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The tragedy of the commons – 15M-inspired responses to issues raised during the IWM Summer School, Austria

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Pic by Louis Maniquet

15M-inspired responses to issues raised during the IWM Summer School, Austria

15M-inspired responses to issues/questions raised during the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) Summer School at Burg Feistritz, Austria

By Pablo Ouziel

 Entry number two: ‘The tragedy of the commons’

On one of the days at Feistritz castle, Holy Case, Associate Professor of History at Brown University, gave a talk in which she asked whether determining the relationship between democracy and demography was a thought problem or a real problem.

In her talk, Case presented our civilizations as shipwrecked in the global ecological disaster. Playing with the idea of metaphor she painted a picture of the current environmental crisis in which the more fortunate and capable passengers are able to escape on lifeboats, while others try to climb into the already overwhelmed and defective vehicles. At that point, those in the boats are faced with the dilemma of what to do. If they take the others, everyone sinks, if they do not, they have to live with their decision. Ultimately, some can be saved or everyone can drown.

Case was drawing on ecologist Garrett Hardin´s Lifeboat ethics: The case against helping the poor (1974). She also used William Forster Lloyd’s Two lectures on the Check to population (1833) to ask if we all should have equal right to an equal share of the resources. According to Lloyd “to a plank in the sea, which cannot support all, all have not an equal share.” It is the lucky individuals who appropriate the plank first that have the right to keep it for themselves at the expense of the remainder.

It is in this essay that Lloyd first raises the idea of the problem of the commons, describing the effects of unregulated grazing on common land. According to him, it is only through enclosure that land can be protected from over-usage. Nevertheless, it is only a century later in 1968, that Hardin popularizes the idea of the tragedy of the commons with his essay titled The Tragedy of the Commons.

As Case suggested during her talk, global warming is framed as a tragedy of the commons. Yet, I think it important to suggest that the co-regulated commons operate much like a dance that those bent on enclosing have not been able to understand. In fact, it is the tragedy of privatization, I will argue following James Tully, that is leading to accelerated climate change and environmental destruction.

As Tully has argued in Two ways of realizing justice and democracy: linking Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom (2013), from the space of elite democracy the institutional structure of the contemporary practice of democracy limits realization-focused democracy unjustly in two ways. First, it limits or eliminates alternative democracies. And, second, it limits democracy internally by pre-emptively privatizing a range of social and economic activities. This Tully argues, excludes realization-focused democracies from being brought under the democratic control of those who are engaged in and affected by them, and restricts democracy to public reasoning and representative government. As Tully points out, through privatization and shielding, a range of social and economic activities are left out of the democratization process and this causes three of the tragic global injustices we are currently living through. First, Global South exploitation, inequality and poverty. Second, the rapidly accelerating destruction of the environment. And third, global warming and climate change.

In his article Tully suggests that if we orient ourselves from this different democratic-commons perspective, “the injustices of the ‘institutional structure of the contemporary practice of democracy’ comprise what we can call ‘the tragedy of privatization’, in contrast to the thesis of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ that has served to legitimate the coercive globalization of this institutional structure since Hobbes.” Basically, what I gather from Tully’s work is that it is not the commons that is the main cause of our current environmental disaster but the enclosures that have been imposed on our common land (earth).

I think Tully makes a valuable observation in this work, which speaks to how people in 15M in Spain (that occupied public squares in 2011) see humans and their relationships with each other. Rather than seeing humans as independent, insecure, and unable to organize without violence and domination, those being 15M in Spanish public squares and beyond, defend and enact cooperative and interdependent relationships of contestation and integration. In doing this, 15M presents a tentative and alternative imaginary of social relationships and power configurations which rejects the tragedy of the commons and embraces commoning practices. It is through these kinds of relationships that those being 15M think systems of violent conflict can be transformed and replaced.

In a sense, 15M defends and enacts the kind of nonviolent agonistics which Richard Gregg and Mahatma Gandhi advocated for throughout their lives. Nevertheless, this mode of being of collective presences like 15M has often been misunderstood. Therefore, in order to help better understand them I suggest that it is best to take a critical stance on Hobbes and read Peter Kropotkin as a alter-narrative to the much praised myth of the Leviathan.

In Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Kropotkin speaks of mutual aid to describe the kind of power relationship we see today enacted by 15M. He points out that, despite the systematic destruction of mutual aid institutions over the centuries, such institutionality, together with its habits and customs has survived. According to Kropotkin, millions of individuals not only continue to enact mutual aid institutions but are reconstituting them where they have perished. This, he is saying in 1902, but arguing along similar lines in the present, Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming (2007), has suggested that these mutual aid networks constitute the largest informal, symbiotic fellowship of engaged citizens in the world. As Hawken puts it, it makes up a network of human beings “willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in an attempt to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”

Following from this and in multilogue with Kropotkin, Hawken, and millions of other participant-thinkers across time, 15M reveals the healthy existence of mutual aid institutionality within Spain. As a reminder, the popular 15M slogan ‘Vamos lentos porque vamos lejos’ (We go ever so slowly because we are going on forever) plays tribute to the autotelic relation between means and ends found in 15M’s joining hands relationships. I think of these joining hands relationships as exemplary responses and antidotes to neoliberalism and right-wing populism. Through them, citizens are challenging modernity’s foundational and violent forms of subjectivity, and building a counter-modernity “within, around, and against” the dominant institutions of their society. In this blog entry, I am not going to describe what these joining hands relationships entail because of space constraints, but if you are interested in reading about them in detail I have a forthcoming book on 15M in which I describe them in detail. The name of the book is Democracy here and Now: The exemplary case of Spain.

What is important for the purpose of this blog is to note that working around the enclosure of the commons, 15M continues to institute commoning practices in places were the commons seemed to have been lost. It is also important to highlight that 15M is just one recent example in Spain. Across the globe we can see examples and exemplars of commons and commoning practices that present a clear alternative view to that which Hardin popularized in his 1968 text. It is in these alternatives that one can perhaps tentatively respond to Case by suggesting that the problem we have when thinking about democracy and demography and how to overcome the climate crisis is not a real problem but a problem of thought. The reason I say this is that when humans have opted to think of these issues from the position of mutual aid, common responsibility and care, the concerns and responses have been different in kind.

