the talking contents cricket - the web basement...b eppe grillo, born in genoa in 1948, is one of...

Beppe Grillo, born in Genoa in 1948, isone of the most popular andcontroversial stand up comedians in

the history of Italian television. In the early1980s, rising audience ratings and criticalacclaim transformed the ‘talking cricket’(grillo is the Italian word for ‘cricket’) intoone of the hottest media figures.

Then, towards the end of thatdecade and into the early 1990s,something changed radically:Grillo’s increasinglyaggressive satire begantackling hot politicalissues that hitherto hadbeen taboo ontelevision. He beganopenly criticizing someof the most prominentItalian politicians andtheir penchant for bribery;he also said that bigcorporations were guilty of ‘falseadvertising and polluting consumerproducts’. With an average 12–16 millionpeople watching and listening to Grillo’s TVmonologues, a widespread feeling developedin the political and commercial sectors thatestablished businesses and revenues, alongwith important political careers, could beruined if strong measures were not taken tosilence Grillo's persistent cricketing.

So Grillo became a persona non grata.Sent into unofficial exile, he was forced toperform in theatres, sports arenas and

public squares. The press and television,with its huge and influential audiences,became no-fly zones for the comedian’shighly politicized satire.

It is no small irony that Grillo’s removalfrom the small screen made him even morepopular with the Italian public. In its eyes,he was the ultimate outspoken ‘talking

cricket’; the figure who could berelied upon to denounce the

secret manoeuvres of thepolitical and economic

establishment; whowas always unwillingto comply with therules of thecensorship game. Hebecame – some said –

a modern hero. Atleast, that was what

the editors of Timemagazine thought, when,

in 2005, they named Grilloamong the thirty–seven European

heroes of the year. Others would probablybe tempted to argue that he is nothing but apopulist.

More recently, the internet hasreinforced Grillo’s popularity, alreadyhighly unusual for someone exiled frommainstream media. The advent of theinternet has given Grillo, like others, a newchance to climb back into the publiclimelight, initially by transforming himfrom a popular comedian into a blogger,

The TalkingCricketGiovanni Navarria asks whether beppegrillo.it can provide a new

democratic space for Italian politics

C O N T E N T S

Besieged in Beirut 3Maria Holt

The Politics of Affectedness 5Noortje Marres

Language-games 12Amanda Machin

Against Naive Pluralism 15Kari Karppinen

Politics as Religion 23David Chandler

The EU and South Africa 26Magdalena Frennhof Larsén

Was Mao a Monster? 29Rana Mitter

Islamism and Democracy 33Abdelwahab El-Affendi

C S D N E W S

Staff 17/Masters 18/PhDs 19Staff Research 19/Events 20/

CSD students and theRussian spy 21/Staff News 21

The CSD Bulletin is published

in Winter and Summer.

ISSN: 1461-4510

E D I T O R : Patrick Burke

E D I T O R I A L B O A R D :

Simon Joss, John Keane,

Amanda Machin,

Giovanni Navarria

T H E B U L L E T I NcsdC E N T R E F O R T H E S T U D Y O F D E M O C R A C Y | S U M M E R 2 0 0 7 | D O U B L E I S S U E : V O L 1 4 N O S 1 & 2

CSD Interview 8Abdolkarim Soroush

csd bulletin 14 double.qxp 13/06/2007 19:45

then into a rather unusual andimportant political guru.

The web has provided Grillo with anew agora, in the form of a blog:beppegrillo.it. On this blog he and hisstaff give to their rapidly expanding andactive community of readers the kindof non-aligned and critical politicalinformation that rarely finds space ontoday’s prime-time television news, oron the front page of newspapers. At thesame time, thanks to the commentsand countless feedbacks posted daily onthe blog or sent via email, Grillohimself has access to information andstories that otherwise would remainuntold.

A BLOG DEFINEDThe Grillo phenomenon raisesthe question of what is meantby a blog. First introduced in1999, the term, an abbreviationof ‘weblog’, refers to an onlinediary or journal the entries, orposts, of which are public, oftenorganized chronologically, and usuallyarchived within certain categories. Thestructure of a blog makes it a simpleand direct means of producing anddistributing information. A blog isalways easily accessible and editable onthe internet. Its content is as variable ascan be imagined. It can contain anykind of user-generated content, fromtext to image, from sound to video. Thecontent itself can be downloaded, read,used, commented on, and exchangedeasily and rapidly; perhaps moreimportant, the content can be daringand politically incorrect.

These characteristicsensure that blogs arebecoming an essentialfeature of the web. A July2006 telephone survey bythe Pew Internet &American Life Projectshowed that, in the UnitedStates, where about 57million adult Americansread blogs, ‘blogging isinspiring a new group ofwriters and creators toshare their voices with theworld’. According toTechnorati.com, probablythe most authoritativeranking and search enginein the world of blogs, there

are (as of March 2007) 70.2 millionblogs on the internet. Since 2003, thenumber of blogs has been doublingevery six months. About 175,000 newblogs are created every day along with,on average, 1.6 million postedmessages.

BLOGGING FOR POLITICS!This trend has been stimulated by thefact that, in recent years, bloggingtechnology has become easier to use(and thus helped to reduce thetechnical gap that once existed incyberspace between users and contentproducers). Anyone can now easilyaccess a blog. Every user of the internet

can have their own blog, and/oreffortlessly share the content of a blogwith the whole community of peoplesurfing the web. The increasingsimplicity and popularity of self-publishing tools have given everyone,at least those with a computer and aninternet connection, access to thepower of broadcasting and publishinginformation. These tools include blogs;‘wikis’ (for example, the freeencyclopaedia wikipedia, writtencollaboratively by volunteers usingwiki software); free video–hostingplatforms such as Youtube.com; and

social networking websites such asmyspace.com – and they bypass thehistorical monopoly of mainstreammedia, for example, televisionnetworks and the press.

Of course, the average blogger hasnowhere near the same reach andpower as major broadcasters, forinstance the BBC. Having said that,Beppe Grillo’s blog is an interestingexample both of the present–daydemocratizing pressures oncommunication media ownership andof the political challenge that newmedia pose to older mainstream media.In the age of the internet, beppegrillo.itcan also be seen as an archetype, amodel of a new type of civicengagement that has a particular bite inthe Italian context. The late IndroMontanelli, once widely regarded asthe leading Italian journalist,repeatedly warned his readers thatSilvio Berlusconi’s de facto monopolyof the Italian media posed a greatdanger to democracy. ‘Nowadays’,Montanelli once said, ‘to found aregime, one no longer needs to marchon Rome, or to set fire to the Reichstag.. . . All that is needed are the so-calledmass communication media. Amongthem, sovereign and irresistible, istelevision.’ In Montanelli’s warning we can read the raison d’être of Grillo’sblog

The best way – in Grillo's opinion –to defeat the kind of mediaregime operated by Berlusconi isto infiltrate into it theinformation that no one daresprovide. By using the wholegamut of new communicationmedia, including the blog, onecan exploit faults in the system.Attempts can be made to

‘perforate’ the system, to make thepublic aware of different truths.

It was in this spirit that, on 16January 2005, beppegrillo.it waslaunched. In the words of Grillo, a ‘blogis an amazing thing that connectspeople’, virtually and practically.Beppegrillo.it aims to provide a freeplatform for all citizens, regardless oftheir political views, who want tocommunicate and share information.Facilitated by a link with the online

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‘In 2005 the editors of Time magazine

named Grillo among the thirty-seven

European heroes of the year.’

Continued on inside backpage


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When the violence began inLebanon in July 2006, I wasstruck by the similarities

with the summer of 1982: Italy winsthe World Cup, Israel invadesLebanon…

I arrived at Beirut InternationalAirport on 11 July, on a plane fromLondon full of families noisily lookingforward to their summer holidays inLebanon. One week on, with Israelibombs falling in the south, and theairport and much of the country’sinfrastructure destroyed, I was waitingto be evacuated by the Britishgovernment, appalled at how quicklyLebanon had been plunged back intoterrifying instability. I would wake inthe night to the low drone of aircraft,then the distant thud of bombs; withina short time the suburb of Haret Hraikin the south of Beirut, claimed by theIsraelis to be the ‘heartland’ ofHizbullah, had been reduced to rubble.

HIZBULLAHI first went to Lebanon in January1993. The civil war that had begun in1975 had not long ended and therewere signs of destruction everywhere:electricity, water, telephones, trafficlights – nothing worked very well; butthere was a determination to rebuildnormal life so that the terrible years ofwar would never return. I came back in1994 to explore the complex reality ofHizbullah, an organization regarded bymany in the West as responsible for

terrorist acts since 1982 – and admiredby many Lebanese as a source ofdignity and resistance. I met a range ofindividuals associated with Hizbullah,which since the 1992 election had hadseveral members of parliament, andvisited some of its social welfareprojects. I have returned to Lebanonmany times since, mainly to researchinto the effects of violent conflict on

Lebanese Shi’i and Palestinian women,and I have observed a steadyimprovement in most aspects of life.

Of course, problems have remained.These are above all – put simply– thefailure to achieve significant politicalreform, and the inability to resolve theconflict with Israel. Israeli incursions

into Lebanon have been frequent andoften brutal. After its invasion in 1978Israel occupied part of southernLebanon for 22 years. Hizbullah,created after the Israeli invasion of1982, dedicated itself to ridding thecountry of what it saw as Israeliaggression against the Lebanese andPalestinian peoples. In interviews withHizbullah officials between 1994 and2003, including its leader HassanNasrallah, I found the organization tobe disciplined, determined and self-confident.

Israel finally withdrew fromsouthern Lebanon in May 2000, largelyin response to Hizbullah’s militarycampaign, and the area’s mostly Shi’ipopulation started to rebuild their livesand communities. Many spoke offeelings of fear and powerlessness; theybelieved that Israel had behaved, andcontinues to behave, towards them in ahumiliating way. A woman living in aborder village, quoted by the LebaneseEnglish-language Daily Star during theJuly 2006 conflict, said: ‘This is ourcountry and we have to defend it. If wedon’t stand up to Israel they willannihilate us.’

BORDER VISITSIn September 2000, withrepresentatives of a local Shi’iorganization and a Palestinianrefugee from Bourj el-Barajne camp inBeirut, I visited the border area,‘liberated’ from Israeli occupation afew months earlier. Our first stop wasthe village of Qana, where a museumhad been built to commemorate themassacre of 1996. In this massacreover a hundred civilians – men,women and children – died whenIsrael bombed the UN compound inwhich they were sheltering during anIsraeli attack on southern Lebanon.From there, we went to the formerprison in the village of Khiam, whichHizbullah had transformed into amemorial. Notorious during theIsraeli occupation as a place where

torture was practised, it still lookedgrim; but it was full not of prisonersbut of Lebanese adults and childrencurious to view the horrors. At theborder with Israel, we gazed, past theUN soldiers from Ghana on one sideand the Israeli soldier in his barricadedwatchtower on the other, into

Besieged inBeirut

Maria Holt was in Beirut when the 2006 ‘July War’ broke out. She

recalls her experiences then and on previous visits to Lebanon.



‘occupied Palestine’; it was the firsttime that my refugee friend had seenhis homeland.

In 2003, I visited the town of BintJbeil, close to the Israeli border, toconduct interviews with local womenwho had lived through the Israelioccupation of their area. It wasFebruary and the weather was so badthat the journey took twice as long asusual. Friends drove me to a hilltop togaze down at Israel, barely visible inthe driving rain; there it is, they said,‘occupied Palestine’. AnAmerican attack on Iraq wasanticipated and many in thesouth believed that this mightgive the Israelis a pretext tore–invade the area. At the endof July 2006, I saw on ChannelFour News the devastationthat Israel’s latest attacks hadcaused: Bint Jbeil, described asa ‘Hizbullah stronghold’, hadbeen almost completely destroyed;many of its citizens had been killed orinjured; hundreds had been forced toflee.

DESTRUCTION, DEATH, TERRORI remained in Beirut for the first weekof the July invasion, waiting to berescued by the British government.Like everyone else, I watchedtelevision incessantly, dismayed by the

scenes of destruction, death and terror.Many people I spoke to in Beirut in theweek after hostilities began expressedbewilderment, anxiety and a sense ofvictimization. It seemed incrediblethat the international community wasunable – or unwilling – to call for animmediate end to hostilities. I feltangry and sad at the same time.Everything had become secondary toIsrael’s overwhelming determinationto exact vengeance for the kidnappingof two Israeli soldiers. In their tepid

joint statement, the G8 leadersmeeting in St Petersburg in Julydeclared Hamas and Hizbullahresponsible for the crisis. Thekidnapping, and the targeting of Israelitowns, said President Bush, lie at theroot of this problem. Yet, ImadMoustafa, Syria’s ambassador toWashington, remarked, there was an‘elephant in the room’: the unresolvedand largely unaddressed Israeli

occupation of Palestinian, Syrian andLebanese territory.

Before the July conflict, theLebanese government, includingHizbullah, was engaged in a ‘nationaldialogue’ to address the outstandingissues of war and an unrepresentativepolitical system. Visiting Lebanon inearly June 2006, I observed bothoptimism and frustration. Thecountry’s economy was starting torevive as tourists arrived in significantnumbers; elegant hotels andrestaurants and chic, exclusive shopswere springing up in Beirut; an air ofself–confidence was apparent. Butthere was also exasperation at the slowpace of reform.

In a speech to the Knesset during theJuly conflict, Israeli Prime MinisterEhud Olmert spoke about the need ‘toeliminate those who hate us’. But heneeds to look more closely at thereasons for such feelings of hate. Ifwhole peoples – Palestinians, Syrians,Iranians, the Shi’i citizens of Lebanon –are demonized as ‘terrorists’, the basisfor reasonable discussion is removed.Israel’s resort in 2006, as in 1982, todisproportionate violence is unlikelyto help resolve the Arab–Israel conflict.In an article in The Independent (11August 2006), Ghayth Armanazi,director of the Syrian Media Centre inLondon, argued that generations ofArabs ‘are awakening to a new reality.If a few thousand, at most lightlyarmed, but steel–willed, irregulars can

withstand the monster theyso feared, what can stop them,with all the potential theypossess, from at last slayingthe dragon of theirnightmares?’

As I sailed away fromBeirut on the HMSGloucester in July, I lookedback through the inkydarkness towards Lebanon,

wondering when I would return. Iconcluded sadly that, unless seriousefforts at regional and internationallevels are undertaken to address in asubstantive way the core issue – theelephant in the room – we may see areturn to the desperation of 1982.

Maria Holt is a Research Fellow in theDemocracy and Islam Programme atCSD.

‘Waiting to be evacuated by the British

government, I was appalled at how quickly

Lebanon had been plunged back into

terrifying instability.’


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Science and Technology Studies(STS) has opened up distinctiveperspectives on democracy in at

least two ways. To begin with, STS is arguably best

known for having introduced thenotion of ‘co-constructionism’, theidea that science, policy and socialarrangements must be understood asoutcomes of interactions amongresearch and politics. In empiricalstudies conducted since the early1980s, Michel Callon, Bruno Latour,John Law, Sheila Jasanoff and SteveWoolgar, among others, have demon-strated that scientific and technologi-cal practices cannot be understoodunless relations between sci-ence, society, the state andthe public are taken intoaccount. In ThePasteurization of France(1988), Bruno Latour showedthat Louis Pasteur’s discov-ery of the vaccine againstanthrax is incomprehensibleif we ignore Pasteur’s rela-tions with non-scientificactors such as farmers and the govern-ment bureau of statistics. STS hasargued that the modern ideal of a strictinstitutional separation between anautonomous science and a sovereignpolitics cannot be upheld in practice.

Some authors in the field havederived normative proposals from thisinsight. They argue for a shift away

from autonomy towards collaborationas the principle that coordinates rela-tions between science and politics.Expertise in, and both policy andsocial concern about, techno-scientificissues, they suggest, are best under-stood as the outcomes of interactionsamong the relevant actors.

Yet, as Sheila Jasanoff noted inDesigns on Nature (2005), the focusin STS on the relations between sci-ence and politics (and lay audiences)carries with it a certain risk. Thisfocus, namely, tends to produce aninstitutionalist notion of democracy,one in which the coordination oforganizational relations is the central

concern. Such an approach may losesight of ‘the public’; it may fail to con-sider this public as an extra-institu-tional configuration, one that resistsassimilation to the professional cate-gories of experts, policymakers orstakeholders. A second distinctivefeature of STS research thus deservesattention.

