Intersectionality and Democratic Politics

Over the last few days I have been inspired, and somewhat intimidated, by the discussions at the seminar on Leadership Challenges in Uncertain Times hosted by the wonderful Aspen Initiative UK. I am still trying to integrate what I heard and learned over the week, but one thought keeps coming back for me that I think might be worth sharing. We spoke a lot about some of the features of contemporary identity politics, and particularly the focus on speech acts and signals. Discomfort with attempts to police opinion are not restricted to conservatives, and Mark Lilla, for one, has articulated an anxiety that is widely shared, that the illiberalism of some expressions of these politics will be self-defeating and make it harder rather than easier to create solidarity and understanding.

Personally I have never run into anything more than what I thought were perfectly reasonable requests to be mindful of the variety of people in organisations I was running. To be honest I've always thought I've just been asked to be polite. However this is a real issue, and I have colleagues and people I admire, like Kathleen Stock, who have had a much rougher time and have legitimate grounds for complaint about how they have been treated. When push comes to shove I would stand up for the most extensive understanding of academic freedom.  That cuts both ways though; I am always amused when some right-wing scholars demand some kind of special protection for their claim about compelling arguments that somehow aren't winning in open debate. 

Coming at this issue through the gate of policing speech, policing the policing as it were, does not strike me as the most creative or interesting way to think about it. I'd like us to be mindful of the work that people involved in these issues of diversity and equality are doing and what motivates them. It may be a mystery to many people why trans issues, for instance, play such an important role in the political thinking of so many people. It may be even more challenging to see why trans issues might or can be aligned with work on  migration or cultural difference. However the idea of intersectionality is the driver of much of the work, so such a lack of understanding is no warrant to reject or ignore that work and that thinking. 

Somewhere at the heart of this work is a breathtakingly ambitious effort to articulate the conditions of global equality. People working in this mode make even people like Sam Moyn, who thinks human rights are not enough, look modest in their ambitions. They are trying to think and live through the conditions of possibility of democracy for the entire globe. The real risk takers even want to extend that imaginative inclusivity beyond our species and recognise the value and dignity of other beings. And these efforts are having effect, in cases such as the Whanganui River being recognised as a legal person. We live in a world of globalised trade, where attaching citizenship too firmly to nationality flies in the face of the reality of the patterns of movement of people and peoples. It is  obvious that global action will be necessary to respond to climate change. So this egalitarianism may be ambitious and utopian, and undoubtedly it lands in odd ways, but it does seem to be posing the right question.

If we come at the phenomenon from this direction, it does not excuse bullying, but it rescues us from the performative contradiction of looking for ways to control the speech of those trying to control the speech of others. It is not surprising that the articulations of this egalitarian desire would be raw, overstated, and uncomfortable. It also helps to understand the attention paid to marginality, since the test of equality arises on the margins. It became clear too in the many discussions during the seminar, that this kind of ambition is really cognitively stressful and demands we be tolerant of ways of thinking that may seem to some of us to be fuzzy and lack evidence. This is stressful, but as one person put it, "it's your turn" on that one. The call to leadership then seems to be to accept the question, especially if one finds oneself at odds with efforts to narrow the space of acceptable speech. Liberal conservatism is too easy, there must be a joyful, robust vision of expansive democracy.

On the Sources of (Some) of our Present Discontents

 I was watching Official Secrets with my daughter last night and I ended up thinking about the Second Iraq War for the first time in a long time. She was very young when it was happening so had only the dimmest memories and it wasn't something we'd ever discussed at length, so she was struck by how upset I remained at it. For some of us thinking is more akin to marination than cogitation and what I discovered when talking to her was that if anything I now think that war was even more of a disaster than it first appeared to be and is a crucial moment that set us up for many of our current difficulties. The us in those sentences are those of us who live in the US and Europe, but particularly in the UK. Of course the real disaster is for the Iraqi people, but I have no competence to write on that, so all I can do is acknowledge it.