Acknowledging the fact that there are many examples of the commons having historically worked and survived despite the enclosing logic of privatization, here are just some minor examples from the Spanish civil war which stem out of my research within 15M. What is interesting about this period is that a society under attack by totalitarian forces responded by sharing-with and mutual care and entered into gift-reciprocity relationships which obtained remarkable results.

On July 18, 1936, a military coup marked the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. During the very early days of the military outbreak, many workers who were actually on strike, soon began to reclaim their production capabilities; seizing corporations and organizing themselves into assembly-run collectives. Even strategic industries such as the oil company CAMPSA were collectivized. A mere week following the military uprising, different self-organizing demoi were running public transportation, the train system, water, and energy sources. In many cases, collectivization was so far reaching it encompassed the whole process of extraction or cultivation, production, distribution, and administration. In metropolitan areas, agrarian land was being collectivized.

In Barcelona, the central fruit and vegetable market in the neighbourhood of the Born was collectivized; distribution from the countryside was also facilitated through collectives. In Montblanc, articles were bought with a new collectivized currency. Some collectives used central storage areas where everyone took what was needed. In others, such as Llombay (Castellón), goods were distributed based on family needs. In most of the collectivized areas, when shortages existed, priority was given to children, the sick, elderly people, and women. In Seros, unmarried people were fed in communal kitchens and were given clean clothes. When they married, the community helped them set up their new family homes. In Graus, the population paid for newly-weds to go on honeymoons. Relationships in collectives were deeply democratic. In Hospitalet de Llobregat, they celebrated general assemblies every three months. In Ademuz, assemblies were celebrated every Saturday and, in Alcolea de Cinca, whenever anyone in the community deemed an assembly necessary.

During this period, a social revolution was taking place within the broader context of a civil war. In this sense, many collectives supported the Republican war effort. Nevertheless, most collectives were predominantly focused on developing their constructive programs towards a new society based on commoning, and constructed through nonviolent, cooperative and democratic principles. George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia (1938) speaks of the Spanish Militias fighting at the Aragon front. Referring to the experience there as an experiment in classless society, he says the following: “In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it.” It is interesting that as he brings the book to an end Orwell also points to the fact he had found himself in “the only community of any size in Western Europe were political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposite” a state of affairs which could not last because it was only a temporary and local phase in the enormous power-over game being played out over the whole surface of the earth.

With this post, I am not expecting every reader to all of a sudden embrace the idea of the commons, what I do hope, however, is that it will give a glimpse of one alternative to our current hegemonic understandings on how we as humans have interacted with each other over time and how we might interact moving forward as the twin crises of democracy and the environment continue to unfold.

In my next entry, I will write about ‘spontaneity and collective presences,’ this was another reoccurring issue during the multilogue at Burg Feistritz, which my work within 15M has revealed to be in need of serious attention.

 

 

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Institutional Reform in the European Union

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By Svetlin Dimitriev, student at the University of Victoria

With the shattering of the status quo in the European Parliament (EP) elections a few months back, the European Union (EU) might now be at the precipice of real and substantial change. In a time in which the public seems engaged with EU activities, be it because of Brexit, immigration, or the environment, the EU now seems to be experiencing a change in its political climate. It is no longer met only by a growing resistance, but now also by a surge in support. This support needs to be harnessed, grown, and cultivated. This new fledgling public enthusiasm might be the EU’s only chance to recover from all the problems and crises it has had to endure over the last decade. If the EU is to learn from its mistakes and past experiences, it must adapt. The only way to adapt is to change via institutional reform. If the EU is to survive in the coming decades it must alter its power structure. The target of these reforms, should be none other than the controversial behemoth of the EU institutions – the European Commission.

Reform can be made in numerous ways, but most importantly, any reform must address the root of the problem. The most frequently made criticism of the Commission is that it is bureaucratic and technocratic. These points are then used to make an argument that it is therefore illegitimate. There is certainly substance to this argument, especially when taking into consideration the Commission’s composition and its glaring lack of democratic representation. However, although undemocratic, there is value and a place for the Commission’s technocratic structure in a system as complicated as the EU’s. It gives officials, experts, the means to create and implement efficient and effective policy. The success of technocracy can be evidenced by the sheer volume of work that has gone towards EU integration over the last few decades. The Commission’s actions and decisions most certainly warrant scrutiny, but the problem with the Commission as an institution is not that it is technocratic and bureaucratic. The problem with the Commission is that it wields a tremendous amount of power on top of already being a technocratic, bureaucratic, and undemocratic institution. The Commission’s character is not what needs to be changed. What needs to be changed is the scope of the Commission’s powers. The Commission should lessen its involvement in legislation in favour of transforming into a fully fledged and operational executive body of the EU, one which can then successfully meet the needs and desires of EU citizens.

In its current state, the Commission takes on far too many tasks and responsibilities. Legislation is a perfect example. The Commission, the executive body of the EU, is the one directly responsible for proposing legislation. Having the right of initiative grants the Commission a near monopoly of power in matters concerning legislation. Although pending approval of the EP and Council, the Commission nonetheless still technically proposes the very policies that it might later have to implement and enforce. This has created a serious imbalance of power between EU institutions. By retaining the right of initiative, the Commission is actively sapping power away from the only institution which gives the EU some sort of democratic legitimacy – the EP. The Commission not only holds a disproportionate amount of power by legislating as an executive actor, but it then also hurts democracy at the EU level by hindering the efforts of the EP. As a direct result, this could then be responsible for discouraging the public from engaging in EU politics by giving citizens a very legitimate reason not to, thus further hurting democracy at the EU level.

An obvious solution which might address this problem would be to grant the EP the right of initiative instead. This would not be considered a radical idea. Just recently during the EP elections, parties and EU officials alike brought up and even campaigned on the idea of institutional reform. Their proposal – exactly the same – take away the Commission’s right of initiative and grant it to the EP. This would certainly remedy the imbalance of power between EU institutions. It would empower democracy at the EU level and perhaps encourage more public participation. Although initially a loss from the perspective of the Commission, granting the EP the right of initiative could yield substantial long-term benefits for the EU as a whole.

