The Demotic Virtues and Islamism: Some thoughts provoked by the Paris attacks

Like all my friends and colleagues I am appalled at the events in Paris and thankful that everyone I know there seems to be safe. It is in moments like these that it is most important to keep thinking and to find creative ways to respond to events that are designed to overwhelm our capacity for rational action, to reduce us to fear. In that spirit I'd like to explain my view that the entire strategy of Islamist groups is based on a false premise and offer some suggestions about why they may have come to their conclusions.

Islamists are trying to start a war because they think they can't lose. The point of events like last night is to polarize, to divide global society and escalate tensions and problems into hostility and conflict. The Islamists share the pessimistic analysis of modern late capitalist society put forward by many commentators on the left and the right. In their view there are no moral or normative commitments grounding our shared life in politics and society in the countries across the Western world. Countries in Europe and the Americas may enjoy tremendous political, economic and military power, but there is no cause or ideal that could sustain those countries through a struggle that was costly and difficult. We believe nothing, so when we come under pressure we will crumble. Negative liberty generates tolerance and pluralism but also narcissism, disengagement, and isolation.

In my view this analysis completely misunderstands the relationship between capitalism and democracy and how that relationship has developed since the Enlightenment. The most astounding feature of that period is the global democratic transformation. By this I mean two really specific things. The almost complete triumph of egalitarian norms and the near complete mobilization of humans into self-organizing societies. One of the great gifts given to us by global history has been to explain that risk societies emerged everywhere, and did not disseminate out of Europe. New forms of collective action and co-ordination, based on the willingness of families at first, and then individuals, to take on new kinds of risk. emerged everywhere. Self-organizing societies are the base of democratic transformation.

The rise of "society" is hardly news, but the relationship between society (in this sense) and political values has not been fully explored. It is a commonplace among historically-minded political theorists to remark that the only new political virtue to be enunciated since Aristotle is egalitarianism and much discussion in political theory turns on whether or not that is real political virtue or rather an anti-political notion. A capacious idea of citizenship can easily comprise egalitarianism because it so clearly underpins so much of the actual public and civil experience of modern societies. Moreover egalitarianism spawns most of the ethics that are recognized not as heroic or aristocratic, but demotic, of the people: kindness, mercy, fairness, justice. I'm not proposing a silly and romantic view of the people, rather observing that there are a set of demotic virtues and we, in the sense of modern late capitalist societies do believe in them. The view that our societies are morally hollow is unfounded.

It would take a lot more than a blog post to argue persuasively that capitalism does not produce "society" but is parasitic on it, and that the cultural misunderstanding that informs Islamism (and much modern conservative thought) is to collapse one into the other. What I do want to end with is a reminder that lots of groups have had success attacking liberal states and even disrupting capitalist economies. However, mobilized democratic peoples are astonishingly successful at warfare. Islamists are like slave-holders or other kinds of late-nineteenth-century elites, clinging to a culturally pessimistic vision of modern life in order to persuade themselves they can create a future. Everything they do is futile and cannot succeed.

From September 2014 to May 2015: Does the SNP become the Irish Home Rule Party?

The referendum campaign in Scotland was one of the most interesting political processes I have ever been involved with, but it is over. I had assumed that once it had finished there would be a fairly speedy return to some sort of political normality, crisis-ridden adaptation to an increasingly unstable world, but that seems to be normality these days. Instead David Cameron's speech at the very moment the "no" victory was announced has moved the constitutional question up to the level of the UK. There is is a lot to be said about this, much of it derived from the debates on the nature of governance in the modern world thrown up in the independence debate itself. Alex Bell's thoughts and Gordon Brown's book aren't bad places to start thinking about these issues and Peter Arnott's analysis of the politics of the moment  is petty sharp.

I want to think about something much more specific and practical: the election next May. That is the next point at which the elements that will have to address the constitution of Britain (in its broadest sense, cultural and social as well as political) will be resorted. Given the current state of polls Labour may win an absolute majority, but I would be surprised if they did. The key indicator (in the polls) of economic competence is against them and that indicates that there will be a swing to the Tories as the date approaches. However there seems to be next to no possibility of a Tory majority, beset as they are by UKIP and by an electoral map tilted against them.

Another factor that has not, as yet, been recognized, is the possibility of the SNP winning a lot of seats in the coming election. They currently hold six but if, and this is a big if, the "Yes" vote on Clydeside translates into an increased turn-out and a change in the pattern of voting SNP in Holyrood elections and Labour in Westminster elections, they could end up holding the balance of power in the UK come next summer.