CIVIC ENGAGEMENTThis strand of STS research focuses onsituated practices of civic engagementwith science and technology. In empir-ical studies of controversies abouttechno-scientific issues, such asnuclear energy and pollution, BrianWynne and Andrew Barry, among oth-ers, have documented the forms thatsuch engagement takes. A distinctivefeature of such studies is their empha-sis on the role of material and physicalentities in civic activism. In PoliticalMachines (2001), Barry describes insitu protests against road-building pro-jects in England, such as the Newburybypass, and emphasizes that the pro-testors used the setting – rural Englishlandscapes soon to be mutilated byconstruction work – to try to open upthe project for contestation.

This attention to the role of physicalentities as objects and instruments ofthe expression of civic concern isalready present in Brian Wynne'sfamous study ‘May the sheep safelygraze?’ (1996), which discusses hownorth Cumbrian sheep farmersresponded to nuclear fallout afterChernobyl. Wynne focuses on the roleof ‘endangered’ physical and materialassociations in civic activism: the rela-tion of the sheep farmers to both theirallegedly contaminated agriculturallands and to the Sellafield nuclearpower plant that gave employment totheir next of kin. Importantly, Wynne’sstudy does not just refer to these physi-cal, social and material dependencies –and how they came under threat – as a

justification for people’sengagement. He also suggests,like Barry, that this civicinvolvement in controversyentailed the mobilization ofsuch endangered attachments;in articulating their concern,actors actively drew on theseassociations.

This preoccupation withmaterial, social and physical

associations in studies of civicactivism reflects a broader theoreticalagenda of science and technology stud-ies; this has been characterized as a‘material turn’, or even an ‘ontologicalturn’. With regard to its wider philo-sophical ambition, STS research hassought to break with an epistemic biasin philosophy and social science:

’Scientific and technological practices

cannot be understood unless relations

between science, society, the state and the

public are taken into account.’

The Politics ofAffectedness

Noortje Marres considers the contribution of science and

technology studies to our understanding of democracy



namely, the tendency to characterizepractices in terms of cognitive opera-tions, that is, distinctive modes of rea-soning. As part of this project, actor-network theory, the STS spin-offdeveloped by Callon, Latour and Law,has advocated a focus on the hetero-geneity of practice, a notion they useto highlight that not only humanactors but also non-human entitiescontribute significantly to the organi-zation of social and political life.

However, the emphasis on themobilization of material associationsin civic activism, though in line withthis broader project, also makes a morespecific contribution to the study ofpublic involvement in politics: it pro-motes a particular take on what couldbe called ‘the politics of affectedness’.In recent decades, ‘issue-affectedness’has become a prominent element ofconceptualizations of democratic poli-tics. Notions of stakeholder democracyand models of global democracy, asdeveloped by David Held (GlobalCovenant, 2004) among others, rely onthe ‘affectedness principle’ to delineatethe democratic community. Theextent to which actors are ‘signifi-cantly’ affected by issues is then animportant legimatory basis for theseactors’ participation in the relevantpolitical processes. Whether peoplesuffer material, physical and socialeffects that can be traced back to theissues at stake determines in large part

whether these actors can or cannotadopt the role of the ‘public’. Theapproach, in science and technologystudies, to civic activism in terms ofthe mobilization of affected relationsresonates with this project in severalrespects. The democratic theory thatfirst put ‘issue-affectedness’ centrestage – that of the American pragma-tists John Dewey and Walter Lippmann– can help to make clear how.

DEWEY ANDLIPPMANNOne of John Dewey’s moreimportant contributions topolitical theory was hisnotion of ‘issue-affected-ness’ as a principle under-pinning the organization ofpolitical community. Thisnotion should be under-stood against the backdropof Dewey’s proposal thatdemocratic theory shift from a concernwith will and opinion formation to anemphasis on issue formation. In ThePublic and Its Problems (1928), Deweyfamously proposed a consequentialistapproach to politics. He questioned theobsession of modern democratic the-ory with the causes of democracy; withthe projection of a collective actor –the public – as a causal force behindpolitics. Instead, he advocated under-standing the public as an effect. Indoing so, he allotted a crucial role to

social problems in the formation ofpublics. In his classic definition ofthe public:

The public consists of all thosewho are affected by indirectconsequences of transactions,to such an extent that it isdeemed necessary to have thoseconsequences systematicallycared for.

According to Dewey, publicscome into being only when a suffi-ciently wide range of actors isaffected by social problems beyondtheir immediate control. Moreover,this type of public wants above allto ensure that these problems areaddressed. Here, as Sheldon Wolinemphasized in Politics and Vision(2006), Dewey came very close toformulating the idea of politics as

problem-solving, later associated withthe philosophy of Karl Popper.However, Dewey’s approach differsfrom Popper’s scientific understandingof democracy precisely in that hegrants central importance to the factthat social actors are affected by theissues at stake in politics. In Dewey’saccount, the adequate articulation ofissues requires that ‘those who areaffected form a public’.

In foregrounding issue–affectednessin the process of public involvement inpolitics, the pragmatists did more thanpropose a specific condition of democ-ratic participation. Their argumentsalso implied a critique of certain mod-els of democratic engagement. This isparticularly clear in the work of WalterLippmann, who criticized the epis-temic assumptions in classic-modern(Jeffersonian) democratic theory. InThe Phantom Public (1928), Lippmannquestioned conceptions of the citizenas a figure with a general interest inpublic affairs. He argued that only ifthey were actually affected by socialproblems would political ‘outsiders’have sufficient reason to become inter-ested in politics. This ‘problem-ori-ented’ understanding of public involve-ment led Lippmann to criticize thenotion that public participation ispredicated on adequate informationand cognitive skill. In Lippmann'saccount, the space for public involve-ment in politics opens up when ade-quate information and the skillsrequired to deal with a social problemare generally found lacking. As he putit:

When the facts are most obscure,where precedents are lacking,where novelty and confusion per-vade everything, the public in allits unfitness is compelled to

‘For Lippmann, the special competence of

the public consists in its capacity to

demonstrate concern for issues under

circumstances of generalized incompetence.’



make its most important deci-sions. The hardest problems areproblems that institutions can-not handle. These are the public’sproblems.

For Lippmann, the special compe-tence of the public consists in itscapacity to demonstrate concern forissues under circumstances of general-ized incompetence. A lack of compe-tence and familiarity does not keeppublics – by contrast with experts andinsiders – from engaging with an issue.This argument also provides a furtherexplanation of why the definition ofpublics as groups of people affected byissues is important from a pragmatistperspective: being affected by a socialproblem can or must be sufficient rea-son for a public to engage with it.

CONSTRUCTIVIST COLOURHow do these pragmatist insights helpus appreciate the potential contribu-tion of science and technology studiesto the study of public involvement inpolitics? Like other current perspec-tives on democracy, STS approachesmake the pragmatist assumption thatpublic participation is and should betied to the extent to which socialactors are affected by issues. But STSgives this idea a twist. Manyapproaches that incorporate the issue-

affectedness principle present issue-affectedness as a precondition of pub-lic participation. They tend tocharacterize public participationprocesses themselves in other terms,such as the negotiation of problem-definitions.

STS accounts of civic activism sig-nificantly enlarge the category ofissue-affectedness. They do this bygiving a particular constructivistcolour to the problem-oriented under-standing of the public that the pragma-tists propose. STS explains civic

activism as entailing the mobiliza-tion of ‘issue-affected’ associations,such as a landscape soon to be muti-lated by a road; here civic activismis to an extent understood as involv-ing ‘performances’ of issue-affected-ness.

STS research is committed to theconstructivist insight that the exis-tence of facts is predicated on thedemonstration of facts; this can alsobe applied to the fact of ‘issue-affectedness’. That is, the construc-tivist commitment is different fromclassic pragmatism, which assumedthat ‘issue-affectedness’ was objec-tively given and could be measuredin a straightforward way. From anSTS perspective, by contrast, ‘issue-affectedness’ must be understood asthe product of the articulation of anissue, whether this articulation takesthe form of scientific research, legalinvestigation or organizational proce-dure.

Importantly, in science and tech-nology studies this contructivist moveis not accompanied by a discursivistturn, one that would displace atten-tion to the issue definitions and idealframes mobilized to articulate issues.In some respects, STS invites us topersist in the ‘object-orientation’ ofpragmatism; it highlights the ways inwhich issues make themselves felt in

social, technical,material and physi-cal associations.Moreover, likeDewey, somestrands of STSresearch focus onthe mobilization ofaffected publicsthemselves. But,being construc-

tivist, it also highlights how publicactivism entails the mobilization ofaffected associations in order to articu-late concern. Issue–affectedness is,then, not only a condition, but also aproduct, of public activism. The mobi-lization of material, social, physicaland technical associations in suchactivism enables the dramatization ofissue–affectedness, and thus of issues.

EFFECTIVENESSSuch a claim invites one to questionseveral aspects of public involvement

in politics: among other things, itre–opens the debate about what theeffectiveness of public mobilizationconsists of. Does this effectivenessentail the articulation of people'sattachments as issue-affected, and theamplification of the ‘issue-affective’charges of relations? This questionsuggests that an object-orientedapproach to public involvement inpolitics may provide a way to developa positive appreciation of affective pol-itics, as suggested by, among others,Chantal Mouffe and Nigel Thrift. Itcould help to demonstrate how thepolitics of affect involves the mobi-lization not only of emotive and dis-cursive relations, but also of material,physical and social ones. Indeed, suchan approach places the question ofactors ‘capacity to be affected’ byissues at the centre of the study of pub-lic involvement in politics.Importantly, STS, like WalterLippmann, suggests that this capacitydoes not entail, first and foremost, anepistemic competence, in the sense ofhaving knowledge of the issues.Science and technology studies asksus, rather, to consider how ourinvolvement in issues is mediated bythe associations that are constitutiveof life forms.

Noortje Marres is Marie CurieResearch Fellow at the Department ofSociology, Goldsmiths, University ofLondon. This is an edited extractfrom a paper she gave to the CSDSeminar in March 2007.

‘STS research highlights how public

activism entails the mobilization of affected

associations in order to articulate concern.’


John Keane: You said recently that thetopic of justice (adalat) is back on thepolitical agenda in your country. Youcontrasted the ‘era of the slogan offreedom’ under President Khatamiwith the emergent ‘era of the slogan ofjustice’ championed by MrAhmadinejad. What did you mean?

Abdolkarim Soroush: The discourseof justice wasn’t prominent in Iranduring the two presidencies of MrKhatami. He came to power throughelections, and that was significant.Elections not only reinforced his per-sonal interest in liberty; they also rein-forced the felt need of Iranian societyfor liberty. Later, people seemed togrow tired of Khatami’s slogans aboutfreedom. That paved the way for thenew president, Mr Ahmadinejad. Heisn’t a profound thinker, but he is sup-posed to be firmly religious. Since the

concept of justice is deeply rooted inthe teachings of Islam, it is what heprefers to talk about. His electionpromises included the commitment toprovide ‘full justice’ to the poor andthe deprived. Of course, everyoneknows that liberty and justice aretwins. There can be no justice withoutliberty. When I spoke about the differ-ent slogans of the two presidencies, Iwanted to challenge Mr Ahmadinejad:since you are for justice, you should befor liberty as well.

Among the many strange things aboutthe word justice, you’ve pointed out,is that in Persian, as in English, thereis no cognate verb for ‘justice’. Wehave laughing, kissing, arresting ormurdering, but we do not have ‘jus-tice-ing’. The verb to justify, as whenwe give reasons for doing something,or when we line up a text in an orderly

way, is not the same. It is as if justiceis condemned to being an abstractnoun. That enables all kinds of peopleto speak of justice in various and con-flicting ways. It even allows rogues totake refuge in talk of justice. Think ofUS vice–president Dick Cheney’s dec-laration that ‘water boarding’, the tor-ture under water and forced confessionof prisoners, is an act of ‘justice’. OrPresident Bush: ‘I want justice’, hesaid shortly after the 11 September2001 attacks, ‘and there’s an old posterout West I recall that said “Wanted,Dead or Alive”.’ Aren’t these exam-ples of the way the notion of justice isdemeaned by its abstractness?

Justice is a complicated subject. Thereis of course no ‘justice-ing’ in English,though with a bit of linguisticmanoeuvring one can create the verb‘to do justice’ to somebody or some-thing. The same is true in Persian andArabic. But the most important thingis this: both linguistic strategy andconceptual analysis make it abun-dantly clear that while justice is not averb or an action, it is often used as anadjective. The field of ethics tells youwhen and in which context actions arejust, that is, justified. Here justiceworks as an adjective: justified lying,justified killing, or justified stealing.Justice implies the justification ofaction. This is how John Rawls’s ATheory of Justice proceeds. It tries tosay that certain inequalities are justi-fied inequalities. Justice is also a polit-ical concept. It is the link between pol-itics and ethics: politics becomesethical through justice. Justice is aconcept that governs both politics andethics.

So could we say that justice is aboutthe right ordering of contexts – that‘justice is a relationship of suitabilitywhich actually exists between twothings’, as Montesquieu famously putit in his Persian Letters? Or is it per-haps better to say that justice is a mat-ter of rights, that it entails the entitle-ments of people, and their obligationsto one another in any given context?

The definition of justice as the fulfil-ment of rights or, as in Plato andAristotle, the paying of debts, is muchclearer, if only because it confines

The Beauty ofJustice

Abdolkarim Soroush is Iran’s most prominent and controversial

philosopher and public intellectual. In November 2006 he was the

subject of the annual CSD Encounter (see ‘CSD Events’, p. 20).

Shortly after the Encounter John Keane interviewed him.

CSD Interview




itself to human beings. But I likeMontesquieu’s old definition of justiceas putting things in their right place.Even though it doesn’t tell us muchabout what to do or what to avoid, itassumes that things in the universehave potentially a right order that canbe discovered, and then can be used toguide action. According to Rumi, thePersian mystic, watering flowers is ajust action, whereas watering thorns isunjust because it is a misuse of water.In Arabic, justice – adalat – means bal-ance in this sense. For instance, if thewhole universe has a balanced archi-tecture, if it is not distorted, then it issaid to be just. This idea of justice asbalance overlaps with a rights-basedconception of justice. To speak ofrights is to speak of obligations. A justperson, we could say, is someone whostrikes a balance between rights andobligations by fulfilling both in a justi-fied way.

The principle that all matters shouldbe decided justly lies at the spiritualand political heart of Islam. There aremany well-known passages in theQur’an, but this one puzzles me: ‘Letnot the enmity of others make yousway from justice; be just, that is onlynearer to taqwa' (5:42). What does thismean?

This verse is among the most impor-tant in the Qur’an. Wisely, you didn’ttranslate taqwa. It isn’t fully translat-able. It means something like virtue,piety, fearfulness of God, abstentionfrom committing sins. . .

Justice seems to besubordinate totaqwa?

Yes. This verse saysthat justice shouldbe done in order toget closer to taqwa,which is seen as thehighest virtue onecan reach. Justice is a kind of ladder totaqwa.

Elsewhere you’ve spoken, rather para-doxically, about the redundancy of jus-tice…

I had something else in mind. What I

wanted to say is that,since justice is anadjective, it can beused to cover and jus-tify any natural action.Justice is not a virtueover and above othervirtues in any givensystem of morality.When you are a moralperson then you are ajust person. It resem-bles the way Frank P.Ramsey speaks aboutthe redundancy oftruth. He doesn’t meanthat there is no truth inthe world. He rathermeans that when yousay ‘p’ is true, then thewords ‘is true’ areredundant because ‘p’states what is the case.Here there is an anal-ogy with justice, forwhen we speak of moral virtues oractions, by definition we are speakingof justified states of affairs.

This has important practical impli-cations, for any particular moral valuecannot be sacrificed for the sake of jus-tice, simply because justice is not aseparate value. You cannot say, forexample, that you performed an unjus-tified action in order to attain justice.This would be a fallacy. If you do thinkthat justice is a different entity, thenyou can of course sacrifice a wholeethical system for the sake of this sup-posed justice. When studying Marxistethics, I was struck by the way its pro-

ponents talked all the time about jus-tice. They were ready to sacrificeeverything moral for the sake of jus-tice. But justice is not an independentvirtue: it is a myth to think that it is,and that is why I said that justice isredundant. Justice is the sum of allmoral virtues.

But here we come to the issue ofwhether or not there are universalstandards of justice. Montesquieu isagain interesting. ‘Justice is eternal’,he wrote, ‘and doesn’t depend onhuman conventions; even if it were todepend on them this truth would be aterrible one, and we should have toconceal it from ourselves.’ How do youreact to that way of thinking aboutjustice?

This is a wonderfully clever and poeticstatement. But although people con-stantly strive both for justice andsometimes even a universal definitionof justice, I doubt that they can or willever get there. For the most we canachieve is an interpretation of justice –a definition of what counts as justice.Such interpretations are of course con-ventional and provisional, and theydiffer from each other.

