abstimmungsprozesse innerhalb der Bundesregierung brauchte. Am Ende sind es weit über 100 Arbeitssitzungen der
Verhandlungsgruppe geworden. Wer sich über die KMK, ihre Gremien und die vielen Sitzungstermine lustig macht, der sollte sich das Verfahren zur Erarbeitung des Startchancen-Programms nochmal
genauer ansehen. 



 



Zwischendurch schienen die unionsregierten Länder die Einigung bei den Startchancen auch noch verknüpfen zu wollen mit der Zusicherung des Bundes, dass die Fortsetzung des Digitalpakts
ordentlich ausfinanziert wird. War das schlau?



 



Ich begrüße, dass die Ministerpräsidenten sich bei ihrer Konferenz im November sehr eindeutig den Digitalpakt 2.0 eingefordert haben. Hier steht das grundsätzliche Vertrauen in Zusagen der
Bundesregierung auf dem Spiel.



 



Im Gegensatz zum Bundeskanzler, der zu einem gemeinsamen Beschluss zum Digitalpakt nicht bereit war. 



 



Dafür haben die Ministerpräsidenten ihre Erwartungshaltung unmissverständlich formuliert. Und zu der gehört, dass es eben nicht möglich sein wird, dass die Länder sowohl beim
Startchancen-Programm als auch beim Digitalpakt jeweils 50 Prozent der Kosten übernehmen. Es gibt Länder, für die kommt das aufgrund ihrer Haushaltssituation schlicht nicht in Betracht.  



 



"Ich bin sicher, dass bei den Startchancen etliche Länder am Ende nur mitmachen werden, wenn eine faire Lösung beim Digitalpakt gefunden
wurde."



 



Was wollen Sie denn tun, wenn Sie Ende Januar die Startchancen-Vereinbarung abschließen, zu der eine 50-prozentige Mitfinanzierung durch die Länder gehört, und der Bund danach trotzdem
auf den 50 Prozent beim Digitalpakt beharrt? 



 



Auch nachdem eine Startchancen-Vereinbarung steht, kommt das Programm nur dann, wenn alle Länder sie in ihren Parlamenten und Regierungen bestätigt haben. Schleswig-Holstein gehört zu den
Ländern, die mit dem Bund die Startchancen verhandeln, und wir werden alles tun, dass die Bund-Länder-Vereinbarung konsensfähig für alle wird. Aber ich bin sicher, dass etliche Länder am Ende nur
mitmachen werden, wenn eine faire Lösung beim Digitalpakt gefunden wurde. Immerhin sprechen wir mit dem BMBF nach langer Zeit endlich wieder dazu. Aber wir liegen noch weit auseinander. Vor allem
für die FDP, die damit angetreten ist, dass die Digitalisierung in der Bildung für sie ganz vorn stehe, wäre ein Scheitern des Digitalpakts 2.0 ein enormer Glaubwürdigkeitsverlust.



 



Und für die CDU? Sie selbst machen sich als Vize-Bundesvorsitzende demonstrativ stark für das Bildungsthema, was bedeutet das für das neue CDU-Grundsatzprogramm?



 



Dieses neue Grundsatzprogramm wird einen starken Schwerpunkt auf die Bildung legen. Der große Paradigmenwechsel christdemokratischer Bildungspolitik wird darin liegen, dass wir klar zur
frühkindlichen Bildung stehen und einen einheitlichen Bildungsplan von 0 bis 10 anstreben und Kitas und Schulen in herausfordernden Lagen besonders unterstützen werden. Dazu gehört auch ein
klares Bekenntnis zum Ganztag.



 



Auch zum gebundenen Ganztag für alle, inklusive verpflichtenden Unterrichtsangeboten am Nachmittag?



 



Das glaube ich nicht, das hielte ich aber auch nicht für richtig. Der gebundene Ganztag ist eine gute Alternative, aber keineswegs überall im Land und für alle gleichermaßen. 



 



Bei Ihrem Parteivorsitzenden Friedrich Merz hat man nicht den Eindruck, als gehöre die Politik für Kinder und Jugendlichen zu seinen Herzensanliegen. 



 



Wie kommen Sie denn darauf? Friedrich Merz ist völlig klar, dass wir unser wirtschaftliches Wachstumspotenzial nur über massive zusätzliche Investitionen in Bildung wiederbeleben werden – so, wie
es uns der Sachverständigenrat deutlich gemacht hat.  Bei der Qualität von Kitas, Schulen und Hochschulen handelt es sich in Wirklichkeit um eine Existenzfrage unserer Wirtschaft, aber auch
unseres politischen Systems. Außerdem ist Friedrich Merz jemand, der von dem Ziel der Chancengerechtigkeit zutiefst überzeugt ist. Wir ziehen da an einem Strang.