This would actually be a terrible outcome for the SNP as they would be under extreme pressure either to support a minority Labour Government or to go into coalition with it. They would become implicated in managing the slow decline of the British social democratic compromise and in whatever constitutional settlement that Labour will favor. Their capacity to represent the forces looking for a democratic renewal across the whole of Britain and NI, not just Scotland, would be eliminated and they would become a regional party speaking to a special interest, the semi-detached wing of the Scottish Labour Party.

This was exactly the crux that the old Irish Home Rule party found itself in and it never satisfactorily solved it. Their tactical alliance with the Liberals made sense, and allowed the party to be part of a coalition interested in reform of the state, but the relationship with the Liberals caused such tension in the party that after the fall of Parnell the party lost most of its efficacy and its capacity to lead the country politically.

My suggestion, given that this is not an unlikely outcome, is that the SNP should state in their manifesto that they will not enter any coalition, support a minority government, or take UK wide office. There is no need to go to the extreme of boycotting parliament or refusing to vote on a case by case basis. Members have to represent their constituents. They have to insist that Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats solve the problem of democratic reform of the UK. The SNP's proposed solution is disaggregation of the Union, their analysis is that it cannot be reformed. They have to act like they mean what they say, and not be tempted to use a tactical advantage, even to secure concessions to Scotland.

And someone should put a copy of Paul Bew's biography of Parnell in Nicola Sturgeon's hands.

Federalism, Scotland and Gordon Brown

There are now two pro-union campaigns being conducted in Scotland and they seem to be hostile to one another. The thrust of the main "Better Together" campaign for the closing stretch is emerging. The best hope they have is to maintain the sizable gender gap in favor of the union. The analysis seems to be that women in Scotland are more averse to the risk involved in independence and dislike the conflict involved in the debate. To that end there will continue to be a series of stories about nationalists as thugs, the assertion that everyone who is pro-independence is a nationalist, with the intimation, never stated, that nationalists are Nazis. This line is calculated to disenchant female voters from voting for independence. As it seems, though evidence on this is mixed, that the don't knows are breaking pro I'd expect to see efforts made to keep as much confusion in play as possible and a fairly sizable voter suppression effort. This is incredibly risky as it doubles down on the negative strategy and, more importantly, risks winning the vote without winning the argument. A slim pro-union vote on this basis would be a disaster for all sorts of obvious reasons.

The other campaign is Gordon Brown. Brown is trying to turn the independence debate into a wider conversation about governance in the British Isles, he is actually trying to win the argument. He has a book out next week, but the central contention has already been trailed in various  newspaper pieces. His argument is that the union has been the context for managing the risk involved in modern society and for solidarity in the face of financial disaster and poverty. It is the best version of the unionist argument, that the union offers a kind of universalism that transcends particular identities. This is not a defence of the political status quo and he is effectively in favor of completing Gladstone's project of home rule all around; federalizing the union. So this is a serious response to the dynamics that are the condition of the independence issue, not an attempt to win 51% of the vote.

I admire Gordon Brown and I've long thought that if he, rather than Blair, had been guiding the New Labour project then it would have been what was needed, a social democratic response to the changes  brought by Thatcherism, rather than a capitulation to them. But I fear that Brown is going to find himself a in a similar place on the independence issue. As Colin Kidd pointed out in his Guardian piece Brown has been trying to get reform of the union and democratization of the state taken seriously for the last twenty years, but without success. If his thinking about the complex relationships within the British Isles had real purchase on unionism then it would be flourishing. However the majority of the people who think like Gordon Brown on these issues are now in the pro-independence camp. They, we, think that the kind of progressive cosmopolitanism he endorses is best pursued through and by an independent Scotland. We have been here before. The Gladstonian project for reform of the union failed too.

Red and Orange

One of the continuing puzzles of the Scottish independence debate is the weak performance of the Better Together campaign. Much is made of the failure to make a "positive" case for the Union, but the case for the Union is obvious. The union offers a hedge against a series of risks, financial, military, economic and cultural. I suspect that what is meant when people complain about negativity is the complete absence of any shared project for the union. We know what it is for, in the sense of its function, but what does it do, what does it propose? There are all sorts of projects for an independent Scotland, and the utopianism that is very often decried by Unionists is, I suspect, the real advantage held by those in favour of independence.