The solution to give the EP the right of initiative, however, would only resolve half of the problem. In such a scenario, although the Commission would still retain a rather large scope of powers, the Commission would nonetheless remain a tremendously flawed institution. This is due to the fact that it would still fail to fulfill its role as an executive actor. When it comes to the Commission and its ability to enforce laws, there is a tremendous gap between reality and expectation. As the Commission primarily operates through the use of normative soft power, it actually has very few tools at its disposal when it comes to truly enforcing policy at the EU and national level. Although in force at the legal level, it has not been uncommon to see EU regulations and standards ignored or delayed simply because the Commission does not have the means to ensure member state compliance. The success of oversight can be debated, while fining non-compliant member states does little when it comes to actually moving the EU forward. The Commission needs more mechanisms of enforcing rule of law, standards, regulations, democracy, etc.

Granting the Commission more power might sound radical; however, that is what it would take to integrate the union and close the gap between Northern and Southern Europe, and Western and Eastern Europe. All member states would benefit from a Commission more capable of combating corruption and safeguarding democracy. For example, citizens of post-communist states in particular could benefit tremendously from a Commission which can effectively keep their national government in check. As corruption remains an endemic problem for post-communist states, it has been made abundantly clear that general EU oversight and that citizens’ efforts to try and combat these issues are simply not enough. More ought to be done, and having a reliable extra buffer of accountability at the EU level might be what these countries need to have a real chance to catch up to the rest of the EU. The alternative would be to leave these countries improving at a snail’s pace and perpetually trapped in a vicious cycle of corruption induced poverty. The benefits of a Commission with empowered executive capacities would go far beyond combating corruption in post-communist states. It would also have a much greater capacity to ensure the provision of human rights, compliance to environmental regulations to aid the fight against climate change, protection of minorities against discrimination, and much more.

The outcome of the last EP elections present the EU with the opportunity for real change, change through institutional reform. Confidence in the EU is by no means high, but the status quo has definitely changed. The EU needs to make use of this opportunity while it still can. The Commission ought to lose its right of initiative for the benefit of the EU as a whole. As the EU needs to be made more democratic and accountable to EU citizens such that it does not disintegrate, the EP must be empowered and transformed into a fully functional legislative assembly which holds the right of initiative. This is vital as more citizens need to be encouraged to participate in the EU political process. Furthermore, the Commission would need to divert its efforts and expand its executive abilities such that it is able to serve the EU to the benefit of its citizens, but in a different way than it ever has before. The Commission has never been a democratic institution and it probably never will be. But what the Commission could do, is focus its efforts and powers on safeguarding and strengthening democracy elsewhere – at national level of the member states. If granted the ability to successfully do so, it could do even more to serve the interests of EU citizens. The opportunity to make a number of positive changes in the EU has finally arisen. It is only a matter of time before it is made clear what the EU will do with it.

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‘Democracy’ – 15M-inspired responses to issues raised during the IWM Summer School, Austria

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15M-inspired responses to issues/questions raised during the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) Summer School at Burg Feistritz, Austria

 by Pablo Ouziel, Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria

Entry number one:  ‘Democracy’

IWM (www.iwm.at) together with the Centre for Global Culture and Communication (https://www.communication.northwestern.edu/global_communication), the Centre for Transcultural Studies (https://www.sas.upenn.edu/transcult/) , and the Mastercard Foundation (https://mastercardfdn.org/) organized a magnificent summer school that ran from August 18th until August 25th 2019. Attendants came from about thirty different countries and the multilogue was steered masterfully by Shalini Randeria, Dilip Gaonkar, Holly Case, Ivan Krastev, Till van Rahden and Alanna Armitage.

Much went on throughout this week-long event and there were many great presentations by the different scholars involved. Due to the fact that I found the event exemplary and that much can be taken from it – in the sense of gaining an understanding of the kinds of concerns people are addressing when talking about democracy and demography – I want to dedicate a little time in this blog to reflect on some of the issues raised.

At Burg Feistritz (www.burgfeistritz.com) the interrelationality between democracy and demography was discussed from transgenerational, transdisciplinary and transcultural perspectives, I think it valuable, therefore, to broaden the conversation out of Feistritz castle’s gates and into the World Wide Web. Perhaps some of these reflections, together with insights on how the conversation was organized and evolved can serve others who might be thinking about related issues or about how to organize such events.

On the day of our arrival to the castle, the owner (Barbara) explained to us that the castle was first mentioned in writing in 1230. She also pointed out that perhaps its foundations are Roman and that it is at least 1000 years old. According to her, it was initially constructed as a defensive structure. I found this somehow metaphoric/symbolic of liberalism today. As liberalism tries to defend itself and those who are included in its ‘we’ from the dangers looming outside, trying to think about its numerous options from within the gates of a fortified structure that is centuries old seems quite an appropriate endeavour.

Throughout the week at the castle, I had one recurring question which never quite dissipated. The question was as follows:

Since we are here talking about democracy, am I here being democratic here and now, or am I here justifying and enhancing processes and structures that seem counter to the imaginary of democracies and democratization practices that I have learned with 15M in Spain and a multiplicity of examples and exemplars of democracy here and now elsewhere (both historically and geographically speaking)?

As a guiding question, this nurtured my reflections and responses during the time of the Summer School and it also feeds the blog contributions I will be making over the coming weeks related to this event. I think of this blog series as an ongoing contribution to the extensive multilogue that happened from August 18th until August 25th. Some of what I share here comes from a talk I gave during the event, which already attempted a preliminary response to issues raised throughout the week.

It is important to highlight that my responses are also drawing from a broader multilogue in which I am engaged with people being 15M in Spain, numerous indigenous communities in Canada, and some settler allies with whom I am building the Cedar Trees Institute at the Centre for Global Studies in the University of Victoria.