If we go back to that moment in early 2003, the geopolitical world was very different. The US enjoyed a kind of cultural, economic, and political dominance that has already disappeared. Looked at in long-term view, the pivot of the US after Vietnam to effectively ally with China against the USSR had worked. Kissenger's move had set up victory in the Cold War, and laid the foundations for the development of the international order after it. To a particular geopolitical turn of mind 9/11 was a reminder that the Middle East was the remaining crucial area of instability in the international order, and a call to do something about it. It is important to remember that the people driving US foreign policy at this point were the members of Nixon's team (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Armitage, Wolfovitz, the people Paul Mann called the Vulcans) who had been entirely sceptical of Kissenger style diplomacy and believed in frank assertion of American power. Imagine how the world looks to thinkers who see Kissenger as too liberal; Joe Nye style notions of a norm-grounded international order don't even occur to them. So the US had enormous room for manoeuvre, and could have done pretty much anything, but it chose to invade Iraq as an opening move in a reorganisation of the international order, and was choosing from a constrained body of choices because of the outcome of the 2000 election. What they found out, as we all know, is that they were completely wrong about how power and the international order work. 

What seems clear to me now is that for the people pushing for war the geostrategic reason for intervention was so clear that the premise was almost beside the point. When you see the unconvincing revelation of shaky intelligence the people delivering it look like they are going through the motions. From their point of view they were going to do the right thing "free the Iraqi people" and the formalities were just that, formalities. And so we start getting in to the long-term consequences. Iraq was hardly the first time a state has lied to its population to go to war (just in case there was any doubt Poland did not attack Germany in 1939, and that whole Tonkin Gulf thing was cooked up) but the investment in alternative facts was unprecedented. The mobilisation we will need to combat climate change is of the order of war and the US and the UK undermined the very principle of rational public debate right at the point we most need it. That was the point at which the rules-based international order started to crumble, and that tendency intensified as the rights regime came under stress (torture memos). From the outside it also looks as if US foreign policy has become locked into a strategy of dominance rather than hegemony through leadership. At the end of this dynamic stands the question of whether the existing international legal and political order can be recovered or do we need to start looking for other arrangements.

Closer to home Tony Blair, and the Blairite support for the war, broke the Labour Party. For those of us of a natural Labour turn of mind Blair and his team were never the easiest option, but if that was where the centre-left of the UK was found, well then so be it. However that warrant did not extend to wars of choice, no matter how well-intentioned or honestly supported (and the egotism of turning these issues on personality clearly foreshadowed what was to come). The Labour Wars of the last decade and a half all turn on where people were on Iraq. It must be hard to be on the Corbyn side of the party and remain civil with the supporters of the Iraq war, and the hard core of anti-Corbyn was driven by the Iraq Yeomanry.

The most vivid example of the effect of Iraq on the Labour coalition is in Scotland. In the Scottish elections of 2003, held in May, Labour lost only six seats, to the Scottish Socialists, and the SNP lost more, eight, mostly to the Greens. That did not crack the mould of Scottish politics since it was hardly news that Labour faced a challenge from the left, and the effect of Iraq had not yet been to reconfigure the political spectrum. Labour had every reason to expect the Green and Scottish Socialist vote to return to them in the long run. The SNP opposition to the war, a position that aligned them with the Liberal Democrats, allowed them to break out of the nationalist constituency and to appeal to Labour voters who could not stomach the war, and they added twenty seats to their tally in 2007, which then set them up to become the dominant force in Scottish politics that now defines the local agendas. The middle class turned against Labour in 2007 and the working class did the same in 2011. 

And Iraq had huge consequence for the UK's position on Europe as well. When Blair supported the war, and so broke with the European consensus that this was, as the cliche has it, "worse than a crime, a blunder", he also reinforced the dynamics of UK nationalism that eventually drove Brexit. The CANZUK/US fantasy as an alternative to the EU, has its proximate roots in the Iraq alliance. The consequences of even trying to put the Empire back together in this form really are terrifying. As the UK aligns with the US, and tries to bring the old white settler colonies in its train, in the view that military superiority generates some kind of international legitimacy, they both drive everyone else, who rejects that view, to co-operate against them. This whole strategy for the UK looks doomed to failure, and makes the work of international co-operation against climate change unnecessarily harder. It also makes an EU-China alignment in accord with the equatorial nations most vulnerable to the early effects of climate change more likely. 