Within contemporary discussions ofjustice, scholars like to emphasize itsdifferent grammars, the differentkinds of equalities these grammarsimply, and to stress that the languageof justice and equality are often rid-dled with paradoxes. The most obvi-ous example is the tension betweenjustice understood as equality ofresults and justice defined as equalityof opportunity, a form of equality that

‘A just person, we could say, is some-

one who strikes a balance between

rights and obligations by fulfilling both

in a justified way.’


typically results inunequal outcomes, in‘winners’ and ‘losers’.Doesn’t your pointabout the interpretedquality of justice lead inthe same direction, sothat the politics of jus-tice has to grapple withquestions of pluralism,complexity and contra-dictoriness?

Absolutely. I endorsefully Isaiah Berlin'spoint that there are nec-essarily contradictorypositions in ethics. Ialways compare the sci-ence of ethics with thescience of logic. The sci-ence of logic is consis-tent; different methodsof deducing results fromcertain premises areconsistent with oneanother. But no suchconsistency proof existsfor any given system ofmorality. Nobody has ever provedthat virtue/value A is necessarily con-sistent with virtue/value B,virtue/value C, and so on. In mattersof ethics, we are confronted by poten-tially inconsistent virtues. That iswhy we have no alternative but tochoose from among different virtuesand values and, on that basis, to selectour priorities.

If different values and virtues arepotentially incommensurablethen doesn’t this imply theneed for something morebasic than justice – if you like,an earthly complement totaqwa in the shape of institu-tions that enable the peacefulflourishing of different livedunderstandings of justice?Doesn’t the human capacityfor concocting different andconflicting notions of justice– values and virtues – makedemocracy both possible and neces-sary?

Yes. In my book Reason, Freedom andDemocracy, I have similarly arguedthat liberty is a value, and that even

the opponents ofthis virtue need itin order to expresstheir opposition toliberty. Liberty is anecessary condi-tion of itself. Thisis another way ofmaking your point,and it is a verycurious feature ofjustice: in order toair our differencesabout justice, weneed a just, that is,democratic systemof institutionswithin which wecan handle our dif-ferences.

This, of course,raises a trickyquestion: whoshould be the jus-tice makers?Given that we arealways immersedin an ocean of

interpretations, and since thereforejustice is also a matter of interpreta-tion – of ijtihad – who should properlydecide which people get what, whenand how?

It’s not for me to say who shoulddecide. If I tried, nobody would berequired to listen to me, or to anyother authority. Some people say thatreligion or God must decide what isjust. Others say reason, or the collec-

tive reason of the masses shoulddecide, but disagreements persist. Inorder to resolve these disputes, I thinkwe need free institutions that enabledialogue about how to reach better,more justifiable outcomes. The right

to democratic freedoms is a subset ofjustice.

Are there standards of justice that cutacross borders and that should apply topeople whom we may never meet,whose language we don’t speak, orwhose beliefs we don’t share?

I wish that we could have cross-borderdiscussions about justice. The realityis that nation states look out only fortheir own interests. The time when weshall decide matters of global justice isfar off. Globalization neverthelessmakes global justice, backed up byglobal institutions of power, necessaryand desirable. The trouble is thatpolitical power is currently distrib-uted unevenly, so that issues of globaljustice are distorted, for instance byinterventions of the American super-power.

Do you see any prospects for counter-balancing this power through the lan-guage of human rights as a majorcross-border medium of justice?

I do. While the Universal Declarationof Human Rights was mainly draftedby Europeans, and although othernations would need to be involved inany new human rights declaration, thepresent charter talks about concretecases, rather than about abstract ideasof justice, and that is why it hasdeservedly won widespread accep-tance. Most of the Declaration is com-patible with Islamic values. Otherparts have an uneasy relationship with

Islam. But let us remember:a declaration of rights willnever be sufficient unless itis complemented by a decla-ration of responsibilities, ofthe kind proposed by theInterAction Council [ofFormer Heads of State andGovernment] in 1997.

We need such docu-ments, and great painsshould be taken to draft newversions. Mind you,

whereas duties constitute sufficientexplanation for actions, rights do not.When, for instance, I am telling thetruth it suffices to say, by way ofexplanation, that it is my duty to doso. But I cannot say that I am telling

1 0 | C S D B U L L E T I N | S U M M E R 2 0 0 7 | V O L 1 4 N O S 1 & 2

‘Shi’ites say that future justice will be

global, that it will be for everyone, not just

for a particular community, be it Shi’ites or

Sunnis, or for that matter Christians.’


C S D B U L L E T I N | S U M M E R 2 0 0 7 | V O L 1 4 N O S 1 & 2 | 1 1

the truth because it is my right, sinceyou may retort that you equally havethe right not to do so. The point is thatthe language of rights is not spaciousenough to accommodate justificationsor explanations of all our potentialactions. We need something more. Weneed not only a concept of rights butalso a concept of justice in order to jus-tify or explain actions.

You said that Islamic values are in ten-sion with parts of the Declaration ofHuman Rights. Which articles do youhave in mind?

The principle of freedom ofreligion is something aboutwhich Muslim scholars andclerics are not altogetherhappy. The same applies tothe principle that men andwomen are equal in everyrespect. But these samescholars and clerics still support manyother points made by the Declaration,which is an excellent means of bring-ing nations together and building aconsensus on what counts as globalrights and duties.

Do you think global justice mighthave religious sources?

There is one principle that has definitereligious roots: the principle that weshould treat others as we would likethem to treat us. While I’m aware ofits limitations, this principle isappealing because it draws upon ourselfishness. It makes our self a crite-rion for deciding what should be doneto others, for example in the conductof friendship and the keeping ofpromises. It specifies as well what weshould not do to others, for instancetorturing or murdering them. Theprinciple is highly fertile, and mostclauses of the Declaration of HumanRights are derived from it. It is a normthat sets minimum standards of jus-tice

Doesn’t the appeal to our selfishnessdownplay vital questions aboutunborn generations? And doesn’tIslam have a rather limited under-standing of justice for future genera-tions? Think of the early Shi’ites. Likethe first Christians, weren’t they ham-

pered from thinking about just gov-ernment simply because they sawthemselves as merely biding theirtime on earth, as waiting for their truesaviour?

When the hidden Imam didn’t appear,the early Shi’ites indeed were forced tothink anew about politics, ethics andjustice. Some of them continued tobelieve that the hidden Imam wouldreappear only when the world becamecorrupt. So they felt they had no dutynot to allow the world to degenerate,in order to hasten the reappearance of

the Imam. Shi’ites no longer thinkthis. Instead they say that future jus-tice will be global, that it will be foreveryone, not just for a particularcommunity, be it Shi’ites or Sunnis, orfor that matter Christians. This is amost welcome development, as is theshattering and collapse of the Marxistparadigm of justice throughout theMuslim world. The upshot is that allMuslims are today striving for justice,for a better future for all.

Don’t you ever worry that such devel-opments as the rapid disappearance ofspecies from our biosphere and thedangers of nuclear war threaten to robus of a future, so that Hans Jonas andothers are right when they say thatour understanding of justice forfuture generations must from hereonbe fuelled by expectations of doom,not bliss?

This is an anti–religious way ofthinking. Hans Jonas was flung intodeep pessimism by the Holocaust. Itconvinced him that God hadexpended all his energy in theCreation, and was therefore too tiredto prevent such disasters. I rejectthis. All religions are optimisticabout the future, even when con-fronted with the signs of doom thatyou mention. From a religious view-point, there is always somebody who

overlooks the whole, and who caresabout people. Abrahamic religionsembrace an energetic God. They sup-pose that history has a teleologicalquality, that humans are guided by aninvisible hand.

This non-secular way of thinkingabout the world is at odds with doom-laden suppositions about a tired andoverburdened God. There is an impor-tant verse in the Qur’an directedagainst those who think that God’senergy has been dissipated by theCreation, and by intervention in ouraffairs. It says that God never grows

tired, that He is always dili-gent and active – and willremain so in the future. It fol-lows from this that the futureis open. Preconceived judge-ments about the futureshould be rejected because, asPopper said, they are not fal-sifiable. Since we do not

know what awaits us, let us not loseour optimism about the possibility ofcreating a better balance within ourown actions.

Some find puzzling that your opti-mism is sustained by looking backover your shoulder, towards the pastworld of mystical thinking andPersian mystics like Rumi.

It is quite the opposite of a backwardway of thinking. I always rememberthat in his Mysticism and Logic,Bertrand Russell remarks that even ifmysticism were wrong it rightlyemphasizes the beauties of the world. Ihave learned from Rumi and other

‘Rumi emphasized that ugliness comes forth

from us, so that when we change ourselves

the whole world looks more beautiful.’


mystics to respect these beauties.Justice and freedom are among them.Rumi emphasized that ugliness comesforth from us, so that when we changeourselves the whole world looks morebeautiful.

But aren’t you also impressed by themystics’ profound suspicion of powerand wealth?

Yes. The mystics were not againstpower and wealth per se, but they dis-liked the way hunger for their accu-mulation results in the victimizationof others. There is much that is posi-tive to be learned from the mystics.Their teachings can be translated intoa modern idiom, in effect to say thatpower and wealth need to be distrib-uted justly so that we are not seduced,deceived and ultimately misled bytheir false charms.

Seen in this way, there is a notice-able mystical dimension in the mod-ern traditions of socialism and democ-racy. Whereas the former strives forthe just distribution of wealth, the lat-ter envisages the just distribution ofpower. Both in fact share a disdain forthe unequal accumulation of wealthand power – a distaste for inequalitythat is not at all alien to the core val-ues of the mystics.

John Keane interviewed AbdolkarimSoroush in November 2006.


For centuries, the fortress of nationhas loomed on the social horizon,casting its shadow over the ham-

lets and habits of humankind. Manysuggest, however, that the batteringrams of globalization are knocking atthe fortress walls, ready to alter thesocial landscape irrevocably. The worldforeseen is truly global, one in whichterritorial borders have dissolved andidentities are trans-national, sub-national, post-national, anything-but-national.

Why then, is the nation still hangingon by its ageing fingertips? Why, more-over, is national identity actuallychampioned by governments and ana-lysts today? Is this merely a cynicalappeal to the parochial views of nar-row-minded voters? Or is somethingelse going on?

The question of national identityhas been further highlighted in Britainrecently by terrorist actions and plotsperpetrated not by foreign extremistsbut by British citizens. Some sort ofstrong common identity, it is hinted,might assuage the apparent cleavagesbetween sections of the population(what are often – problematically – seenas the homogenous categories ‘Muslim’and ‘non–Muslim’). The same questionwas asked in France after the riots of2005. But how is an inclusive and over-arching national identity established?

The problem with both these phe-nomena – the attempt to reject nationalidentity and the growing obsession

with instituting it – is that they havealready made a mistake: they presup-pose that national identity is a matterof rational choice. Belonging to anation, however, is more often an oblig-atory identification, instituted by thelanguage and concepts of a society weare born into – and which pervade oureveryday lives. These sorts of non-rational identifications are ignored inpolitical theory today, so that main-stream politics is dominated by a ratio-nalism that calculates only in terms ofthe self-interested subject.

A different approach to nationalidentification is desperately needed.Although Wittgenstein does not him-self explicate a political theory, hisideas can open up the new approachrequired. From a Wittgensteinian per-spective we can see that the nationbecomes an object of identificationbecause it is used in everyday life. It isnot so much in formal politics and aca-demic theory, but in a whole variety ofcontexts – history books and atlases,newspapers and tourist brochures, foot-ball matches and music awards – thatthe nation finds its existence.

PRIMORDIALIST THINGS,RATIONALIST HATSIt was German romanticism, perhaps,that most ardently proclaimed the ‘pri-mordialist’ account of the nation.Divine and eternal, the nation was heldto be part of the fabric of the world.Today, this idea is considered deeply

Language-Gamesof the Nation

We can use Wittgenstein’s ideas to develop a new approach to

national identification, argues Amanda Machin


suspect. A nation is not an actual thing.Where would it be found? We are notborn with an innate national identity.The nation is not a concrete reality, buta construction that emerged in moder-nity. Once it is revealed as historicallycontingent, the primordialist illusiondissolves.

Theorists, amongst others ErnestGellner and Anthony Giddens, empha-size the historical contingency of thenation, showing it to be engendered bymodern capitalism, industrializationand the state system. They are right.Yet these accounts often mistake con-tingency for superficiality. They sug-gest that people identified with thenation because it was in the individ-ual’s self-interest to do so; it was cho-sen like a hat to match an outfit. It isthis rationalist account that lies behindpredictions of the nation’s demise: whywould it be rational to choose thenation in a globalizing world?

But why, in that case, does the imageof the primordial nation continue topervade everyday thought and lan-guage? Why do we, in our daily lives,rarely question the existence of thenation that we cheer for and complainabout, that we are proud of and embar-rassed by? What gives the nation itssolid appearance? And why can itsometimes inspire such passion andhatred?

The rationalist account reveals thecontingency of the nation but strugglesto understand its apparent inevitabilityand its common potency. It does notgive us the full picture; yet itcontinues to dominate politi-cal theory. So while the nationis often acknowledged in con-temporary politics, it can onlybe acknowledged as a superfi-cial, rational decision.Politicians might recognize theexistence of the nation, butthey have no model in main-stream theory to understandthat existence.

How then, can we understand theapparent paradox of the persistence ofthe socially and historically specificnation?

USING THE NATIONIn a Wittgensteinian approach theapparently rigid alternative betweencontingency and solidity dissolves.

Concepts such as the nation are ‘given’to the subject within language; theyform part of the vocabulary withwhich we understand the world andourselves. On the other hand, however,these concepts are not themselvesfixed and independent of us. Thenation, then, is neither completelycontingent nor fully fixed.

Wittgenstein showed that we do notcommunicate through an abstract pre-determined linguistic code, butthrough ‘language-games’ that involveboth words and actions: ‘the term lan-guage–game is meant to bring intoprominence the fact that the speakingof language is part of an activity, or of a

life–form’, he wrote in PhilosophicalInvestigations. Telling a joke, askingdirections, buying a coffee, reading amap, watching a magic trick: it isthrough language-games such as thesethat we interact with each other andthe world. Our everyday life containsinnumerable language-games and theyare continually changing as the mater-

ial reality in which we live changes:‘this multiplicity is not somethingfixed, given once for all; but new typesof language, new language-games, aswe may say, come into existence, andothers become obsolete and get forgot-ten’. Language-games shift and adjust,obsolete ones dwindle and new onesemerge.

A word has a meaning through beingused in a language game, and thereforehas no essential or fixed definition. Ican sit on a chair and I can sit on a jury.You can feed a meter and you can feed acat. She might be fair-minded, hemight be fair-skinned. The words ‘sit’and ‘feed’ and ‘fair’ mean different

things simply because theyare used differently. AWittgensteinian approachshows, therefore, that anation has no fixed mean-ing; its meaning relates tohow it is used. Moreover,there is no meaning outsidelanguage games. ‘France’and ‘Finland’ and ‘Fiji’ arenot primordial things; theyexist only within our lan-

guage games. These language-gamesarose in modernity, and were condi-tioned by capitalism, industrializationand the state-system.

Although the Wittgensteinianapproach, like rationalism, emphasizesthe contingency of the nation, it alsodisputes rationalism. For we cannoteasily cast aside the whole system of


‘Concepts such as the “nation” are “given”

to the subject within language; they form

part of the vocabulary with which we under-

stand the world and ourselves.’


meanings and concepts that constituteour perspective of the world.

I did not get my picture of theworld by satisfying myself of itscorrectness; nor do I have itbecause I am satisfied of its cor-rectness. No: it is the inheritedbackground against which I dis-tinguish between true and false(On Certainty).

Language-games allow us to func-tion in the world. It is not just that weplay them out of some calculated self-interest but that what we consider to bein our self-interest – along with, forexample, what we believe to be rationaland moral – is itself conditioned by lan-guage-games. By implication, then, thenation cannot be easily discarded norforged.

This allows us to grasp the paradoxi-cal nature of the nation. A nationalidentification does not exist primor-dially, but nor is it rationally chosen.We are born into language-games of thenation, and through participating inthem we re-imagine the nation. Thenation is a burden with which weencumber ourselves. But is this burdena help or a hindrance?