As the blog series progresses I will discuss some of the talks by different participants, some of the more informal discussions that took place on the edges of the main conversation, and the following topics which really caught my attention:

1) The tragedy of the commons/tragedy of privatization

2) Spontaneity and collective presences

3) The tree trunk metaphor

4) Adversaries versus enemies

Nevertheless, in order to begin the series and for the purpose of this first entry, I want to say a few things about the word ‘democracy’. This is a word that was repeated hundreds of times during our event, without anyone dedicating much time to explaining it in any meaningful manner. It is important to mention that democracy throughout the Summer School was seen from Charles Taylor’s position. According to Taylor, our democracies are hollowing out and the fiction of democracy is today contradicted by reality. As he puts it, “as it hollows-out it becomes unbelievable.” Of course, the kind of democracy Taylor has in mind is representative democracy. This is an idea which in the Western world has been hegemonic for a little while now, but which is seriously being contested. Nevertheless, despite this being the case, I do not think we need to worry about descending into chaos and devouring each other if our understandings of democracies are broadened during the current period of contestation.

 Why do I say this?

Instead of ‘demoarchy’, the Greeks chose the term ‘democracy’ to signal the fact that what they envisioned was not a form of rule (arche). Protagoras, Pericles, and Meletus described it as a non-elite telic mode of governance in which all citizens were equal and exercised power-with instead of power-over. Everyone’s will was expressed in the assembly (agora) and through consensus a ‘democratic people’ (demos) moved forward.

Through participation, people organized, brought into being, and practiced self-government together, by all having a say and hand in the decisions and actions of the community. This was the primary understanding of the term democracy until the eighteenth-century.

I do not romanticize Greek democracy and I understand that in this conception of democracy there was also an insider and an outsider, just like there is today in liberal democracy. Notwithstanding, what the term meant for the Greeks was different to what democracy means today when spoken of thinking only about liberal democracy. In fact, even in eighteenth century Europe many considered the idea of representatives as non-democratic. For example, during the French Revolution those who considered themselves democrats thought of representatives as a new kind of aristocracy. Furthermore, even James Madison, Founding Father of the United States of America, understood representative systems to be non-democratic.

What happens between 1780 and 1860, is that this primary mode of democracy is displaced by a state-centric conception that emanates out from Europe and North America. At this point, the definition of ‘democracy’ becomes formalized as the exercise of power over a governed electorate by an elected representative government, with elites envisioning a common will that has to be represented. Benjamin Constant’s 1819 lecture, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns marks a key point in which the distinction between the primary and the modern forms of democracy becomes central to democratic theory. Constant vehemently defends the idea that the freedom of the ancients in their Greek city-state belongs to an earlier stage of development – one without any connection to the modern state – and argues that anyone defending such democratic practice is suffering from a ‘maladie infantile’. For Constant, the modern state requires a type of liberty that can only be provided by a representative government.

By 1850, the idea of democracy has become so intertwined with representation that the Russian philosopher Peter Kropotkin stops using the term democracy altogether, and begins to speak instead of mutual aid, self-government, or anarchy. Nevertheless, despite this appropriation of the meaning of democracy by the state, it would be naïve to assume that the governed of the time embraced the redefinition. In fact, it isn’t until the expansion of the middle classes in the twentieth century that people begin to have faith in the fact that elected officials might finally represent the community. And already by the second half of the twentieth century, the primary form of democracy begins to be described using terms and concepts like ‘deep democracy,’ ‘prefigurative democracy,’ ‘direct democracy,’ ‘radical democracy,’ or ‘earth democracy’. This is a necessary step taken by citizens themselves to differentiate their practices from the dominant representative mode of democracy through which we are presently ruled.

In the contemporary Western world, these two distinct types of democracy seem to be following their separate paths with occasional interactions that have both positive and negative consequences. Elites continue to defend the idea that representative democracy is the universal standard by which democratic achievement can be measured. In the meantime, citizens are responding by enacting participatory modes of democracy that have persisted through time. These are practices that are considered by these citizens to be the primary mode of being democratic.

In 2011, 15M in Spain exemplified the actuality of this primary sense of ‘democracy’ and crystalized a lifeway (a mode of being and a temporality) that has persisted. Following from this, as an exemplary model of democratic practices, a closer understanding of 15M modes of being can help us open up democracy beyond our current modern conceptions. By looking closely at 15M, we can understand democracy as a space within which multiple heterodoxies enter into dialogue and negotiate ways to co-exist peacefully and constructively without being subsumed. Most importantly, if we grasp 15M’s ‘democracy here and now’ approach, it will help broaden the monolithic thinking that trains us as civil citizens to understand power flows as stemming from above. Through this move, we will be able to see representative democracy as a set of governance practices, which although regulative are not in any sense constitutive of democracy. Furthermore, it will crystalize how citizens are able to transform elite democracies into non-elite democracies, by reclaiming the power of the Leviathan through speaking and acting otherwise.

The recent Democracy and its Futures event series at the University of Victoria (March 2019; co-funded by the Erasmus+  Jean Monnet Program of the European Union and the Centre for Global Studies) is a good example of a discussion thread which has taken seriously the importance of exploring how different families of democracies can address present crises of democratic, social, ecological, and earth systems (Gaia crises). It provisionally described the field of democracy in both theory and practice as consisting of the five overlapping and criss-crossing modes or families of democracies and democratization and brought these into dialogue in a manner that de-universalized the idea of representative democracy. Bringing together scholars from all over the world, the event has facilitated a multilogue between different democratic traditions that are currently developing future collaborations and preparing an edited volume entitled Democracies and their Futures.

For information on this conference you can visit online here: https://www.eucanet.org/index.php/component/content/article/41-news-media/1-what-s-new/572-democracy-its-futures-2

In my next entry I will write about ‘The tragedy of the commons’ and will present a counter view of ‘The tragedy of privatization’.