Just why there seems to be no project for the Union among Scottish unionists isn't hard to understand. The Conservative and Unionist party cannot lead the campaign for the union in Scotland for the obvious reason, so it is left to the Labour party. However the Labour party is not a unionist party. It has all sorts of federalist and home rule roots (not as many as the Liberals) and is fully aware that the greatest electoral threat to working and lower-middle class support for the party has been unionism. You can be red or you can be orange but it is very hard to put those two identities together. In the unlikely event that Alistair Darling were to wrap himself in the Union Jack, plead with his fellow Scots to remember their loyalty to the Queen and remind them of their shared majority Protestant faith and commitment to liberty, he would actually be a Tory, a liberal unionist Tory, but a Tory nevertheless. So for obvious, structural reasons the Better Together campaign can't make a positive unionist case.

This would never have happened when Donald Dewar was around. The trap for Labour in Scotland was set when the Edinburgh Agreement excluded the "Devo Max" option from the referendum. This was initially seen as a bit of clever manoeuvring by Cameron as he forced Salmond to argue for an option that had only roughly 30% support at the time. At that point it looked like the independence issue might be taken off the table for a generation by way of a heavy defeat. However the real losers here were Labour since Devo Max was their natural equilibrium point so they ended up with the options of either supporting the Scottish Nationalist position or the Tory line, they had no option that they owned. I can't imagine Dewar, or Labour circa 1999 that still had serious Scottish representation around the leadership, would have allowed a question go the Scottish people that did not have a clearly Labour-branded option on it. So now, as the polls tighten enough to make it impossible to be semi-involved, Labour is driven to do the Tories' work for them in Scotland, and pretty much on their terms. This can get really odd and drive otherwise sensible people to say really daft things. I don't really believe George Robertson thinks that Western civilisation will collapse if Scotland votes for independence or that Alistair Darling really thinks there is any resemblance between Alex Salmond and Kim Jong-Il. These are the kinds of exaggerated statements people make when they are uncomfortable about their own positions.

Global History

We held the second of our workshops on the definition of global history on March 21st and 22nd in Dundee. The first, last June, was on finance, and this one was on communication. When we were setting these up I thought what would emerge would be a set of objects and categories that had a "global", that is to say universal, history. This expectation has not been fulfilled and a much more unexpected, and to my mind interesting, set of ideas about global history has begun to crystallize for me from our discussions.

The version of global history that seems to me to be emerging is characterized by a benign tension between two poles. The first is an insistence that a global history can't simply be a general history. This disposition is skeptical about every particular instance of global history, because it is suspicious of abstraction away from experience. However it insists that global context is absolutely necessary for the understanding of phenomena like democracy, empire or capitalism. Underlying this move is a kind of neo-transcendental argument (most explicitly deployed by Andrew Sartori in his version of global intellectual history). This asserts that since global phenomena (like the state or science) exist then there must be conditions of globality which have been and are being fulfilled. This kind of argument, that avoids prematurely defining the empirical conditions of globality, seems much more promising than defining global history in terms of trade, empire or any other phenomenon.

The second pole follows on form work done in the last decade by Anthony Hopkins and Patrick O'Brien. This is an insistence that global history is local history. The point of global history is not to identify structures with world-spanning effect. In some ways that would be too easy. The point is to convincingly argue why global context counts in particular places for particular reasons. Global is not some teleology toward which societies develop; it is more like a technique or a repertoire that a society can mobilize (with more or less success). Sophus Reinert's work on emulation is a really powerful example of how a specific text translated into a variety of contexts to very different ends. The really tough work to be done will be to explain how globally significant ideas and contexts generate radically different outcomes in different contexts. Difference, rather than identity, seems to be the them of the work that we will be doing.

Secession or Dissolution

The Scottish Government published its White Paper on the Independence Referendum today, so the phoney war is finally over and we can start to debate seriously. Very few people are going to make their decision based on issues in international law, but there are some fascinating questions. For instance, if the referendum decision is for independence, the manner in which Scotland would legally constitute itself is not clear. There is no legally defined mechanism for secession from the Union. The Acts of Union (in British and Irish Parliaments) 1801, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, were never repealed, merely amended, in the UK and were only repealed in the Irish parliament in 1962 and 1983 respectively, long after Ireland had declared a republic and left the commonwealth (1948). The British response to that was the Ireland Act of 1949, which effectively decided to treat citizens of the Republic of Ireland as if they were still UK subjects (which is why I get to vote here in referenda and don't need a passport to enter the UK). So while the Republic of Ireland effectively seceded from the Union, it did so, in a legal sense, so incrementally that it didn't establish a precedent.