MULTIPLE AND CONTESTEDMEANINGSIn which language–game, wemight ask, can find the nation'sbasic meaning? Inlanguage–games of ethnicity?Politics? Linguistics?Geography? An important ele-ment of the Wittgensteinianapproach is that there is not onelanguage game of a nation. Thenation is reinforced in a multiplic-ity and diversity of uses. Considerwhere we might find the meaning of‘Germany’. On a map? In history les-son? At a football match? ‘Germany’has a different meaning in each of theselanguage–games and none is its ‘basic’or ‘real’ meaning. The meaning of‘Germany’ is really a compound of itsvarious uses, which together give thenation an apparent solidity. In this wayGermany’ becomes a concept that wecan identify with.

The nation, then, does not exist inone particular or essential way. We seeevery attempt to pinpoint its meaning

flounder. The British politiciansGordon Brown and David Blunkettrecently tried to define Britain in termsof common values; their attempts wereimmediately dismissed as being bothtoo vague and too specific. (As HenryPorter wrote in the Observer [9 July2006], the list of British attributesshould also include ‘our honourablecontempt for political leaders’.) Is itpossible to define what any nationreally means? For many people, theUnion Jack is a symbol of racism andexclusion, not tolerance and democ-racy. Are they wrong about its mean-ing?

Many of the nation’s meanings willcomplement each other, piling up tocreate a multifaceted entity with noone ‘true’ aspect. Other meanings

might contradict each other. In somepatriotic language-games the nation issoaked with blood and rooted in soil – itdemands loyalty, sacrifice and passion.In other language-games this demand isshirked and trounced. Is not this verylack of consensus over the nation partof its existence as a political construc-tion?

Academic language-games todayinevitably reveal the contingency ofthe nation. It is rolled out of its every-day context, turned over, examinedunder the socio-historical magnifyingglass, and defined as a contingent

social structure. But this is only one ofthe language-games in which thenation appears. It is also used – by acad-emics themselves – in other language-games in which it is simply given andinescapable. Perhaps we should say:neither the rationalist nor the primor-dial use of nation is wrong. The pri-mordialist use emphasizes its everydaysignificance. The rationalist usereminds us of the nation’s contin-gency; warns us against making a naïvecommitment to the nation; and forbidsus from making bombastic claims inits name. But where these theories dogo wrong is in trying to monopolizemeaning.

USEFUL USESThe multiple meanings of ‘nation’ con-tradict each other yet add weight to itsexistence. It is both nascent andancient, contingent yet solid. It is apuzzle that can never be solved butleads to new questions. Why does itcontinue to exist in these languagegames? Does it remain useful? Thenation emerged to help make sense of acertain historical epoch. It is not clearthat that epoch is as moribund as somesuggest, for the nation continues toexist, although in places where thoselooking for it do not always expect tofind it.

The current focus on national iden-tity, whatever its motive, isflawed in its attempt to forgea national identity throughrational persuasion. Thenation has salience notbecause of its appeal to rea-son but because of its multi-ple and diverse existence.Accordingly, it cannot be

rigidly defined. This is not tosuggest that the meaning of the nationcannot be debated; that one shouldsubmit to its existence as if it reallywere some primordial ‘thing’. For itsmeaning is never fixed but changes asthe world it is used in changes, and ourendeavour should be to ensure that itsuse is always useful.

Amanda Machin is a PhD student atCSD. This is an edited extract from apaper she presented to the 1st ECPRGraduate Conference, September2006.


‘The current focus on national identity is

flawed in its attempt to forge a national

identity through rational persuasion.’


The theories and concepts onwhich normative views ofmedia and democracy build

have recently taken a markedly plu-ralist or anti-essentialist turn.Principles of pluralism, diversity anddifference seem increasingly promi-nent in the theorizing of the publicsphere and the democratic role of themedia. Instead of a singular notion ofthe public sphere, public use of rea-son, or the common good, theoristsincreasingly stress the plurality ofpublics, politics of difference, and thecomplex ways in which the media cancontribute to democracy.

In part, the renewed emphasis onpluralism can be seen as an expressionof a general postmodern suspicion ofuniversalism and unify-ing discourses gener-ally. However,arguably, it also consti-tutes a form of politicalrationality that directlyconcerns media andcultural policy. Theemphasis on pluralism,however, creates prob-lems for both theoryand practice. As Gregor McLennan(Pluralism, 1995) notes, it may seemthat all things plural, diverse andopen-ended should automatically beregarded as good. But in deconstruct-ing pluralism, we are faced with ques-tions like this: is there not a point at

which healthy diversity turns intounhealthy dissonance? does pluralismmean that anything goes? and whatexactly are the criteria for stoppingthe potentially endless multiplicationof valid ideas? In the context of anincreasingly complex media land-scape, a crucial question remains:how do we conceptualize pluralism asa political value without falling intoanti-political relativism and indiffer-ence?

To those, particularly in mediastudies, who are explicitly concernedwith institutional politics and mediastructures, the postmodern critique ofuniversalism and rationality oftenrepresents an irrational threat to mod-ern democratic ideals. If there is no

rational basis or common standard forevaluating the performance of themedia, it is feared that a ‘politics ofdifference’ will lead to a ‘politics ofindifference’.

However, political theory in gen-eral, and recent debates on radical plu-

ralism and the public sphere in partic-ular, suggest an understanding of therelationship between the media anddemocracy in which the point is notto celebrate all multiplicity and het-erogeneity but, rather, to try to ques-tion the inclusiveness of current plu-ralist discourses and theirunderstanding of economic and politi-cal power.

PLURALIZATION AND THE PUBLIC SPHEREMuch of the discussion on media plu-ralism as a political value is premisedon the conceptual framework of thepublic sphere. As a general normativeconcept against which to assess themedia, much of the debate draws uponJürgen Habermas’s early work; morebroadly, the public sphere is under-stood as a general context of interac-tion in which deliberation and discus-sion take place and citizens informthemselves, and form themselves intothe public. In this general sense, thevoicing of diverse views, and access toa wide range of information and expe-riences, are rarely questioned as a pre-condition of citizens’ effective partici-pation in the public life.

However, the Habermasian con-ceptions of the public sphere anddeliberative democracy have longbeen criticized for their views on plu-ralism and irreducible value differ-ences, in the sense of both culturaldifferences and structural conflicts ofinterest. It is commonly claimed thatthe ideal of a rational–critical deliber-ative public sphere fails adequately totheorize power, and thus inadequately

addresses existing forms ofexclusion. As ChantalMouffe contends:

The belief in the possi-bility of a universalrational consensus hasput democratic thinkingon the wrong track.Instead of trying todesign the institutions

which, through supposedly‘impartial’ procedures, wouldreconcile all conflicting inter-ests and values, the task fordemocratic theorists and politi-cians should be to envisage thecreation of a vibrant ‘agonistic’


‘Habermasian conceptions of the public sphere

and deliberative democracy have long been criti-

cized for their views on pluralism and irreducible

value differences’

Against NaïvePluralism

Kari Karppinen discusses the implications of radical pluralism

for media politics


public sphere of contestationwhere different hegemonicpolitical projects can be con-fronted (On the Political,2005).

Consequently, it can be said thattheorizing about the public sphere hastaken a markedly pluralistic turn. Theuniversal or singular idea of the public

sphere has largely been rejected infavour of a plurality of counter- andsub-public spheres, conceptualized asvarious, differentiated arenas of pub-lic action for communicating politicalviews as well as social experiences.What, then, are the implications ofsuch radical pluralism for our under-standing of the relationship betweenthe media and democracy?

RADICAL PLURALISM AND THE MEDIAWhile the Habermasian approach tothe public sphere is often (and ratherloosely) mobilized as a normativebackbone in debates on media struc-ture and policy – for instance, indefence of public service broadcasting– the implications of radical pluralistperspectives for the media are lessdebated. In fact, it seems that the lackof institutional proposals, or of inter-est in concrete political questions, is ageneral feature of post-modern theo-rizing of radical difference and plural-ism. These perspectives have thusbeen used, most notably, more asoppositional discourses or criticaltools in criticizing various monisms

of media studies and political econ-omy, rather than as coherent norma-tive theories that pertain to questionsof media structure and policy.

Elizabeth Jacka, for instance, con-tends that the dominant arguments inmedia policy, and especially thosethat defend public service broadcast-ing, are based on an indefensible theo-retical ideal of a unitary public spherethat has little relevance in today’ssociety. Following Mouffe, Jackaargues that democracy needs to seenas pluralized, marked by new kinds ofcommunities of identity that breakthe traditional public–private divideand ditch the universal visions of thecommon good. If the relationshipbetween media and democracy isseen, instead, as being based on ‘prag-matic and negotiated exchanges aboutethical behaviour and ethicallyinspired courses of action, then wewill countenance a plurality of com-munication media and modes inwhich such a diverse set of exchangeswill occur.’ Mirroring Mouffe'sdefence of the role of passions indemocracy, this approach would theninclude different genres of media textsand forms of media organization, andnot privilege ‘high modern journal-ism’ as a superior form of rationalcommunication (Television and NewMedia, 4(2), 2003).

Furthermore, Jacka seeks supportfrom the notion of ‘semiotic democ-racy’, which separates democracyfrom collective action and re-articu-lates it with questions of personalself-realization. Similarly, for JohnHartley citizenship refers primarily toidentity and difference – in the senseof identity poli-tics: he invents‘do-it-yourself ’citizenship as‘the practice ofputting togetheran identity fromthe availablechoices, patternsand opportunities on offer in the semi-osphere and the mediasphere’ (Uses ofTelevision, 1999). Jacka, Hartley andothers thus claim that there is a movein postmodern democracy from poli-tics to ethics. Seeking ‘democratiza-tion without politicization’, writerslike Jacka and Hartley envisage a shift

from political democracy to semioticdemocracy, a future of post-political,post-adversial citizenship that isbased on semiotic self-determination,not state coercion or paternalism. Forthem, one of the key developmentsthat makes semiotic democracy possi-ble is the growth of channel availabil-ity. This allows for ever greater diver-sity and choice, as it caters to moreand more specialized tastes and needs.Semiotic democracy is thus seen toexist when people can freely constructtheir identities by means of everexpanding choice in the mediasphere.

THE END OF MEDIA POLICY?Given all this praise of individual cul-tural autonomy and choice, it is nowonder, however, that many haveargued that the stress in media studieson popular consumption, active audi-ences, and individual creation ofmeaning is complicit with the neo-liberal idea of consumer sovereigntyand defence of the political status quo.

One of the main philosophicalproblems with any ‘principled plural-ist’ perspective thus remains, whereto draw the line: how to conceptualizethe need for pluralism and diversitywithout falling into the trap of flat-ness, relativism, indifference, andunquestioning acceptance of market-driven difference and consumer cul-ture.

Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic theoryof democracy provides a useful argu-ment against views like Jacka’s andHartley’s of ‘democratization withoutpoliticization’. Critical of the ideas of‘life politics’ or ‘sub-politics’ in gen-eral, Mouffe stresses the need to

acknowledge the crucial role playedby economic and political power.Unlike Hartley, Jacka and others, sheexplicitly rejects the type of pluralismthat valorizes all forms of differenceand espouses heterogeneity withoutany limits. She does this not becausesuch pluralism would be in conflict


‘A lack of interest in concrete political

questions is a general feature of post-modern

theorizing of radical difference and pluralism.’



CSD Staff Dr SimonJoss, Directorof CSD

Science andTechnologyStudies

Dr MarkHarrison

ChineseStudies

ProfessorLord BhikhuParekh

PoliticalTheory

Professor AliPaya

Islam andDemocracy

Dr DibyeshAnand

InternationalRelations

Mike Brooks

Governanceand Sustainability

ProfessorTony WrightMP

WestminsterForum

Suzy Robson

CSDAdministrator

Dr Katie Hill

ModernChineseVisual Culture

Dr MariaHolt

Islam andDemocracy

Dr PatrickBurke

PublicationsOfficer/Web–editor

ProfessorJohn Keane

PoliticalTheory

ProfessorDavidChandler

InternationalRelations

ProfessorChantalMouffe

PoliticalTheory

Professor JohnOwens

US Governmentand Politics

Dr AbdelwahabEl–Affendi

Islam andDemocracy

Professor HarrietEvans

Chinese CulturalStudies

Dr Tassilo Herrschel

Urban and RegionalGovernance

Dr Thomas Moore

International Relations

Dr Aidan Hehir

International Relations

Dr Patricia Hogwood

EU Policy/ Immigration Policy

Dr Peter Newman

Urban and RegionalGovernance

Dr Celia Szusterman

Latin AmericanPolitics/Political Economy

ASSOCIATES

VISITING PROFESSORS



MA INTERNATIONALSTUDIES

(East Asia/European Union)

This MA programme inInternational Studies offers studentsan integrated programme of regional

specialisms with political andcultural studies. Students may focuson East Asia or Europe, drawing on

the research expertise of CSD staff inpolitical science, cultural studies

and international relations.

The East Asia strand gives students acritical introduction to the political,economic, social and cultural aspects

of contemporary China (includingHong Kong), Taiwan, Japan, andKorea, such as Chinese cultural

politics, media across Greater China,and Japanese politics, as well as theinter–relationships between these

states and regions.

The European Union strandemphasizes the study of

contemporary Europe and itspolitical institutions and policy-making processes. Contemporary

political developments in Europe arelocated in a wider internationalcontext so that the international

significance of European integrationcan be better appreciated.

******For specific enquiries contact:

Professor Harriet EvansCSD, 32–38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW, UK

Tel: +44 020 7468 2254/7911 5138; Fax: 7911 5164;

Email: [email protected]

CSD’s Masters Courses

For detailed information about our Masters programmes go to

http://www.wmin.ac.uk/csd (Click on ‘Masters’.

For online applications see ‘How to Apply’).

Or write to: Admissions & Marketing Office,University of Westminster,

16 Riding House Street, London W1W 7UW. Tel: +44 020 7911 5088; Fax: +44 020 7911 5175;

email: [email protected].

CSD’s Masters programmes (one year full–time, two years part–time)offer innovative and intellectually challenging theoretical andempirical frameworks for postgraduate study in International

Relations, Politics, and International Studies, including Asian andEuropean Studies. The programmes exploit CSD’s reputation as adistinctive and well-established centre of exellence in these areas.

Teaching in the Centre has been rated ‘excellent’ by the UnitedKingdom Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA).

FURTHER INFORMATION/APPLICATION FORMS

MA INTERNATIONALRELATIONSCore modules: International Relations 1:Theo–retical Perspectives;International Relations 2: BeyondInternational Relations?; *International State-Building:Exporting Democracy?; Dissertationand Research Methods.Elective Modules: 3 from the list,depending on the course of study.

MA INTERNATIONALRELATIONS ANDCONTEMPORARY POLITICALTHEORYCore modules: International Relations 1:Theoretical Perspectives; TheHuman Sciences –Perspectives andMethods; EITHER The State,Politics and Violence ORDemocracy: Global Perspectives;Dissertation and Research Methods.Elective modules: 3 from the list

******

Students may begin both Masterscourses in September. The Masters

in International Relations andContemporary Political Theory may

also be started in January.

ELECTIVE MODULES* Controversies in United StatesForeign Policies and Processes* Democracy and Islam* Environmental and UrbanGovernance: International Perspectives* The European Union as anInternational Actor* Governance of the EuropeanUnion* International Humanitarian Law* International State-Building:Exporting Democracy?* International Security* Introduction to ContemporaryChinese Societies & Cultures* Latin America and Globalization* Modernity, Postmodernity and theIslamic Perspective* Perspectives on Post-Cold WarChinese Foreign Policy* Politics, Public Life and the Media

******

For specific enquiries contact:Professor John E Owens, CSD,

University of Westminster, 32–38 Wells Street, London W1T

3UW, United KingdomTel: +44 (0)20 7911 5138Fax: +44 (0)20 7911 5164

Email: [email protected]



PhDProgramme

CSD has a highly-regarded MPhil/PhD programmewith over 25 research students

enrolled. These high qualitystudents are attracted to the work

of the Centre’s internationallyrenowned staff. Staff members’

research covers variousgeographical regions and a broadspectrum of interests in politicaltheory, international relations,cultural studies, and media and

civil society, among others. Severalof our students have received

scholarships from both British andinternational funding bodies.

Current PhD topics include:

* Nationalism and identity * Anti–terrorism legislation and the

future of dissent in the Muslimcommunity

* EU integration and subjectivity* How art can influence democracy

and the formation of an activepublic sphere

* The construction of the discourse ofsecularization in the Turkish

Republic, 1924–45* Reinventing democracy in the era of

the internet

F U RT H E R I N F O R M AT I O N

For initial enquiries about CSD’s PhDprogramme, contact Dr Simon Joss:

[email protected] more detailed information, and

the PhD students’ web pages:http://www.wmin.ac.uk/csd

Staff Research at CSD

CSD is the University ofWestminster’s main centre forresearch in Asian Studies,

Politics and International Relations. Ithosts distinct research groups(including Contemporary ChineseCultural Studies, Political Theory,International Relations and Security,US Government Studies, Democracyand Islam, Science and TechnologyPublic Policy, Multi-level and UrbanGovernance, and European UnionStudies), and provides a platform forinterdisciplinary research. Research onthe European Union and LatinAmerica are important recentadditions to CSD.