Image by skalekar1992 from Pixabay

 

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Surveillance and Democracy

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By Pablo Ouziel, Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria

I was recently asked by the journal Surveillance & Society, to review the book Surveillance Studies: A Reader (2018), edited by Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood. As I was writing my review, I could not escape thinking about the implications of modern surveillance for our democratic societies. Without a doubt democracies are being hollowed-out. At the same time, we are witnessing the rise of populist right-wing and far-right parties across the planet. All this is happening, while popular movements engaged in democratization practices and demanding a deepening of democracy in their societies are being systematically surveilled and often brutally repressed.
Anyone who has participated in democratizing protest movements or has had contact with activists and demonstrators working within them, will be aware of the impact surveillance has had on their lives. In many instances, people have been indiscriminately arrested, followed, or charged with crimes which oftentimes they did not commit. A case in point, is one of the protestors that I interviewed years ago for my PhD dissertation on the 15M movement which occupied public squares in 2011. This was a movement demanding “democracia real ya!” (real democracy now!) and shouting “no somos mercancia en manos de politicos y banqueros” (we are not merchandise in the hands of politicians and bankers). The person, I am referring to, a few years after the protests, experienced his house being raided in the middle of the night by SWAT teams from different Spanish security forces. He was arrested in front of his partner and child and was left for three days in a cell without having access to a lawyer, and without being told why he was being arrested. Upon release, he was told that he was facing terrorism charges. His crime, having re-tweeted information that had been previously published on Twitter regarding police infiltration within the 15M movement.
Obviously, this is not something that the majority of the population is likely to learn about, let alone experience, but the fact is that while Spain prides itself on being a democratic society, these kinds of activities are happening with increasing frequency. Sadly, these kinds of incidents bring back memories of a not too distant past in which the whole world understood Spain as a dictatorship. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. Not only in Spain, but also in the rest of Europe and North America, people who are resisting the hollowing-out of democracy are facing a similar fate.
In Western societies, it is easy for citizens to look at the all surveillant state of China and be repelled by the kind of surveillance practices being implemented there. When from the West we witness through the media the police brutality experienced by protestors in Hong Kong – who for the past few days have occupied the island’s international airport – most find it quite normal to reject both the surveillance measures they are submitted to and the repression they endure. Yet, when similar surveillance and repression tactics are used in the West, I often witness too much tolerance – by the majority of the population – towards the actions of the security forces and other state institutions. It seems, in many cases, as if the mere fact that those in power say we live in democratic societies, serves to justify the kind of treatment those subverting the status quo are facing. It is this observation, which leads me to think more broadly about surveillance practices and the kinds of consequences they are having on different demoi.
What interests me about surveillance within the context of democracies is the fact that in our technological societies what we are experiencing is dataveillance; the systemic use of personal data systems to investigate or monitor the actions or communications of one or more people. The danger with this kind of surveillance is that it facilitates the large-scale combination of data points and the construction of profiles that oftentimes are used to discriminate against people even in advance of any wrongdoing. This sorting of people happens in unequal ways that obscure the inherent biases of the systems being used. Like in all other societies, in democracies it is subversives, minorities, and the poor that are most affected by this kind of profiling.
It is true that when we study surveillance and try to define it we come to the realization that as a concept it escapes definition. Nevertheless, when we read the literature, amidst family-resemblances (similarities and differences), it becomes quickly apparent that most people studying it agree that it is one of the dominant modes of ordering in the post-modern era. New technologies allow surveillance to be technologically mediated, frequently undetectable, of an involuntary nature, and often automated. The information rich environments we are creating with embedded sensors, mobile computers and algorithmic processes help subject whole populations to automated management. Increasingly embedded in material infrastructures, these surveillance practices help individualize people and commodify data in a manner that exponentially increases the potential of corporations and states to sort populations. What is most problematic about this, is that while such technologies are often described as neutral, the mechanisms of discrimination they hide continue to operate in the background. This reality exposes marginalized populations to augmented forms of oppression, violence and control. Added to this, since 9/11, governance has undergone huge transformations towards a model of risk management aiming to discern threats in advance. This move has in turns consolidated racialized discrimination and social inequality.
We know that surveillance played a key role in the rise of the modern nation-state. It served the purpose of identifying and governing populations, under the implied contract between state and citizens that in exchange for knowing its citizens the state would protect their bodies, property, and rights. We also know that colonial states used their colonies to test forms of surveillance which would be later implemented in the metropolis. We can also read about the role that surveillance played in slavery – hot-iron branding and lantern laws regulating movement are just two examples. In addition, we have seen how in totalitarian societies the culture of fear and suspicion generated by surveillance remained for decades following democratization processes. The case of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall illustrates this clearly. Yet, for most citizens in the contemporary West these events seem too distant to be relevant.
We remain distant when we read about the kinds of atrocities that the surveillance of South African apartheid made possible. Or when we see the surveillance and control methods deployed on the Palestinian people by the State of Israel. Generally, we think it has nothing to do with us. There is nothing we can do about it and most importantly it does not apply to life in our Western societies. Yet, most of us are aware of kind of surveillance the United States National Security Agency has been practicing illegally for decades; the leaks by Chelsea Manning, made available by investigative Glenn Greenwald leave little room for doubt. Notwithstanding, not even such revelations about the not so benevolent nature of the state lead us to a serious social discussion on the kind of societies we are and want to become.
There seems to be little fighting back going on. Our hyper-accelerated societies seldom give us time to focus on such issues for too long. There are many ways to obfuscate or evade surveillance systems, but one of the biggest problems we face has to do with our social imaginary. Despite the numerous warnings we receive about the dangers of surveillance, until we can imagine our societies working in a different manner, surveillance seems to be here to stay. It will continue to enter into more domains of our life, as we embrace or ignore it without too much critical analysis. Considering this as the most likely scenario, I think it remains our responsibility to imagine what democratizing surveillance practices can look like. Perhaps by doing this we can begin to prefigure how as democratic citizens we might respond to it, and how democratic surveillance assemblages can be co-constructed by all those surveilled by them. I fear that if we do not address this urgent issue in depth, the hollowing-out of democracy will continue at an ever-accelerating pace supported by the surveillance complex we have silently helped to construct.

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What does ‘Safety’ mean?

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By Franziska Fischer, Phd candidate at the Department of Political Science, the University of Victoria

We have come full circle, from the boy on the beach (Alan Kurdi, drowning on September 2nd, 2015, trying to cross the 4 km between Turkish and European soil by boat), to Óscar Ramírez and his daughter Valeria drowning in the Rio Grande, trying to swim towards a safer future. After September 2nd, when the world looked down on the small body of Alan Kurdi being washed up on a Greek beach, we have pledged to do better. Four years later the pledge we made has nothing to show for it.