The US did not have to make this mistake, and the UK made it worse by supporting them.

The Rag and Bone Shop of the Mind

It has been lovely over the past two days to have so many people kindly respond to the publication of Provincializing Global History. The book will have to stand on its own two legs as a contribution to the field, but I thought it might be interesting to write something about the background of concern that it emerges from. At a workshop around the book kindly organised by Sophus Reinert, my old friend and colleague John Shovlin asked me what was the predicament that we were in that I wrote in this particular way, and I've been thinking about that as a really interesting question for me.  I'm taking John's "we" in this circumstance to refer to the scholarly community and I think John is right, we are in a predicament, but that is no bad thing. John's question brought me back to a moment very early in my scholarly life when Patrice Higonnet gently intimated that if I was that committed to praxis and saw scholarly work as a projection of more profound issues then why didn't I go and directly address them. That stopped me dead in my tracks, but again in a really useful way because it made me get past an unhelpful idea about what it was to research and write history, particularly history of the changes in the use of ideas. And that is why on my PURE profile I have my tongue a little in my cheek when I refer to myself as an applied eighteenth-century historian. We have not, I feel, fully appreciated how our work uncovers latent possibilities and resources to address our current moment. Every day in my work in Dundee I see how just allowing what I know from my work and experience as an historian to inform my work with partners, has transformative effect. So our predicament, I feel, is that we are not open enough to the radical consequences of historical practice, and the kinds of hopeful, but awkward, places following the consequences of our own practice might take us. And for me that late eighteenth century moment, in which so many of the institutions and ideas that structure contemporary reality were constructed, is the most challenging and disturbing of places to do historical work. Seeing the past as full of possibility, most of which is lost, rather than as a simplified or immature version of the present and future, completely changes the way in which one approaches the archive.

The nagging question that drives the book is around the conditions of possibility of stable modern  life. Why and how did and do ordinary (a tricky word) families and individuals commit themselves to the risk and danger of social experiment, rather than relying on the reproduction of known structures and authorities? I am continually struck that over the past 250 years, despite the horrors of imperialism and slavery, the anxieties attendant on market economies, the catastrophic revolutions against modern life, and the even more damaging barbarisms inflicted by modernist utopians, the everyday miracle of a self-organising society reasserts itself, as well as its demotic virtues of equality and kindness. The hypothesis I advance in the book is that European provincial life created the context within which specific, particular experiences, of the acquisition of knowledge, of economic life,  of material culture, could be abstracted and represented in universal terms, and that in consequence a culture of reason shared between elites and subalterns emerged. And that, I think, is the key to understanding how the thread of civilisation is spun, out of reason. Since I wrote this I've been thinking about, and writing about, other contexts where models of demotic reason emerged. Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic, and his notion of double consciousness is more and more compelling to me, and I'm hoping to extend my work in his direction. My colleague Undine Sellbach has driven me to think much harder about feminist critiques of the idea of critical rationality that structures my understanding of reason. So I understand that any specific definition of reason in the book is open to challenge, but I think that does not invalidate the observation around the historical experience of the community and its significance. The book is also in dialogue (if not evidently) with James Scott's work and his wonderful notion of a popular reason that escaped the neolithic revolution, let alone the industrial. His sensitivity to the paradoxes of coercion and the importance of agency to understand stability, is, I hope, reproduced in my thinking.

This book is the first of a pair, the second being on how demotic reason relates to capitalism. One of the reasons the book took so long was the impact that Chris Desan and Sven Beckert's seminar on capitalism had on me. I kept trying to align the story about the Languedoc and capitalism in a narrative, and I just couldn't. Eventually (it takes time but I do catch on) I realised it was because they are not continuous so I have been working for a while on the hinge between the commercial societies of the eighteenth century and the emergence of capitalist globalism in the nineteenth. As Patrice says, no great work is ever finished, merely abandoned.....