In the last Research AssessmentExercise (2001), CSD’s research wasrated as ‘nationally and internationallysignificant’ (Politics and InternationalRelations were rated ‘4’; Asian Studies‘5’). The reputation of CSD staff fortheir work on politics, societies andcultures (and the ways in which theseare interdependent): is reflected incitations of published work, electionsto professional bodies, andappointments to advisory bodies.

CSD’s research aims for 2006–2010include:

* Fostering high-quality researchrated as ‘nationally and internationallyexcellent’.

* Promoting research that advancesthe knowledge of the history, presentand future of democracy; national andinternational politics; and variousaspects of public policy (cultural,social, foreign, and environmental) andpublic life.

* Helping to shape the content andquality of undergraduate andpostgraduate teaching, and ofpostgraduate research training inAsian Studies, Politics, andInternational Relations, at theUniversity of Westminster.

* Contributing to knowledgetransfer: the mutual exchange ofknowledge with ‘users’ of researchboth in the University of Westminster(other research and teaching staff;students) and externally(decision–makers; the media; public

sector, civil society and private sectororganizations; and members of thepublic). Knowledge transfer takesvarious forms, including teaching,consultancy, policy advice,collaborative research programmesand projects, networking, researchtraining, media work, and publicevents programmes.

* Developing research co-operationand networks with relevantinstitutions, think tanks and publicfoundations, both nationally andinternationally. This will build on theAsian Studies programme’s co-operation with other London researchcentres, such as Goldsmiths College,CSD’s close link with theWissenschaftszentrum Berlin, and thecollaboration, through the Science,Technology and Urban Governanceprogramme, with the Lemelson Centerin Washington DC.

* Strengthening CSD’s engagementwith other academic institutions,policy-makers and civil societyorganizations in order to hostconferences and run joint programmes.CSD’s involvement in theInternational Summer School forDemocracy (with Belgrade University);the SAID – Sovereignty and itsDiscontents – workshops series(through the International Relationsprogramme); joint seminars withBirkbeck College; and the recentlaunch of the Westminster Forum – aprogramme run jointly with membersof the Houses of Parliament – areexamples of such beneficial co-operation.

* Creating new researchopportunities at CSD. Additionalresearch themes or groups mightinclude: the future of representativedemocracy; the rise of China;international state building; the newera of global terrorism; internationalrelations concerning East Asia, Africa,and Latin America; British politics andconstitutional reform; and science andtechnology policy.

Simon Joss, Director, May 2007



The Centre for the Study ofDemocracy (CSD) is the postgraduateand post-doctoral research centre ofPolitics, International Relations and

Asian Studies at the University ofWestminster.

Well known for its inter-disciplinarywork, CSD is led by a team of

internationally recognized scholarswhose teaching and research

concentrate on the interplay of states,cultures and civil societies. CSD

supports research into all aspects ofthe past, present and future of

democracy, in political theory andphilosophy, international relations

and law, European Union social policy,gender and politics, mass media and

communications, and the politics andculture of China, Europe, the United

States, and Muslim societies.

CSD is in the School of SocialSciences, Humanities and Languages

(SSHL) on the Regent Campus. It hostsseminars, public lectures and

symposia in its efforts to foster greaterawareness of the advantages and

disadvantages of democracy in thepublic and private spheres at local,

regional, national, and internationallevels. It offers MAs on a one-year full-time, or two-year part-time, basis (seepage 18). CSD’s publications includeworking papers (CSD Perspectives),

books and this bulletin.

csd

T H E B U L L E T I Ncsd

aims to inform other universitydepartments and public

organizations, and our colleagues andundergraduates at the University of

Westminster, of CSD’s researchactivities. The Bulletin publishesarticles by CSD staff and research

students and by visiting researchersand speakers. To comment on, orreceive, the Bulletin, contact Dr

Patrick Burke, CSD Bulletin, 32–38Wells Street, London W1T

3UW/[email protected]. Theopinions expressed in these pages donot necessarily represent those heldgenerally or officially in CSD or the

University of Westminster.

CSD hosts a range of events andacademic programmes, including:

The CSD SEMINAR, at whichspeakers from CSD and other

academic institutions – in the UK andabroad – present papers on a wide

range of subjects in politics,international relations and cultural

studies. Recent speakers haveincluded:

Dr Magdalena Larsen (Westminster)‘EU Trade Negotiations with South

Africa’ (See article on p. 26)

Julia Svetlichnaja and JamesHeartfield (Westminster)‘Interviewing Litvinenko’

(See article opposite)

Rachel Briggs (Demos)‘Bringing it Home: community–based

approaches to counter–terrorism’

Robert Benewick (Sussex)‘Decoding the Harmonious Socialist

Society or Walking the Dog’

Dr Celia Szusterman (Westminster)‘Politics in Latin America Today’

Dr Noortje Marres (Goldsmiths)‘Actor-network Theory and the Issue-oriented Perspective on Democratic

Practices’ (See article on p. 5)

Dr Dibyesh Anand (Bath)‘Hindu Nationalism and Politics of

Security in India’

Dr Jonathan Pugh (Newcastle)‘Representation and its Discontents’

Abdo Naqeeb (Southern DemocracyAssembly), Ali Noman ‘The Quest for

Democracy in Yemen’

Sean Curtin (Westminster) ‘Sino–Japanese relations under the Abe

administration’

The DEMOCRACY CLUB, whichencourages participation among CSD

staff and students and visitingresearchers in discussions about

democracy, considered as a language, away of life and a set of institutions.

A recent highlight:‘We, the Weather Makers:

a discussion of the implications ofclimate change science for political

economy and democracy’. WithProfessor David Henderson, Dr Neil

Strachan, Professor John Keane

*The DEMOCRACY AND ISLAM

programme.

*The ASIAN STUDIES programme.

*The POLITICS OF TECHNOLOGY

seminar

*The annual CR PAREKH LECTURE,

at which a distinguished speakerexplores various aspects of democracy.

Professor Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard)gave the 2007 lecture:

‘Performing Democracy:Experts, Citizens and The Public

Trust’*

The annual CSD ENCOUNTER, atwhich CSD members and outside

academics discuss in detail the workof a leading thinker in his/her

presence. The 2006 Encounter waswith the Iranian philosopher

Abdolkarim Soroush(see interview on p.8)

The 2007 CSD Encounter will be withJulia Kristeva

*The WESTMINSTER FORUM, the

first two seminars of which, in 2006,considered civic disengagement.

For more information contact CSD

CSD EVENTScsd


C B U L L E T I N | S U M M E R 2 0 0 7 | V O L 1 4 N O S 1 & 2 | 2 1

In May 2006, Julia Svetlichnajaand I interviewed AlexanderLitvinenko, a former member of

the Russian Security Service, theFSB, as background for a paper onthe Chechen minority in Moscowin the 1990s. Amongst otherthings, he told us that, when stillan FSB agent, he had beeninstructed to kill the powerfulRussian businessman BorisBerezovsky. Julia, who conductedmost of the interviews, gave thepaper later in the summer at theRussian International StudiesAssociation meeting.

In November 2006, Litvinenkodied from a dose of the extremelypoisonous radioactive substancePolonium 210. More extraordinary,from his deathbed he condemnedRussian President Vladimir Putinfor killing him.

As the last people to interviewthe poisoned FSB agent we wereunsure what to do. We felt we hadan obligation to tell people what hewas thinking about before he waskilled. Eventually, we decided thatwe would take the story to thenewspapers. We tried the Guardianfirst, but it was slow to call back.The Daily Telegraph called us inthe following day to write thestory. The Associated Press reportof the Telegraph story (26November 2006) was reproduced inmore than three hundrednewspapers around the world.

We then found ourselves sweptup in a media feeding frenzy. The

response to our story echoedweirdly the Cold War. We hadgiven what we saw as a balancedview of Litvinenko’s life. We weretaken aback that our interview waswidely reproduced by Russiannationalists, relieved that theycould discount his accusation thattheir president had had the formeragent assassinated. Equally, theexiled critics of the Kremlin haveaccused us – laughably – of beingagents ourselves. We thought wehad given an accurate account ofwhat he had to say; they said wehad ‘smeared’ Litvinenko'smemory.

Without CSD’s continuinginterest in post-Soviet societies,and the space it provides forreflection on transitions and civilsociety, it is unlikely that wewould have ever been driven tointerview Alexander Litvinenko –for good or ill. Of course,newspapers work at a verydifferent level from academicresearch, and the media scrum wasa big distraction from seriousreflection, but we hope that theexperience has been CSD’sadvantage as well as our own. Inparticular, we are both verygrateful for the support we havehad from CSD – especially SimonJoss and Suzy Robson;Westminster's excellent PressOfficer, Rob Watson; oursupervisors, David Chandler andChantal Mouffe; and, of course, ourfellow PhD students.

CSD STAFF NEWS

Mark Harrison’s book, Legitimacy, Meaning and

Knowledge in the Making ofTaiwanese Identity, was published

by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006.

John Keane has been awarded aMajor Research Fellowship fromthe Leverhulme Trust to conduct

research during the next threeyears on the topic of the future of

representative democracy. His newhistory of democracy, The Life and

Death of Democracy, is to bepublished next year.

John Owens’s recent publicationsinclude: ‘Explaining Party

Cohesion and Discipline inDemocratic Legislatures:

Purposiveness and Contexts’. InReuven Y. Hazan, ed., Cohesionand Discipline in Legislatures.

Routledge, 2006.

Caught up in theRussian spy scandal

James Heartfield reports on how he and fellow CSD PhD

student Julia Svetlichnaja became involved in the events

surrounding the death of Alexander Litvinenko


C S D

with the common good, but becausethis concept of pluralism ignores thedimensions of power and the political.Because of its refusal to acknowledgethe relations of power and regulationinvolved in all ‘constructions of dif-ferences’, such ‘naïve’ pluralism,Mouffe argues, is compatible with theliberal evasion of politics; indeed, itconverges with the typical liberal illu-sion of a pluralism without antago-nism. Mouffe’s position thus seems tocomplement criticism of a culturalpolitics of difference that overridespolitical–economic considerationsand valorises agency within commu-nicative practices without providingadequate attention to communicativeconstraints.

The point is that radical pluralismis not constituted through a liberalcelebration of ‘more choice’, or aspraise of multiplicity as such, but as acall to recognize the aspects of power,exclusion and selectivity inherent inall conceptions of the public sphere.

This view is directly relevant to theperspectives that celebrate the com-municative abundance of contempo-rary media as a path to a new post-political semiotic democracy with adecreasing need for regulation. For, asJohn Keane has noted, even thoughthe communicative abundance of con-temporary media might well bury

many of the old regulatory clichésabout scarcity, it will not bring abouta harmonious, unrestricted sendingand receiving of messages. Nor will itput an end to the old controversiesabout the maldistribution of, andrestricted access to, the means ofcommunication; in other words, tothe questions of ‘who gets what,when, and how’.

Thus, rather than celebrating allforms of multiplicity and choice, theradical–pluralist approach to the pub-lic sphere and media politics is best

conceived of as a criticalorientation that seeks toask how plural, in fact,the pluralism and abun-dance extolled today is.As such, the radical-plu-ralist approach departsfrom the political mini-malism of liberal plural-ism. In contrast to theconventional view thatthe sanctity of the indi-vidual is best protectedby restricting politics tothe bare essentials, radi-cal pluralists contendthat the spaces in whichdifferences may consti-tute themselves as con-tending identities aretoday most efficientlyestablished by political means.

The issues here are reminiscent ofNicholas Garnham’s argument that,while one form of identity politics is aclaim for recognition and toleration,another aspect is a claim on scarceresources, such as access to the media,cultural subsidies or productionresources. As Garnham argues, ‘toooften there is an attempt to combine arequest for recognition and a share ofpublic resources that such recognitionbrings with it and, at the same time,demonize the very common decision

making, politics, that mustinevitably go with suchresource distribution'(Television and New Media,4(2), 2003).

To grasp the aspect of powerand exclusion in all publicspheres means recognizingthat selectivity and exclusionare inherent in all forms ofpublic spheres. A realistic

question is thus not whether therewill be forms of power, regulation andexclusion in the future, but, rather,what form they should take, what val-ues they are based on, and how aresuch decisions arrived at.

CONTINGENT VALUESThere is thus a need to examine criti-cally the rhetoric of pluralism andfreedom of choice; and to recognizethese values not as absolutes or neu-tral objectives, but as contingent andcontested values whose definitions,

limits, and evaluative criteria are allpolitically constructed. From the rad-ical-pluralist perspective, the ideal ofmedia pluralism need not be seen interms of choice for consumers, as aperfect reflection of social differ-ences, or in terms of any other sim-plistic system by which the media aremodelled on existing social differ-ences. Media pluralism would notonly be preoccupied with heterogene-ity and the diversification of choicesas such, but with the structural rela-tions of power that limit that‘choice’.

The radical pluralist perspectiveimplicitly proposes a rethinking ofthe traditional concepts and theoreti-cal roots of media policy and regula-tion, not least those underlying pub-lic service media. However, thisrethinking would not suggest shiftingregulation more towards the marketand celebrating the multiple sourcesof identification that the marketoffers. Instead, radical pluralist per-spectives can be conceived of as theo-retical approaches that call for a radi-calization of the aims of democraticmedia policy.

Kari Karppinen is a ResearchAssociate in the Department ofCommunication at the University ofHelsinki. He was a Visiting ResearchFellow at CSD in the autumn of2006. This is an edited extract from apaper he gave to the CSD Seminar inNovember 2006.

2 2 | C S D B U L L E T I N | S U M M E R 2 0 0 7 | V O L 1 4 N O S 1 & 2 |

‘Radical pluralism is a call to

recognize the aspects of power,

exclusion and selectivity inherent in

conceptions of the public sphere.’


Our engagement with andunderstanding of politics is,it seems, increasingly shaped

by global questions: from interna-tional terrorism and the war in Iraq,to climate change, humanitariancrises and relief from poverty. Formany people the fact that politics hasbecome global – that it is no longerrestricted to issues and institutionsat the national level – shows that thestakes in politics are higher today

than they once were. Westernpowers, it seems, have carteblanche to assert their power inthe war on terror or their newrights of humanitarian inter-vention; and new forms ofglobal opposition – global civicmovements and campaigns –have emerged.

Domestic politics seems tomatter less today. Our relation-ship to the electoral process,and the role of elections inpolitical life, have changed. Inthe past, voting gave us a senseof connection: to society as awhole; to other voters, whetheror not they supported the samepolitical programme as us; topolitical representatives; andto the government. Today, ifwe vote, we experience a senseof disconnection, a feeling thatwe share little with other vot-

ers; we certainly do not feel part of acommon project, or share the goals ofthe political party for which wevoted. Individuals have an increas-ingly atomized sense of their socialand political selves.

Nor do elections today – unlike inthe past – give an incoming govern-ment social and political legitimacy.Governments have a fragile, unmedi-ated relationship with their societies.

For many of us, though, politicsremains important; it still gives us a

sense of social connection and root-edness. But we are now more likelyto engage in ‘post-territorial’ politics,where both the private and the publicspheres and national, territorial andglobal concerns substantially over-lap. This type of politics is both‘global’ and highly individualized. Itis the politics of our everyday lives –the sense of meaning we get fromthinking about global warming whenwe recycle our rubbish; from the eth-ical or social value of our work; orfrom supporting good causes –Oxfam, Greenpeace and ChristianAid.

The form and content of this new,global approach to politics resembleless ‘old’ politics – the social andpolitical engagement of the past –than they do, in three ways, religiousbeliefs and practices. First, global,post-territorial politics is no longerconcerned with self-interest, politi-cal parties, and governmental power:it is, rather, existential – it is abouthow we live our lives. Secondly, itentails private and individualizedpractices that centre on ethicalchoices. Thirdly, this politics tendsto be non-instrumental: we do notsubordinate ourselves to collectiveassociations or parties; we treat as anend in itself our aspirations and acts,or the fact that we are aware of anissue. It is as if we are upholding ourgoodness or ethicality in the face ofan increasingly confusing and alien-ating world. Our politics is the voice– in Marx’s words – of ‘the heart in aheartless world’.

Doing politics as religion is highlyconservative, and it feeds an illusionof change at the expense of genuinesocial engagement and transforma-tion. More than that, global ethicalpolitics reflects and institutionalizesour sense of disconnection and socialatomization and results in irrationaland unaccountable government pol-icy making.