Between Alan Kurdi and Óscar and Valeria Ramírez, thousands have died, and millions are caught in limbo between their dangerous past in war-torn regions and their hopeful future in ‘safe’ and ‘stable’ countries such as the US or Europe. People, humans, parents and their children are fleeing unsafe conditions in South America, Africa, and the Middle East. They are “fleeing a hell the US helped create”, as the Guardian put it, drawing on the violence and inequalities that US political and economic actors helped to create, perpetuated and reproduced through ongoing actions. I do not write this text to point fingers, even though one might rightfully do so. I do not write this text to get caught in the intricacies of why we are, where we are. I do not write this text to find blame. I write this text to find hope, to find my sanity and to find the belief in humankind. Because what I see, read and hear tears me apart. I have shared some of the articles underneath this text, there are thousands more.

Two ‘cornerstone events’ of Alan Kurdi and Óscar and Valeria Ramírez, framing a humanitarian crisis that has the world in its tight grip, illuminating just how drastic we have successfully split our world into two. Safe and unsafe, developed and undeveloped, successful and failed, stable and conflict. However, this dichotomous perception of our messy world is beginning to crumble, the lines between safe and unsafe are blurring. Can we with a straight face say, detention camps on the Mexican/US border are safe? Is crossing the Mediterranean Sea safe? Is it safe to rightfully claim asylum in a welfare state, with a stable democracy? What does safe mean? Having a place to sleep, being able to keep yourself and your children clean, being able to eat? Then No, the US is not safe, Europe is not safe, because none of these things are guaranteed when a human in need enters these territories. Organizations, Non-profits, and individual people try to make up for the failure of the governments, of the state officials, which are caught in the bickering of who will take on the ‘burden’ to provide the most basic needs.

I am not claiming to be able to relate but I can only imagine the devastation, fear and absolute horror, as well as the hope for a better future, that will convince a parent to give themselves and their children to the goodwill of human smugglers, to trust a little rubber dingy, or swim across a vicious river, all in hope for better conditions on the other side. But for those who actually make it to ‘safety’ and don’t become tragic figures of our contemporary world order, the journey through hell has only just begun.

I will direct my focus here towards the detention camps at the Mexico/US border, but by no means do I want to belittle the horrors, the terrible conditions and lack of resources in other places of this world. For me, the recent reports from detentions camps in Clint, Texas or El Paso amongst many more, feel personal, they hit home.

I read about people being held in tiny rooms or big storage facilities without windows; for days and for weeks. I witness the governments denying it is happening. I see families ripped apart for the benefit of bureaucratic processes and separated for months. I hear about children being pulled away from their mothers, and my heart breaks. The stories are endless, and I will share several of them under this text, as many others have done a much between job than me to illustrate the tragedies. This is when I get up from my computer and I sneak into the room next to me, just to lay down next to my napping five-month-old daughter, to hear her breathe, to wake her up just to see her happy little toothless smile and her chubby little arms grabbing onto me. Silent tears running down my face, half heartache for these women who are denied giving their love to their children, to make sure they are healthy and happy, clean and fed; literally the only thing a mother wants to do (I speak from experiences). The other half of my tear’s origins in unbelievable gratefulness and humbleness to be able to be with my daughter, to watch her grow, to know her safe and fed. This unbelievable privilege revealed by the horrors of stories of other mothers just one country to the south happening right now. As a German citizen, the resemblance to concentration camps in Germany in the Third Reich is uncanny. People keep asking how Germany could allow this to happen? We are allowing it to happen right now. And it needs to STOP!

I sit in my little office, reading books about Political Theory, Development, Economy, all part of my PhD program at the University of Victoria. And all I can think of is, what is it for? All this knowledge, all this wisdom, wrapped in books sitting neatly on my shelf. This is when I want to get up, grab my daughter and hop in the car to drive down to Texas. To drive a hole in the wall of the detention camps? To protest in front of their gates? To throw diapers above the fence? All of the above? The fear of bringing my own daughter near a place that allows for such terrifying things to happen and the grip of hopelessness has me paralyzed. What can we do?

Internet research readily provides lists of organizations that are on the ground, trying to help. It feels barely enough to send a few dollars through electronic channels, to somehow make the difference between a child living or dying. It feels detached and provokes an odd sensation of guilt! Is this doing my due diligence? Is it so I can sleep at night without having nightmares? Or is it the most effective and efficient thing that I could be doing at this moment in time in my position, being a 28-year-old German PhD student, living in Canada with my little baby girl. I honestly don’t know. Maybe I will find myself in Texas soon, maybe I won’t. But what I do know is that I want to help make this stop.

Please share with me your thoughts. What can we do? What are we doing? Do you know for any particular organization or individual that is on the ground and needs help? Needs funds? If you have now considered this but were thinking of doing something nice for me for my birthday, do something else instead, as I don’t need anything. Donate to the people on the ground. Vote for an administration that will not allow this to happen. Go down to Texas.

And please, someone more courageous than me, drive a hole into these walls.

https://www.newyorker.com/…/the-lasting-trauma-of-mothers-s…

https://www.refinery29.com/…/help-migrant-children-at-borde…

https://www.newsweek.com/migrant-children-share-heartbreaki…

https://www.theguardian.com/…/central-america-migrants-us-f…

 

 

 

 

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Matteo Salvini and Italy’s government instability (again!)?

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By Julian Campisi, University of Toronto

Italians have come accustomed to expressing their dissatisfaction in political leaders and the system at large. Economic growth has been stagnant for two decades, unemployment, especially among youth, is stubbornly high, infrastructure is crumbling, bureaucracy is stifling, and government debt is growing. Time and again, new parties, leaders, and coalitions promise change, reform, progress and growth, yet they inevitably arrive at the same place: government instability and fresh elections. There have been over 60 different governments voted in since the 1950s, roughly one per year. This time it is Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini of the League (Lega) who is at the precipice of bringing down another government and potentially leading the next one as the Prime Minister.

How did we get here?