So if the Scots do decide on independence does that mean they secede from the union or does that mean that the union is dissolved? Since the constitutive documents of the union are all based on the 1707 settlement (explicitly cited in the 1800 negotiations which established that the Irish Parliament had enough constitutional authority to dissolve itself, but not enough to negotiate a new treaty of union), can a United Kingdom legally exist if one of the constituting parties pulls out of it? Wales would still remain attached to the Crown and the English Parliament come what may since the incorporation of Wales long precedes the Union, but all other dependencies of the Crown of England would need to renegotiate their relationship to the English Parliament. There are quite a few entities, such as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, that are already subject to the Crown of England but not part of the United Kingdom, so there is domestic precedent for complicated constitutional machinery.

Oddly enough, if the legal situation was dissolution this would make the European issue much easier. Europe has already established that it recognises the entities consequent to a dissolution (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) as successor states, so both Scotland and whatever constituted itself out of subsequent negotiations between Northern Ireland and England would be automatically members of the EU. The contrast would be with the Soviet Union. When it dissolved only the Russian Federation was recognised as its successor state and the other republics were new states, but the consequence was that it assumed all the debt of the Soviet Union. So either dissolution or secession have downsides from the perspective of England and Northern Ireland.

If we get to the point where Scotland, England and Northern Ireland are negotiating Scottish Independence, public international law is going to constrain all parties in interesting and possibly unpredictable ways. The domestic constitutional stuff could get interesting too. If there is a dissolution, given the 1707 union was an incorporating union and the Scottish Constitutional tradition was not continued, does the Kingdom of Scotland revert to the forms of 1707?

Finance, Communication and Co-­‐ordination in Eighteenth-­‐Century Empires

Finance, Communication and Co-­‐ordination in Eighteenth-­‐Century Empires

A workshop sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, University of Dundee, July 5-­‐6, River Rooms, Ninth Floor, Tower Building, Nethergate.

The workshop will be the first of a series that have as their goal specifying the objects of global history. Global history has not been successfully separated from world history. World history is a well defined field, the study of the species from a high level of abstraction, but global history, the study of the phenomena that have global effect, is not at all the same thing. There is another meaning of world history as the history of peoples outside the Atlantic basin, but while intrinsically interesting it poses no new intellectual challenge. Nor is global history usefully defined as the study of the emergence of globalisation. The teleology built into that conceptualisation excludes the dynamics of global history, which are not uni-directional, and ignores some the most interesting questions in global history, such as given we have many cultures why do we have only one science?

The objects of study in global history are the phenomena that co-ordinate behaviour across space and time, that create the possibility of acting in a way that has global significance. The most interesting ones are those that are implicitly, rather than explicitly, global. These include objects and categories such as information, money, facts, rights, data, or debt. Institutions normatively regulated by such ideas have local effect but global scope. The early-modern period, and in particular the eighteenth century, marks the fascinating moment when structures and norms with genuinely global force emerged, when, for instance, nosological systems that ideally could be extended to categorise the whole of natural history began to have regulatory force on communities involved in the interrogation of nature. After Linnaeus natural scientists, even those critical of his categorisations, formed part of a global community.

The fiscal systems of the eighteenth century sea-going empires were a set of laboratories from which the elements of a global financial system emerged.  Those systems were far more than methods of extraction to support the costs of military competition; they were sophisticated and diverse means of communicating and co-ordinating behaviour. By the end of the eighteenth century fiscal systems were even being instrumentalised as a means of pursuing imperial goals and shaping behaviour, most notably in Hamilton's plan to constitute a new nation through a national debt. There is also a rich literature that reflected on the problems and possibilities offered by the fiscal systems of the empires. Imperial fiscal systems interacted in surprising ways; some financial instruments and forms of public credit were traded and used to transfer wealth in unforeseen ways. For instance the finance to support General Wolfe's campaign in Canada in the Seven Years War was moved through Irish banking networks, Catholic and Protestant, co-ordinated by the Nesbitt house from London.

Paper-­‐givers and commentators include William Summerhill (UCLA), Steve Pincus (Yale), Alan Forrest (York), Carl Wennerlind (Barnard), Claire Priest (Yale Law School), Sophus Reinert (Harvard Business School), Daniel Carey (UC Galway), Ivar McGrath (UC Dublin), Philipp Roessner (Manchester), William Deringer (Columbia).
The workshop will include a series of graduate student roundtables and the organisers encourage interested graduate students to attend. Pre-­‐registration is essential as space is limited.

Please contact Professor James Livesey (jlivesey@dundee.ac.uk) or Dr Nicola Cowmeadow (n.cowmeadow@dundee.ac.uk)