RADICAL ACTIVISMPeople often argue that there is noth-ing conservative about radical politi-cal protests: the February 2003 anti-war marches, anti-capitalism andanti-globalization protests, the huge‘Make Poverty History’ march in2005, the World Social Forums, or


Politics asReligion

David Chandler on the pitfalls of global ethical politics


even the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda.But these new forms of protest arehighly individualized – they are notan attempt to build a social or collec-tive movement. People seem toregard demonstrating, badge andbracelet wearing, or theatrical sui-cide, as ethical acts in themselves: aspersonal statements of awareness,rather than as attempts to engagepolitically with society.

The ‘celebration of differences’ atmarches, protests and social forumsillustrates this. It is as if peo-ple are more concerned withthe creation of a sense of com-munity through acceptingpersonal differences thanwith political debate andagreement, or collective pur-pose. Yet to end war orpoverty, or to overthrow capi-talism, one needs to express politicalviews and establish political differ-ences: what, say, are the roots of war– capitalism, human nature, the exis-tence of weapons?

Radical political activism todayseems to entail not political engage-ment with, but social disengagementfrom, the world – evident in theFebruary 2003 anti-war marchers'slogan, ‘Not in My Name’.

Global ethics offer us a sense ofsocial connection and meaning while

allowing us to construct the meaningourselves; to pick our causes of con-cern. It frees us from the responsibil-ity to act as part of a collective asso-ciation, to win an argument, or towork for success at the ballot box.Yet – and this is reflected in its rejec-tion of any form of social movementor organization – radical activism hashad little impact.

GOVERNMENTSThe only people keener on globalethics than radical activists are polit-ical elites. Since the end of the ColdWar, foreign policy has tended todominate domestic politics; andglobal ethics have formed the core offoreign policy – they have been cen-tral to debates about humanitarianintervention, ‘healing the scar ofAfrica’, or the ‘war on terror’.

Traditional foreign policy, basedon strategic geo-political interestsand with a clear framework for pol-icy-making, is less important than itwas. The British government hasbeen down-sizing the Foreign andCommonwealth Office – the staff ofwhich are regional experts and speakthe relevant languages – and is givingmore resources to the Departmentfor International Development, thestaff of which are experts in goodcauses. This shift was clear in theUK's attempt to develop an ‘ethicalforeign policy’ in the 1990s – anapproach that claimed to reject

strategic interests in favour of values.The execution of a foreign policybased on values and identity, ratherthan on the needs and interests ofpeople on the ground, leads to illthought-through and short-term pol-icy-making, as the destabilizing,‘value-based’ interventions fromBosnia to Iraq have demonstrated.

These campaigns and wars aredemonstrations and performances,based on ethical claims rather thanresponsible practices and policies. In

‘Politics as a Vocation’ Max Webercounterposed this type of politics –the ‘ethics of conviction’ – to the‘ethics of responsibility’.

Governments have put globalethics at the top of the politicalagenda for the same reason radicalactivists have shifted to the globalsphere: it frees them from politicalresponsibility. Every government andinternational institution hasreplaced strategic and instrumentalpolicy-making based on a clear politi-cal programme with the ambitiousassertion of global causes – saving theplanet; eradicating poverty; savingAfrica; not just ending war butremoving the causes of conflict. Themore ambitious the aim the less oneis accountable for success and failure.Donald Rumsfeld said that ‘there areno metrics’ to help assess whetherthe war on terror is being won or lost.In fact, the more global the problem,the more the US or the UN can beblamed for not translating ethicalclaims into concrete results.

Yet governments, even more thanindividuals, feel the consequences oftheir lack of social connection: thislack undermines any attempt to rep-resent shared interests or to producecoherent political programmes. AsJean Baudrillard suggests, without aconnection to the ‘represented’masses, political leaders are as opento ridicule and exposure as the‘emperor with no clothes’ (In the

Shadow of the SilentMajorities, 1983).

ACADEMIAMore and more people arestudying InternationalRelations. But it is not IRtheory that attracts peopleto the discipline; it is the

desire to practice global ethics. Theboom in IR has coincided with arejection of Realist theoretical frame-works of power and interests and ofthe sovereignty/anarchy problem-atic. But this is an ethical rejection,not the product of theoretical engage-ment with Realism.

Normative theorists andConstructivists tend to support theglobal ethical turn; they argue thatwe should not be as concerned with‘what is’ as with the potential emer-


‘Radical political activism today seems to

entail not political engagement with, but

social disengagement from, the world.’


gence of a global ethical community.Constructivists in particular focuson the ethical language that politicalelites use, rather than on practices ofpower. But the most dangeroustrends in IR are those frameworksthat have adopted Critical Theory;they argue that focusing on the worldas it exists is conservative ‘problem-solving’, while the task for CriticalTheorists is to focus on emancipa-tory, alternative forms of living or ofthinking about the world.

This turns critical thought into aprocess of wishful thinking, not oneof engagement. Critical Theoristsargue that we need to clarify our ownethical frameworks and biases beforethinking about or teaching worldaffairs; in the process this becomes‘me-search’ rather than research. Wehave moved a long way from HedleyBull’s view that, for academicresearch to be truly radical, we haveto put our values to one side and fol-low the inquiry, wherever it leads.

I recently asked my IR studentswhich theoretical frameworks theyagreed with. Critical Theory andConstructivism, most replied. Yet

they still thought that states oper-ated on the basis of power and self-interest in a world of anarchy. Theirtheoretical preferences were based ontheir ethical choices; they were lessinterested in how theory might helpone understand and engage with theworld.

ALTERNATIVESThe problem, then, is that politics isincreasingly like religion. What is thesolution? It cannot be purely intellec-tual or academic: the demand forglobal ethics, after all, is generated byour social reality and experiences.Marx spent some time considering asimilar crisis of political subjectivityin 1840s Germany. In his writings –The German Ideology, ‘Theses onFeuerbach’, and elsewhere – he ragedagainst the idealism of contemporarythought and argued that the criticism

of religionneeded to bereplaced by thecriticism of pol-itics: by politi-cal activism andby social changebased on theemerging prole-tariat. Today itis harder toidentify anemerging politi-cal subject thatcan fulfil thetask of ‘chang-ing the world’rather thanmerely ‘reinter-preting it’through philos-ophy.

Yet there is apressing need for an intellectualstruggle against the idealism ofglobal ethics. The point needs to beemphasized that our ‘freedom’ toengage in politics, to choose our iden-tities and political campaigns, as wellas governments’ freedom to choose

their ethicalcampaigns andwars, reflects alack of socialties and sociale n g a g e m e n t .There is no

global political struggle between‘empire’ and its ‘radical discontents’,as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negriwould have it; and the Foucauldiantemptation to see power and resis-tance everywhere is a product ofwishful or lazy thinking dominatedby the social categories of the past.The stakes are not in the globalstratosphere but much closer tohome. Politics appears to have goneglobal because there is a breakdownof genuine community. Unless webring politics back down to earthfrom heaven, our critical, social andintellectual lives will continue to bediminished.

Moreover, since the political ‘free-dom’ of our social atomizationencourages us to pursue increasinglyidealized approaches to the world, weshould take more seriously Bull’sinjunction to ‘pursue the question’,

or – in Alain Badiou’s words – weshould subordinate ourselves to the‘discipline of the real’. Subordinationto the world outside ourselves canbind together those interested in crit-ical research. To facilitate engage-ment with what is external, weshould experiment with ways of cre-ating social bonds with our peers thatcan limit our freedoms and developour sense of responsibility andaccountability to others. The valueand instrumentality of these bondswill then have to be proven as weengage with, understand, critique,and ultimately overcome the prac-tices and subjectivities of our time.

This is an edited extract from DavidChandler's inaugural professoriallecture, 2 May 2007.


‘There is no global political struggle between

“empire” and its “radical discontents”.’


In 1999, after more than four yearsof intense and often difficult nego-tiations, the European Union (EU)

and South Africa signed the landmarkTrade, Development and CooperationAgreement (TDCA).

The TDCA was of great importancefor both the EU and South Africa. Forthe EU, it was the most ambitioustrade agreement it had ever concludedwith a third country outside of its geo-graphically closest ‘circle of friends’.The negotiations were also a continua-tion of the EU's long-lasting policiestowards South Africa – first throughthe European Political Cooperationand then as a joint action under theCommon Foreign and Security Policy –and its efforts to support South Africa’s

transition todemocracy. ForSouth Africa,the TDCA nego-tiations werethe first interna-tional negotia-tions in which itengaged as partof its strategy tore-enter theglobal tradingsystem after theend of apartheid.

The EU hasextensive com-petence in trade

– the Common Commercial Policy isone of the oldest and most integratedpolicy areas of the EU. The EUMember States have delegated respon-sibility for trade to the Community;they no longer have their own;national, trade policies. Thus, in these,as in other EU trade negotiations withthird parties, the EU was supposed tospeak with a ‘single voice’.

In analyses of this ‘single voice’ inEU trade policy, the most commonscholarly approach is to look at howthe different interests of the MemberStates combine to produce that voice.Although there are diverging viewsabout the extent to which EuropeanCommission – as the main agenda-set-ter and the EU representative in trade

policy – is able to influence theMember States to reach an agreementgreater than the lowest commondenominator, there is general agree-ment that the Commission does play asignificant role. Yet there has been lit-tle investigation into the internal poli-cies of the Commission during tradenegotiations.

The TDCA negotiations betweenthe EU and South Africa demonstratethat this lack of attention to internalnegotiations within the Commissionis a shortcoming; it produces anincomplete view of the EU’s positionor ‘single voice’. A focus on theCommission negotiating team in theTDCA negotiations shows clearly thatthe team had to work through both theCommission – reaching agreementbetween the different Directorates–General(DGs) – and the Council of the EU (reachingagreement between the then 15 MemberStates) before it could present an EU posi-tion to South Africa.

A THREE–LEVEL GAMEThe structure within which theCommission negotiating team had towork during the negotiations withSouth Africa can be likened to that ofRobert Putnam’s two- (extended tothree-) level game model (seeInternational Organization, 42(3),1988). The model regards the negotia-tor as the key actor who, by operatingalternately at all levels, unites domes-tic and international levels of negotia-tions. The main task of the negotiatorat the international level is to composea tentative agreement, which will haveto be ratified at the domestic level(s).

At the domestic level(s) the negotia-tor has to coordinate the differentdomestic opinions into a unified viewthat can provide terms of reference inthe international negotiations.Although negotiators might beexpected to act merely as servingagents on behalf of their domestic con-stituencies, Putnam follows the logicof ‘principal–agent analysis’, in whichone actor (the agent) has been dele-gated power by another (the principal)to act on behalf of the latter; he thusargues that negotiators are likely tohave their own interests, which theytry to pursue by acting autonomouslyand strategically.

In the TDCA negotiations the


A ‘Single Voice’?

How can Robert Putnam’s three-level game model help us under-

stand the complexities of EU–South Africa trade negotiations?

Magdalena Frennhoff Larsén explains.


‘negotiator’ was the Commission nego-tiating team, which consisted of fourofficials in DG Development;Director-General for Development;and the Commissioner forDevelopment. The three levels ofnegotiations in which the negotiatingteam was involved were: 1) the intra-Commission negotiations between thedifferent DGs; 2) the Council negotia-tions between the EU Member States;and 3) the international negotiationswith South Africa.

In line with Putnam’s argumentabout the negotiator’s own interests,the interests of the Commission nego-tiating team were, due to its locationwithin DG Development, develop-ment oriented. The team wanted toreach an agreement that would be asbeneficial as possible to South Africa.Ideally, the negotiators would havewanted to offer South Africa full mem-bership of the Lomé Convention (thetrade and aid agreement that regulatedrelations between the EU and theAfrican, Caribbean and Pacific [ACP]countries from 1975 to 2000), as SouthAfrica initially requested.

It should be noted that this way ofstructuring a three-level game is differ-ent from the way in which three-levelgames are traditionally used in analy-ses of EU negotiations. Normally, thedomestic focus is on the level of theMember States, rather than theCommission. However, given that theCommission is the EU representativeand the main agenda-setter in tradepolicy, a central game is played withinthe Commission rather within theMember States: the latter tend torespond to, rather than be part of,the initial development of theagenda for trade negotiations.

The structure of the three-level game both constrained theCommission negotiating team inits ability to push through itsown, developmental, preferencesin the TDCA negotiations; and pro-vided opportunities for the team topromote these interests.

CONSTRAINTSA Rigid Negotiation Position. The EUposition that the Commission negoti-ating team presented to South Africatook the form of two mandates. Theteam’s first task was to produce the ini-

tial proposal for the mandates. Thesewere then worked out in two sets ofinternal negotiations: with the DGs inthe Commission and with the MemberStates in the Council, respectively.

The proposal reflected the strongdevelopmental interests of theCommission negotiating team.However, these interests were thencompromised both by the DGs in theCommission and the Member States inthe Council, which had diverginginterests from the negotaiting team.

In principal–agent terms, theCommission negotiating team – thatis, the agent – was controlled by twosets of principals: the DGs in theCommission and the Member States inthe Council.

For the first mandate, whichfocused on the overall structure of the

future cooperative arrangementbetween the EU and South Africa, thedevelopmental interests of theCommission negotiating team weremainly compromised by DG Trade,which insisted on the establishment ofa Free Trade Area. The first mandatethus proposed a twin-track approach:on the one hand making South Africa aqualified member of the Lomé

Convention; on the other, initiatingnegotiations that would lead to thegradual establishment of a Free TradeArea. This proposal, which reflectedthe dual nature of South Africa – it isconsidered to be neither a developingcountry at the same level as other ACPcountries; nor, because its wealth isunevenly distributed, a fully industri-alized country – met little resistancefrom the other DGs and from theMember States in the Council.

However, the second mandate,which focused on the establishment ofthe Free Trade Area itself, turned outto be very rigid and protectionist.Although South Africa’s agriculturalproduction did not pose a significantthreat to the EU, DG Agriculture andseveral of the southern Member Stateswere reluctant to set a generous prece-

dent for future negotiationsbetween the EU and thirdparties. The result was amandate which suggested afree trade area from which39 per cent of SouthAfrica’s agriculturalexports to the EU would beexcluded.

Strict Monitoring. During the nego-tiations with South Africa, both theDGs and the Member States were ableto monitor the behaviour of theCommission negotiating team.Through GINAS (Group Interservicepour les Négociations avec l’Afriquedu Sud), the DGs regularly met theCommission negotiating team to monitor the progress made in the


‘There has been little investigation into

the internal policies of the Commission

during trade negotiations.’


negotiations. In addition, a Core Groupconsisting of the DGs most affected bythe TDCA negotiations – DG Trade,DG Agriculture, and DG Enterprise –was established. This group met morefrequently, and its representativeswere all present during the actualnegotiations with South Africa; theywere thus able to monitor directly thenegotiating behaviour of theCommission negotiating team ratherthan having to rely on the team’sreports and other feedback.

In addition, Core Group membersactually led the technicalaspects of the negotiations.For example, the agriculturalelements of the agreementwere negotiated directly byDG Agriculture and its SouthAfrican counterpart, theNational Department for Agriculture.Consequently, DG Agriculture resistedmany of the South African demands toopen up the EU market more widely toSouth African products – even thoughthe Commission negotiating team waswilling to meet these demands.

Similarly, in the Council of the EU,the Southern Africa Working Groupand the 133 Committee (made up ofsenior trade officials from the MemberStates) met frequently to get feedbackon the negotiations and to provide fur-ther instructions and guidelines to theCommission negotiators. Althoughthe Member States were not present atthe negotiations with South Africa,they still constrained the Commissionnegotiating team. As the Member

States can only make decisions collec-tively in the Council, the negotiatingteam could not ask for concessionsdirectly from one of them. (A Councilagreement usually represents a balanceof trade-offs and issue-linkagesbetween the interests of all MemberStates; a concession from one MemberState would change that balance.)Consequently, every time South Africaasked for a concession, the EU negotia-tors had to wait for the Council to dis-cuss the issue before they could comeback with a response. This caused a lotof frustration among the SouthAfricans.

OPPORTUNITIESDespite these constraints on theautonomy of the Commission negoti-ating team, the three-level gamenature of the TDCA negotiations alsooffered opportunities for the negotiat-ing team to act strategically and pushthrough its own – developmental –preferences.