March 2018 elections in Italy produced a hung parliament with no clear majority among parties or coalitions, resulting in (after two months of stalemate) the formation of an odd governing partnership between two parties previously pitted against one another: The League, a right-wing, pro-business, anti-immigration party with roots in the industrial north, and the 5-star movement (Movimento Cinque Stelle-M5S) led by Luigi di Maio, an anti-establishment, pro-environment and ideologically incoherent group of novice Parliamentarians that was formed only a few years prior by former comedian Beppe Grillo amidst an anti-EU and anti-corruption uproar. The League won 18% of the vote and the M5S won 33%, together putting them above the 50% threshold to form government. The uneasy ‘governing coalition’ between the two sides was premised on a ‘contract’ for change based on the electorate’s apparent antipathy towards the two traditional coalitions of centre right (around Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party) and centre left (around Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party- PD).

Salvini and Di Maio compromised on the selection of a neutral PM Giuseppe Conte, and both remained as Deputy PMs trying to push their respective agendas. Policy-wise, the contract for change was far-reaching, broadly attempting to: set up a universal basic income plan (to appease the M5S southern Italian voters), institute a flat tax (a nod to the business community/northern regions), fight the European Commission over budgetary rules (deficits/debt), overhaul the Dublin regulation and fair burden sharing of migrant arrivals amongst all EU member states, and a host of other difficult promises that would prove hard, if not impossible, to keep. Perhaps the only common ground the two parties held was firstly, an anti-EU/anti-elite sentiment, and secondly, being in constant campaign mode. But from the outset in June 2018, Salvini quickly outmaneuvered Di Maio and manipulated the government narrative to his own liking, with the so-called migration ‘crisis’ at front and centre of the discourse. Over the year, the electorate responded well to Salvini, and poorly to Di Maio. In the EU Parliamentary elections of May 2019, their respective vote shares basically flipped, with the Lega earning 34% and the M5S just 17%. In this period, the M5S, which essentially started as a protest party, has shown to be inept at influencing governance in partnership with a strong-man leader, and has been losing support from both right and left.

Where are we now and what happens next?

After barely 14 months in government, Salvini, with an eye on his ascendant popularity, in early August decided to pull the plug on the governing coalition and threatened to withdraw his ministers based on an ‘unworkable government’, due to constant disagreement with the M5S and their final decision to not support the high speed TAV rail link between Italy and France. Critics and the M5S have decried his opportunistic dash to become PM at the expense of Italian stability, especially given the upcoming negotiations with the EU in which Italy must demonstrate that it is following budgetary rules. Salvini, however, has doubled down and his party issued a motion of non-confidence in PM Conte, which will be debated in Parliament soon. Things are moving quickly and are very fluid, but at this moment there is much uncertainty over what happens next. A number of possibilities remain, and only the President of the Republic, Mattarella, has the power to dissolve Parliament and decide what path to follow. Although hehind-the-scenes dealings have started, if the non-confidence motion on PM Conte passes in the next weeks, a few options are possible:

  • Mattarella can look for another majority in Parliament with a coalition of other parties, likely M5S and PD, but the political splintering in both parties, in addition to the windfall it would give to the right-wing parties in a future election, makes this option tricky;
  • Mattarella can call for new elections within 70 days, but this would coincide with delicate plans for the Italian 2020 budget preparations, its presentation to Parliament and subsequent negotiations with the EU Commission;
  • Mattarella can convene another ‘technocratic’ government and appoint a neutral PM, with the support of the majority of Parliament, in order to pass a viable 2020 budget this Autumn, and then proceed with elections in early 2020;
  • Other Autumn election alternatives that involve a reduction in 345 Parliamentarians and their salaries (an M5S proposal) before agreeing to a vote.

Whichever set of options materialize there are a number of political implications to consider. As Salvini has governed as a Deputy PM with Di Maio, it has enabled him to use his position to strengthen his electoral base on contentious issues such as security and migration. This has allowed him to maximize his popularity and he wants to take advantage of this immediately. Any talk of the President’s government of technocrats, or a new PD-M5S coalition, will likely be manipulated by Salvini to appeal to his base that the elites are trying to prevent his ascendance to the highest office, and stop him from finally ‘changing’ Italy for the better. Salvini also knows that his main opposition is divided on which course of options to pursue – technocratic, partnership, or elections; and this reaffirms his desire for immediate elections. The PD and M5S are down in the polls, and are rightly worried about an imminent vote, which might mean more politicking amongst them. Berlusconi may prove to be important yet again, if he promises to support Salvini as head of the right wing coalition (which is by no means guaranteed), or if he decides to support another type of coalition in the current Parliament. Still, Salvini’s gamble may backfire, note many experts, and Italians may not forgive him at the polls for creating another political crisis in government at a delicate economic time. Regardless, the outcome will likely coincide with further instability, which seems to be the only constant in Italian politics. President Mattarella will again have to be at his creative best in order to carefully navigate this difficult period, until the next one…

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Youth Climate Justice Activism: Changing the Agenda

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By Pablo Ouziel, Cedar Tree Institute at the Centre for Global Studies, University of Victoria

A few weeks ago, I attended the webinar ‘Youth Climate Justice Activism: Changing the Agenda’. This was part of the EUCAnet Webinar Series Global Politics in Critical Perspectives: Transatlantic dialogues. The event brought together youth activists and allies from movements in the UK and Turtle Island as they shared their experiences with one another and discussed the ways forward.

The Webinar was co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union and counted with the support of the Centre for Global Studies (CFGS) and the Cedar Trees Institute (CTI) at the University of Victoria (UVic), and with the support of the International Institute for Child Rights and Development (IICRD).

Speakers included the following:

  • Mary-Jane Farrell & Roseanne Steffen, Youth Strike 4 Climate Brighton (YS4CB), UK
  • Rose Henry, Tla’amin Nation
  • Kiana Alexander, Director, Emerging Leaders Program, Raven Institute
  • Emily Thiessen, youth activist/organizer, Canada’s Green New Deal, Rise and Resist, Our Earth our Future (Victoria Youth Working for Climate Action) / the Canada Climate Strike Network
  • Antonia Paquin, youth activist/organizer, Canada’s Green New Deal, Rise and Resist, Our Earth our Future (Victoria Youth Working for Climate Action) / the Canada Climate Strike Network
  • Danny Noonan, Global Program Coordinator, Our Children’s Trust, US
  • Samantha & Carolyn Norr, Youth Vs Apocalypse

The event was co-chaired by Keith Cherry of CTI and the CFGS at UVic, and of Rise and Resist, and Rebeccah Nelems, also of CTI and the CFGS at UVic, and of IICRD.