Support from a Third Party inInternal Negotiations. Since there wasa convergence of interests between theCommission negotiating team andSouth Africa, the Commission negotia-tors would, in their informal interac-tions with South Africa, highlightwhere the obstacles were on the EU

side. For example, they pushed theSouth Africans to lobby DGAgriculture as well as the more protec-tionist Member States, rather thanSouth Africa’s ‘friends’ in countriessuch as Sweden, the UK, and theNetherlands. Similarly, towards theend of the negotiation process, whenSpain, Italy, Portugal and Greece werereluctant to lift their reservationsabout an EU concession on SouthAfrican oranges, the Commissionnegotiating team persuaded the SouthAfricans also to request a concessionfor apples and pears (less important tothe South Africans) – which are alsothe products of northern MemberStates. This allowed the Commissionnegotiators to go back to the Council

and request a concession on orangesand on apples and pears from SouthAfrica. The burden of concessionswould thus be shared within theCouncil, and it would be easier for theMediterranean Member States to setaside some of their reservations aboutthe orange concessions.

The ‘Hands Tied’ Tactic. In the‘hands tied’ tactic (Thomas Schelling,The Strategy of Conflict, 1960), thenegotiator stresses how domestic con-stituencies make it impossible for anopponent’s demands to be met; thisforces the opponent to make a move.The Commission negotiating teamused this strategy to emphasize, in itsown negotiations in the Council andthe Commission, that South Africa'shands were tied – and thus promotedits own developmental interests.When, for example, first DGAgriculture and then the MemberStates presented so called ‘wish-lists’for products to be included in a ‘nega-tive list’ – products to be excluded fromthe Free Trade Area agreement – thenegotiating team responded by sayingthat it would not even be worth tryingto coordinate these wish-lists: anyresult would be too protectionist forSouth Africa to ‘sell’ domestically. Byusing this argument, the Commissionnegotiator managed to reduce signifi-

cantly the number of productson these lists.

These examples demon-strate how the three–levelgame nature of the TDCAnegotiations offered theCommission negotiating team

both constraints and opportunities;and how the team had to engage in twosets of internal negotiations – withinthe Commission and in the Council –in parallel with the negotiations withSouth Africa. But, more important, theexamples also demonstrate how, forSouth Africa, it was clear that the EUdid not speak with a ‘single voice’, andthat the diverging interests of both theDGs and the Member States werereflected throughout the TDCA nego-tiations.

Magdalena Frennhof Larsén is a for-mer PhD Candidate, and now aVisiting Lecturer, at CSD. This is anedited extract from a paper she gaveto the CSD Seminar in January 2007.


‘For South Africa, it was clear that the EU

did not speak with a “single voice”.’


In some recent interpretations Maoappears almost as a figure outsidehistory. Rather as Roosevelt or

Churchill emerged to drag his nationout of a terrible crisis, so Mao – in aninversion of great man theory – arrivedfrom Shaoshan with his glowing redeyes and, over five or six decades, mes-merised an entire country into follow-ing his will. This is not a satisfactoryway in which to interpret Mao'simportance. However, a strongly eco-nomically-based interpretation, forwhich the individual is of little impor-tance, is also misleading. We do needto think about how Mao influencedChina’s development up to the presentday.

CONTEXT First, to understand whether weshould interpret Mao as monster ornational saviour, or something inbetween, we need to put him in con-text, to contrast him with what wentbefore or with what could have comeafter if Mao and the Communist Partyof China (CCP) had failed to win theCivil War of 1946–49. One of the still-dominant generalizations amongsome on the traditional left is thatthere are legacies of the Mao era thatmeant that the downsides – for exam-ple, the Great Leap Forward (1958–61)or the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) –were a price worth paying. These lega-cies include the much raised position

of women in Chinese society; or thebasis for economic growth that ulti-mately flowered from the 1970s. Quiteoften these explanations contrastChina under Mao with pre-1949China. In fact, even today in Chinayou frequently hear the word ‘libera-tion’ used for the year 1949, when thePeople’s Republic of China was estab-lished.

Western scholarship, which doesnot accept all of the CCP’s claims, alsouses the term ‘liberation’ as shorthandfor 1949, the switch between the oldand the new China: life in pre-1949China had no redeeming features – itwas a sequence of collapsed empire,warlord governments, and rapaciousnationalists (Kuomintang) underChiang Kai-shek who had no interestbeyond exploiting the peasants andrunning a corrupt government whichserved simply to enrich themselves.Having failed to demonstrate anyprowess against the Japanese, thenationalists were thrown out of powerby a mixture of popular sentiment andefficient communist political and mil-itary tactics. This is not much of cari-cature; it is a textbook approach to thecontrast between pre– and post–1949China in much Western historiogra-phy over the last few decades.

However, significant elements ofWestern and much Chinese historicalscholarship about this period havealso changed greatly in the last twentyyears. Here, Manichean Cold War dis-tinctions are no longer regarded as his-torically convincing or politically use-ful: the Maoist division between a


Was Mao aMonster?

Mao has been dead for over thirty years, yet our knowledge of

him – as a man and as historical actor – remains patchy and

sometimes even less informed than before. In China, serious

enquiry into Mao is discouraged by the Party which he helped

found and is still in power. In Western academic studies, there is

now more interest in China as it has become since Mao, rather

than as it was under him. The implicit reductionism in post-Cold

War Western historiography has reached its peak in Jung Chang

and Jon Halliday’s best-selling biography of Mao (Mao: The

Unknown Story, Jonathan Cape, 2005), from which many

reviewers concluded that Mao was nothing more than a monster.

Yet, as Rana Mitter explains, many important questions still

remain to be asked about Mao.


virtuous Communist Party and a vil-lainous nationalist party; or, inTaiwan, between a wonderful but mis-understood nationalist regime and anutterly evil communist regime.

Many interpreters ofChinese history – in Taiwan,the People’s Republic ofChina (PRC), and in the West– now present a differentmacro story: namely, thatboth the nationalists and thecommunists had projectswith good, indeed noble,intentions. Both saw that China’sproblems included imperialist domi-nation of its tax base and of its legalrights, and the imposition of extra-ter-ritoriality (the maintenance of foreignlegal and property rights on Chineseterritory); both were confronted by amassive agrarian crisis; both faced theapproaching Japanese invasion. Thecommunists and nationalists also hadthe same flaws, which helped bringabout their own destruction: an inabil-ity to encompass difference, to agree todisagree; and an obsessionwith violence.

So, rather than Chinesehistory being a melodramabetween the black of thecommunists and the whiteof the nationalists, or viceversa, we see a tragedy inthe Greek sense: actorswith good intentions butwith flaws which theycould not overcome; and,possibly, in true Greektragedy style, much later acatharsis – the gradualchanges that have takenplace in China and Taiwansince the 1980s.

These current historicalinterpretations also stress the similari-ties rather than the differencesbetween pre- and post-1949 China.Much that people associate with thecommunist victory was in fact attrib-utable to the communists’ predeces-sors. For example, extra-territorialityended in not in 1949 but in 1943 underthe treaties signed by Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and the Westernallies as part of the price for Chineseparticipation in World War II. Thatcommunist China has a seat on theSecurity Council of the United

Nations today is again attributable tothose negotiations with nationalistChina between 1943 and 1948.

Many changes in Chinese societyafter 1949 – for example, the establish-

ment of the danwei, the work unit(strongly associated with the change toa more totalized social system) inwhich the living place, the workplaceand so forth are all joined together –were not unconnected with the reorga-nization of workplaces in national-ist–held China under wartime condi-tions.

Does this new trend in the histori-ography of China – that both theKuomintang and the CCP, and pre- andpost-1949 China, are not substantially

different but variations on a theme –go too far? Does it obscure the impor-tance of figures – in particular Mao –who did seem to create a new type ofsocial organization, one unlike any-thing that China, or the world, hadseen previously? Consideration of twobroad areas – the role of the anti-Japanese war (1937–45) in Mao’s rise topower, and Mao’s use of terror – canhelp us answer these questions.

THE ANTI-JAPANESE WARFor decades the anti-Japanese war has

been central in our understanding ofwhy China looked as it did under Mao.In 1962, in Peasant Nationalism andCommunist Power, the Americanpolitical scientist Chalmers Johnson

broke new ground by arguingagainst a Cold War consen-sus. This consensus – in theUS at least – hinted that Maowas simply a Soviet puppetand that the Sino-Soviet splitof the early 1960s was simplya feint to distract people fromthe Moscow-based conspir-

acy to take over the West. Johnsonargued that the anti-Japanese war wasimportant in shaping the eventual riseof Mao’s communists to power: com-munist social organization had beenmixed with anti-Japanese patrioticguerrilla fighting; this had motivatedlocal peasantry, particularly in north-ern China, and had created the mobi-lized political base from which aMaoist China would emerge after theCivil War.

A decade later scholars in the US(most notably Mark Selden)argued that more attentionneeded to be paid to thesocial reorganization inMao’s war-time base area,not the anti-Japanese ele-ment. Known thereafter bythe title of Selden’s book,The Yenan Way, this reorga-nization took the form of apolitical system whichmixed local people whowere not associated with theCommunist Party withactual party members, andof the establishment of aself-sufficient economydependent on handicrafts,on more efficient agricul-

ture, and on an economy that exportedmore (within China).

This work, which fuelled impor-tant academic debates into the early1990s, was based on the assumptionthat, if writing about the anti-Japanesewar, one had to study the Yan’an area.There were three main reasons whythis assumption was reasonable in the1960s and 1970s (in addition to thewider story, mentioned above, that theprevious, nationalist regime had lostpower because of its own failings andunder the onslaught of a strong, well-


‘Current historical interpretations stress

the similarities rather than the differences

between pre- and post-1949 China.’


organized and honest com-munist administration).

First, simply, communistChina existed, and scholarswanted to explain why anapparently alien, previouslyunknown ideology hadtaken such powerful holdwithin China.

Secondly, in the 1960sand 1970s it was impossibleto do archival research inChina. Johnson, Selden andothers obtained much oftheir material fromJapanese sources or sourcescaptured by the Japanesearmy, or from Taiwan. Thematerials that tended to beavailable in the West were,for the most part, thosefrom the communist-heldbase areas, which had beencaptured later by theJapanese or the national-ists.

Finally, of course, therewas the figure of Mao him-self: alive and well, runningthe Cultural Revolution,greeting Richard Nixon – hewas clearly the dominantfigure at the time. There was an imme-diate political relevance in trying tounderstand how he had got from, in the1920s, heading a tiny illegal party onthe run in Beijing and Shanghai to, in1973, leading a nuclear-armed Asiansuperpower that was playing host tothe President of the United States.

In the last fifteen or twenty years,particularly since archives have beenopened in China itself, the Mao-cen-tred story has come under strongattack, first of all from scholars of theCCP. Gregor Benton, a senior historianof China at Cardiff, has written at leasttwo definitive and fantasticallydetailed accounts of the communistswho worked with Mao and foughtbravely in the war, but whose storieswere sidelined in the Mao-centredpost-1949 historiography (MountainFires, 1992; and New Fourth Army,1999).

A more recent, and in some waysmore measured, reassessment, hasbrought China’s lawful and interna-tionally recognized government,Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists, back

into the story. Recent research by anew generation of scholars, workingfrom the new Chinese sources – Hansvan de Ven, Joshua Howard and EdnaTow, among others – has largely erasedthe picture of Chiang Kai-shek as a buf-foon who spent all his time trying toavoid fighting. Thiswork does not goback to the old ColdWar, Taiwanese,interpretation ofChiang Kai-shek asa wonderful vision-ary leader who wasslandered by theWest. Rather, it points out that ChiangKai-shek’s record, like that of Mao,was, though mixed, in some ways posi-tive. The war-time nationalist govern-ment, which had to flee at very shortnotice to Chongqing in 1937, whenwar broke out, was much more impres-sive than previously realized: thenationalist government’s refugeeagency, for example, provided reliefand employment to about 9.2 millionrefugees.

The achievements ofthe nationalist regime inthe construction of aerialdefences and military tac-tics, and indeed the recon-stitution of government –when, for almost fouryears, the regime was effec-tively fighting alone andthen, after 1941, had anambivalent and in manyways poisonous relation-ship with its Western allies– also mean that we have toreinterpret Chiang Kai-shek’s record.

Similarly, manyassumptions about thecommunists – that theirwar effort was central tofighting against theJapanese all across China(which is not true; even the‘100 regiments’ campaignof 1940 was not a great suc-cess in terms of lastingeffects); that they bore thebrunt of total fighting or ofthe refugee relief efforts; oreven that the communisteffort was primarily wherethe eyes of the world were

turned during the war – need to bereconsidered. Mao can now perhaps beportrayed as lucky as well as genuinelytactically skilled. Relatively cut offfrom the Japanese, he had time to re-group. Chiang Kai-shek and his gov-ernment, by contrast, were in

Chongqing, which, in 1939–43, wassubjected to heavier air raid bombingthan London or, indeed, the cities ofRepublican Spain in the Spanish CivilWar. Moreover, because it was underthe eyes of the world media, theChiang Kai-shek regime’s many flawswere magnified; the communists, towhom access was far more restrictedaccess, had this problem less.

The wartime experience shouldalso make us look again at the idea


‘Land reform policies and the reshaping of

the cities led to massive and continuous

unrelenting terror campaigns in China.’


that the Maoist period created theeconomic base for the growth that hastaken place in post-1978 reformedChina. Of course, this growth, and theeconomic miracle that we see today,did not emerge out of nowhere. But itis important to understand quite howdevastating the economic impact ofthe Sino–Japanese war was on China.Chinese historians have provided fig-ures that illustrate the extent of thedevastation suffered by China’s agri-cultural and industrial plant in thatperiod. Something like 55 per cent ofthe industrial plant of Shanghai,China’s main industrial base, wasbombed out of existence a few monthsinto the war. This is an extremely lowbase from which to be reconstructing.The resulting growth figures wereinevitably going to be high – underany regime. (The devastation visitedon Japan and Germanyalso led to impressivelyhigh growth figures afterthe war.) This puts in con-text – without takingaway the credit from –China’s economicachievements.

Nevertheless, the factthat we might need todowngrade the central rel-evance of Mao and theYan’an base area in thestory of the Sino–Japanesewar does not, as some recent interpre-tations have it, mean that Mao was atraitor, that he wanted to do a dealwith the Japanese. Mao was a genuineanti-imperialist who wanted to recon-struct China as an independent statefree of foreign interference.

TERRORAccess to archives in mainland Chinahas also forced us to reconsider theimpact of terror tactics on the imple-mentation of early Maoist policies.For a long time the dominant viewwas that, because the Chinese revolu-tion of 1949 was a people’s revolution– it had come from below – there hadbeen no need for Stalinist terror tac-tics. This picture is now changing. Itis clear that the land reform policiesand the reshaping of the cities, partic-ularly after the resolution of theKorean War in 1953, led to massiveand continuous unrelenting terror

campaigns in China. This has to begiven weight when interpreting therecord of the regime.

Yet one should remember theinternational context. Many stateswere born or existed in a welter ofblood: Stalinist and indeedpost–Stalinist Russia, for instance,and the satellite communist easternEuropean states – Poland, Hungary,Bulgaria, and others. Being a non-communist or a communist leaderout of favour in eastern Europe in theearly Cold War was not healthy forone’s career prospects. So while onecannot deny that China experiencedterror tactics in this period, there is aquestion of comparability: how differ-ent was China from other communiststates?

But there is one particular periodwhich is not comparable in the same

way: the Cultural Revolution, which,as Roderick Macfarquhar andMichael Schoenhals’s new book,Mao’s Last Revolution, points out,was unremittingly and anarchisti-cally violent throughout. One of themore troubling legacies of the May4th movement of the early twentiethcentury – the iconoclastic and insome ways liberating rejection of oldConfucian norms in China – was that(copying the pattern of the Bolsheviksin Russia and the futurists in Italy,who embraced a new post–traditionalmorality) the movement found aredeeming social quality in violence.Violence was not simply an unfortu-nate by-product of social change andrevolution but, rather, a positivesocial good in itself. This elementinformed many of the actions and themodernization of both the national-ists and the communists in the earlyand mid–twentieth century.

DOES MAO MATTER?But when we ask whether or not Maowas monster, and, if so, why and how,are we in fact asking the wrong ques-tion? Is Mao actually that relevant tounderstanding the wider sweep ofChinese history?

China today resembles to anextent the China being constructed inthe 1930s, without the imperialism –at least in the cities, and to someextent in the countryside too. Thereis a nationalist party in charge whichdoes not allow any rivals but toleratesdifferent views inside the party; itsofficial ideology is ostensibly corpo-ratist and welfarist but, in practice,the party encourages a kind of man-aged capitalism; its nationalism isstrong but not xenophobic and isbased on a secular, Enlightenment-derived discourse; the regime has a

troubled human rightsrecord but is a long wayfrom being a totalitarianstate; it genuinely wants todo something about thepoor but also about corrup-tion and a lack of statecapacity in various areas;and it is developing citiesat the expense of the coun-tryside – Shanghai, ofcourse, is its window onthe world. Moreover, theregime – like Chiang Kai-

shek’s nationalist regime in the 1930s– is generally quite well regarded bythe outside world. (The difference isthat the Japanese are not about toinvade any time soon, regardless ofwhat Beijing taxi drivers say.

In this context, then, though Maois interesting as a historical figure,does he have much to tell us aboutChina today? Perhaps an examinationof the legacy of the ‘abortive revolu-tion’, as Lloyd Eastman called ChiangKai-shek’s nationalist revolution ofthe 1930s, might be a more produc-tive way to understand modernChina.

Rana Mitter is University Lecturer inthe History and Politics of ModernChina at the University of Oxford.This is an edited extract of the talkhe gave at the CSD symposium, ‘WasMao a Monster?’, in June 2006.


‘A more recent, and in some ways more

measured, reassessment, has brought

China’s lawful and internationally recognized

government, Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists,

back into the story.’


There have been many – perhapstoo many – conferences onIslamist politics. Islamist

activists have usually been absent fromthem. Also lacking has been any directdialogue between Islamist leaders andwestern diplomats. Most Western gov-ernments, in order to pacify friendlyregimes, have a policy of avoiding offi-cial contacts with Islamist activists. Asmost Islamist groups are deeply hostileto US and Western policies, manywould reject overtures from Westerndiplomats, even if the officials werebrave enough to make them.

It was therefore greatly significant

that, at the November 2006 CSD work-shop arranged to discuss importantelectoral developments in Arab coun-tries and international responses to theelection results, not only were diplo-mats from Western countries sittingalongside scholars and Islamist leaders,but that they helped sponsor the work-shop.

Another important first was thatIslamists from across the Sunni–Shi’idivide (including leading figures frombeleaguered Iraq) came together at thisevent to discuss issues relating todemocratization and political reform.Islamist leaders from almost every Arab

country, and from the most importantmovements, joined the debate.

ISLAMIST VICTORIESIn October 2005, candidates of the out-lawed Muslim Brotherhood scored animpressive victory in Egyptian parlia-mentary elections. This win confirmeda pattern established in elections inIraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia (municipalelections), and, against expectations, inSudan (for professional and trade unionbodies), as well as in the elections heldeven earlier in Bahrain, Morocco, Jordanand Algeria: namely, that voters wereturning in growing numbers to Islamistparties. The landslide victory of Hamasin the January 2006 Palestinian elec-tions, which stunned observers, con-firmed the trend.

One should treat cautiously theresults of elections held in Arab coun-tries, as many distorting factors are atwork. But there is no avoiding the con-clusion: Islamism is here to stay. SomeBahraini invitees were unable to attendthe workshop as they were feverishlypreparing for Bahrain’s first contestedparliamentary and municipal elections,scheduled for November 2006. As pre-dicted, Islamists of all persuasionsswept the board, winning 30 out of 40parliamentary seats, and most of themunicipal seats as well.

These results are all the moreremarkable given the many obstaclesset up to prevent such outcomes. InEgypt, for example, the MuslimBrotherhood is branded an illegal orga-nization, and the government had tar-geted its activists and voters witharrests and assaults before and duringthe elections. Yet the Brotherhoodended up winning close to a quarter ofthe seats in parliament.

DEBATESAn impressive array of scholars, diplo-mats and activists from Europe, the USand the Arab debated issues arisingfrom the elections. Leading scholarsincluded Dr Samir Khalaf (Lebanon),Radwan Masmoudi (USA), Dr Madawial–Rashid (UK/Saudi Arabia), Dr AsmaAfsaruddin (USA), Prof RobertSpringborg (USA/UK), and Dr JohannesReisner (Germany). The focus was onthe Arab world, but prominent scholarsfrom Turkey and Iran – including therenowned Iranian reformist thinker


Beyond theStalemate?

Organized by the Democracy and Islam programme at CSD, the

November 2006 ‘Electing Islamism’ workshop took stock of

recent election results in the Arab world. Abdelwahab

El Affendi reports.


-


Dr Abdolkarim Soroush (see interviewon p. 8) – offered additional perspec-tives. Ambassador Hans-GuntherGnodtke from the German foreign min-istry, Dr Ibrahim al-Ja’fari, Iraq’s firstelected prime minister in four decades,and Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannoushi,exiled leader of the Tunisian An-Nahdaparty, made keynote speeches.

Hans-Gunther Gnodtke began byexpressing the view that the West wasnot yet adequately prepared to face thechallenge of resurgent Islamism.Western policy makers had genuineconcerns about the agendas of thesemovements. International reservationsabout the rise of Hamas, he pointed out,

had nothing to do with Hamas’s pre-sumed Islamic agenda and everything todo with its problematic role in the peaceprocess. While welcoming the markedshift in Islamist discourse towardsespousing democratic values, hepointed out that there were seriousdoubts (shared by many in the region)about whether Islamists could betrusted. He recognized the dynamismand potential of Islamic activism, aswell as the uncontested need for reformin the region, and expressed the hopethat Islamists would become reliablepartners in the reform process.

In an indirect reply to these remarks,Sheikh al-Ghannoushi opened with thequestion: ‘Why does the Arab world

lack democracy?’ Rejecting the claimthat religion was to blame, he arguedthat there are secular and Muslim dic-tatorships and democracies. Whilesome Islamists may not believe indemocracy, the majority do. ‘The prob-lem’, he added, ‘is in convincing therulers of the merits of democracy, sincethe shortest way to prison and the gal-lows in the Arab world is to win elec-tions.’ However, he said, the key pointis that the regimes that obstruct democ-racy are rewarded by the West, whilethe people who participate in freeelections in the Arab world (thePalestinians, for example) are pun-ished with starvation. The obstacleto democracy is neither Islam norIslamists, nor religion or culture. Itis, rather, international politics,and the Western democracieswhich support corrupt rulers. It isin the interest of Western states – andthe key to good relations with the peo-ple of the Arab world – al-Ghannoushistated, to withdraw support from theserulers

Emphasizing the Iraqi experience, DrIbrahim al-Ja’fari also argued thatIslamist movements support democ-racy. Common human values makedemocracy compatible with religions.Democracy’s emphasis on pluralismand non-discrimination conforms per-fectly with Islamic values. Islamicmovements seek justice and equalopportunities. Al-Jaafari cautionedagainst judging the nascent Iraqi demo-cratic experiment too harshly, and com-plained about the media distortion ofevents in Iraq. The main challenge todemocracy comes from terrorismregimes; Arab countries suffer from ter-rorism; and some regimes both practiceterrorism and support terror organisa-tions.

Abdelwahab El-Affendi, presentingthe CSD discussion paper, warned thatthe Islamist ascendancy is threateningto become an obstacle to democracy,because – paradoxically – Islamist par-ties are not ambitious enough: most arenot prepared to shoulder the responsi-bility of being in government. Instead,they tend to make contingent compro-mises with incumbent regimes, offeringto support them in exchange for limitedparticipation in the political process ;this helps perpetuate the status quo andhampers progress. Islamist groups can

avoid this situation in one of threeways: by sticking to their rigid pro-grammes and using revolutionary tac-tics to gain power (as happened in Iranand Sudan); by addressing directly theproblems created by their participationin the political process – they can radi-cally modify their programmes toaccommodate the concerns of others, asthe Justice and Development party inTurkey did; or by withdrawing fromelectoral politics altogether and func-tioning as a pressure group. Most have

chosen the third alternative. These issues were hotly debated at

the workshop. Islamist leaders tried toconvince the scholars and diplomats oftheir democratic credentials; they, inturn, were challenged on many crucialpoints. Western policies towardsdemocratization in the region cameunder serious scrutiny. Scholars pointedto the diversity within Islamist politicsand called for more sophisticated andsensitive approaches towards theregion. The crises of the region, includ-ing those of Iraq and Palestine, were dis-cussed in separate, more in-depth, ses-sions.

In spite of the wide range of Islamistgroups present, at no point were democ-ratic principles contested or opposed.The debate centred mainly on thenature and sources of obstacles todemocratization. Anti-Western rhetoricwas noticeably absent. There was muchcriticism of Western policies. None ofthe Islamist leaders, however, said thatMuslim–Western relations should beconflictual. In fact, all deplored the ten-sions between the Muslim world andthe West and called for more dialogue inorder to achieve mutual understanding.

Another workshop is scheduled fornext year: a date has been set and prepa-rations are under way. Watch this space.

Abdelwahab El–Affendi is the Directorof CSD’s Democracy and Islam pro-gramme. The proceedings of the work-shop are available on the CSD website.

‘All called for more dialogue to

achieve mutual understanding between

the Muslim world and the West.’



social networking portal Meetup.com,the blog aims to be the first point of callfor people who want to gather anddiscuss, to meet not only online butalso in the real world, to fight togetheragainst the politically-biased media ‘smonopoly grip on truth. To date, theMeetup.com group category ‘Friends ofBeppe Grillo’ has around 33,000members, organized in 199 groups in157 cities in 15 different countries. Thefriendship groups meet regularly;sometimes, when possible, Grillohimself attends their meetings.

THE BLOG’S FEATURESLess than a year after its birth, in mid-December 2005, beppegrillo.it wasvoted best internet site in the category‘News and Information’ for therenowned WWW 2005 Prize. Theannual prize, organized by il Sole 24Ore, the most popular Italian dailyfinancial newspaper, is awarded ‘forinteraction with the public, ampledocumentation on the internet and thecommitment to tackling topics usefulto citizens.’ Like any standard blog,beppegrillo.it stores post by relying ontwo different kinds of archives: one isorganized by months, while the other isorganized according to ten categories.The blog, however, displays somerather unusual, possibly unique,features; these are strong indicators ofits political character.

One of the most important featuresof Grillo’s blog is the way it seeks towiden its reach through La Settimana(‘The Week’), a printed magazinecontaining the posts published on theblog during the previous week. Amagazine like this is not a commonfeature of blogs. In Italy, where 52 percent of the population is still

disconnected from the web, this ratherold-fashioned weekly pamphlet is anattempt to export information from theweb onto the streets. In the editorialpublished in the first issue of LaSettimana, Grillo – making fun ofLenin – wrote that La Settimana was ineffect ‘one step back in order to goforward’. What he meant was that theblog uses a traditional method ofdistributing political information (theprinted pamphlet) in order to bridgetwo different worlds: the world of ‘bits’and the world of bricks. (More recently,Grillo has also begun to post a videoversion of La Settimana onYoutube.com.)

NUMBERSThe importance, and henceauthority, of a blog can bemeasured by the number ofother bloggers who are linkedto it. This measurement canalso be used to bring somemeasure of accountability to theblogosphere. That at any rate is thephilosophy behind the search engineTechnorati.com.

According to Technorati,beppegrillo.it is number 20 in a listdrawn up by tracking and rankingover 70 million blogs. Grillo’s blogis linked to an impressive 6,180blogs. By way of comparison,according to the July 2006 PEWsurvey on the Americanblogosphere the average number ofinbound links to a blog is around13. Beppegrillo.it is not only thenumber one Italian blog; with anaverage of 170,000 individual visitsper day, it has also become, in a

short period, the third most traffickedinformation website in Italy.

In the twelve–month period from 1May 2005 that culminated in theItalian general election month of April2006, 401 posts were published onbeppegrillo.it: an average of 1.18 postsper day. These posts received a total of463,000 posts, or an average of1,154.92 comments per post.

The number of comments increasedsubstantially throughout this period.The total number grew by 368 percent: from 17,021 in May 2005 to62,786 in April 2006. Averagecomments per post grew from 405 in

May 2005 to over 2,025, in April 2006– an increase of 500 per cent. Thesection that received the mostcomments was ‘Politics’: it got almosta quarter – 111,000 – of the totalnumber of comments posted on theblog. On average, the topic of politicsproduced over 1,300 comments perpost.

Given that beppegrillo.it isessentially a blog for information andpolitics, it should not be surprisingthat the blog received the greatestnumber reached of comments in April2006, the month of the generalelection. If we consider only thenumber of posts directly related to theelection (8 out of 31) in the two weeks

Continued from page 2

‘Grillo tackles important issues that the

mainstream media rarely address, and

never with clarity.’



immediately before and after theelection, the average number ofcomments per post was nearly 3,300.The message posted by Grillo the dayafter the election, 11 April, ‘C'è chi’(‘There are those…’), produced 4,198comments, the highest number forthe year. Grillo’s message wascommenting on the narrow victory ofthe centre–left coalition, led byformer EU Commission presidentRomano Prodi, over the centre–rightcoalition led by Silvio Berlusconi. Theclosing words of the message can beinterpreted as the motto of the blogand its community: ‘There are thosewho looked up at the ceiling fromunder the covers [of their bed] anddecided never to give in.’

CAMPAIGNSIn its first year, beppegrillo.itpromoted a number of campaigns oneconomic and political issues as wellas campaigns to protect and sustainscientific research. It often took a firmstand on matters that are under- orwillfully misrepresented in themainstream media. An example wasthe Parlamento Pulito (Clean UpParliament) campaign, which hadconsiderable resonance in the media.Stemming from an initiative of theBeppe Grillo Meetup group in Milan,the campaign set out to inform theItalian public of a rarely discussedfact: that several members of theItalian parliament, though convictedby the courts, are allowed to representtheir constituents. The ultimate aimof the initiative was to protest againstthe lack of legislation that wouldprevent such corruption. Using hisblog, Beppe Grillo and his fellowbloggers raised almost 55,000 euros,easily enough to pay for a full–pageadvertisement in the InternationalHerald Tribune that drew attention tothe problem. No newspaper in Italywas willing to publish the sameadvertisement.

POLITICAL GURU?One of Grillo’s great strengths is hispassion. He tackles important issuesthat – though familiar to many people– the mainstream media rarelyaddress, and never with clarity. Just ascrucial is the way beppegrillo.itmanages to aggregate in a virtual

space an otherwise fragmented andgeographically dispersed public.Those who read and comment onGrillo’s posts are members of anactive public inclined to questionopenly who gets what, when and how.The rising proportion of politicalcomments among those posted is astrong indicator of this publicengagement. Judging from the contentof these comments, the publicgathered here is quite mixed: thoughleaning slightly to the left, itsmembers come from different parts of

the political spectrum. It is alwayshighly critical of the politicalestablishment.

According to a 2006 FreedomHouse report on freedom of the press,Italy is currently ranked 80th in theworld, immediately after Tonga andBotswana and just before Antigua andBurkina Faso. In the period 2001–06,when he was prime minister, SilvioBerlusconi and his governmentexercised almost total control of whatwas said or discussed on televisionand, to a lesser extent, in thenewspapers. In opposition to thehighly partisan and often misleadingreporting that appears in Italy’snational media, beppegrillo.it hasmanaged to become, in a short time,one of the main reference points forthe many Italians around Italy andacross the globe trying to make senseof the state of their country.

Commenting on his unusualposition as a political guru, Grillosmiles, then quickly adds thatsomething is wrong: ‘Peopleconstantly write to me on my blog totell me that I am the only person whocan say certain things . . . but actuallyI am just a comedian who shouldn’thave to bear such a serious burden.’

Grillo is right. Blogging is not thekey to democratic revolution. Yet thecase of beppegrillo.it is a goodexample of how civic–minded peoplewith limited access to mainstreammedia but with a history of integrityand a strong sense of civicengagement – and who are willing tosupport others – can harness thepower of the web to promoteinnovative modes of politicalparticipation. Beppegrillo.it is animportant sign of political vitality in acountry in which mainstream mediaare muzzled and the ruling politicalclass lacks popular support. (A surveyconducted by Repubblica.it on 23May 2007 found that more than 70 percent of Italians trust neitherpoliticians nor political parties.)Judging from its growing number ofvisitors, beppegrillo.it shows that it ispossible, in quick time, to provide amuch-needed, new democratic spacefor politics.

Closer inspection shows, of course,that beppegrillo.it’s efforts have so farbeen less than optimal: it has not hadmuch impact on national politics.Grillo is the first to admit this. It isalso true that his blog’s success islinked heavily to Grillo's personalappeal in the Italian blogosphere.Moreover – if it is not degenerate intopure populism – beppegrillo.it needsto improve its own processes of publicaccountability and its agenda-settingprocedures. Nonetheless, by anystandards, bepegrillo.it is a politicallyimportant initiative that deservesmore attention, if only because itmight well set a few standards for thedawning world of web politics.

Giovanni Navarria is a PhDcandidate at CSD.

CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF

DEMOCRACY

University of Westminster

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