Four key questions triggered the discussion:

  • How are movements currently coordinating or collaborating across movements, cities, countries and continents?
  • What are the opportunities and challenges for future collaboration?
  • What are opportunities for leveraging inter-generational support?
  • How might movements draw on the wisdoms of Indigenous nations, communities and organizations with respect to living in reciprocal relationship with the earth?

In this blog post, I want to highlight some of the contributions made by different speakers during the multilogue. It was a great experience to witness the level of commitment and expertise revealed by the youth involved in the Webinar and their allies.

In one of her interventions, Emily Thiessen pointed to the need of building a movement of the kind pre-figured by Occupy and suggested that the Green New Deal could be a platform from which to engage the broader community outside of the environmental movement bubble. For her, engagement with churches, unions and other communities of practice is important. Thiessen argues that this is the moment for youth to lead a glocal effort to coordinate a movement that can change the world.

Antonia Paquin spoke of an epiphany following a time of feeling intensely overwhelmed in which she realized that we lived in a globally polluted world in which young people were disempowered. She realized then the need to make a change in her life and to acknowledge the enormous power of a vision of a world that is more just. She became aware of the enormous capacity for change if people team up in a mindful manner. She gave the examples in Victoria of Rise and Resist and the Youth Climate Strike, and spoke of the March 15th 2019 demonstration in Victoria which brought out 2000 people in a revolutionary spirit. For Paquin, young people are always a force for change because young people are generally bolder and more provocative. Young people she argues, have more capacity to imagine a new vision for the future because of their fearlessness. This is why, she argues, the older generations are now looking at them to lead the way. Paquin spoke about numerous issues, she mentioned urban agriculture, food security, water and food, self-sufficency, energy democracy, and reducing the power of large corporations. She placed great emphasis on the source of our food, and on indigenous rights groups and their anti-colonization efforts together with allies. One prominent example repeated by other speakers was the Tiny House project in which activists built a Tiny House and carried it up the highway for 22 km to the location of a planned pipeline. This she described as indigenous people re-occupying their homeland. For Paquin, what is important as we transition to a healthy earth is authenticity. We need to help each other, and we need to speak and listen with our hearts.

Mary-Jane Farrell & Roseanne Steffen, joined the conversation from the UK and spoke of their experiences in the Youth Strike for Climate. In it, schools, colleges and universities are involved, and once a month since February they have been striking. As they explained this was initiated by Greta Thunberg from Sweden but it is actively being acted upon in the UK. They predominantly spoke of their local experience in Brighton and the diverse range of people from different generations active in the movement. The first strike in Brighton counted 2000 people, including local politicians, youth, academics, and performance artists. By the March strike, the numbers had doubled. Then Mary-Jane and Roseanne spoke of their trip to the EU parliament in Belgium to meet other youth activists from around Europe. They were invited by the democratic and socialist alliance in the EU parliament. For that trip, they planned a protest outside of the EU parliament, asking the EU to shut down British Petroleum (BP). They were asked politely to leave, then Swedish Green Party youth delegates decided to join the protest and they all ended up in a park nearby sharing with each other their strike experiences and discussing what to do in the future. What was most inspiring for them was the fact that this was a spontaneous meeting, which revealed the fact that coalitions can happen in the oddest of places. Their experience within the movement is one in which hierarchies have been broken and everyone is respectful of everyone in the space.

Samantha & Carolyn Norr, joined the Webinar from Oakland, California. Carolyn is an adult supporter of youths fighting for a liveable planet and has been supporting Samantha and other youths to travel to strikes. Carolyn spoke of a city with concentration camps on one side and rich people on the other. She described global inequality as it is lived within their city. She spoke of children in concentration camps following waves of deportations. For Carolyn, combating inequality and injustice is at the core of climate justice work. She spoke of the Climate Strike in San Francisco and how children from East Oakland could not afford public transport to attend ($10 roundtrip). Her work emphasizes getting children to these strikes so that they can fight for their communities. She also spoke of the block to the coal export terminal of the Oakland port. Samantha, spoke of Warriors for Justice in her middle school and of environmental racism. She also mentioned the difficulties they had getting people to go to the Climate Strike because of the strong resistance from teachers. This was due to the fact that the strike was not in the curriculum. Samantha launched a petition which was signed by 3/4 of the 7th grade class asking the school to let them go. Then some teachers threatened with lowering grades if people did not come to school on the day of the strike. They also threatened with calling their families. Those who made it to the strike, Samantha described, went to Nancy Pelosi’s office denouncing her proposal to tackle climate change. In a subsequent press conference, Pelosi withdrew her proposal. Samantha’s final comment was ‘do or die’. As she put it: “If we do not take action now we are going to go away”.

Danny Noonan of Our Children’s Trust, explained the work they are doing providing legal support to 21 young people across the US who have presented numerous lawsuits against the government, claiming that the government had knowledge of climate change while promoting fossil fuels. He spoke of these as youth led systemic legal actions. A growing movement in the courts protecting the fundamental right of people to be protected from climate catastrophe. Danny emphasized that their work is supported by a movement and that international awareness is rising thanks to local, national and international mobilization. He mentioned the 4th of July in Portland, Oregon, 360.org, Earth Gardens, and the Sunrise Movement as exemplars of the kind of action making their work possible. Danny also mentioned the support they receive from legislator allies on social media, and the work they have been doing on Podcasts to make their arguments more broadly accessible.

Rose Henry, Elder of the Tla’amin Nation, began by emphasizing how pleased she was seeing so many young people speaking about ‘our climate change’. She then went on to talk about the fact that we should be doing a lot more. That we should be making space for indigenous people and young people in our rallies. Rose was clear about the fact that we are in a crisis and that we need to change our climate direction. The youth, she argued are showing the rest of the world the direction we need to take. She mentioned how she has been fighting for social change since she was 14 years old. For her there are many links between murdered indigenous people and climate change. She denounced lack of action from leaders and voting people. For Rose, it is ironic that now people are looking at indigenous people and youth to make the change, while these are the people who have been oppressed. As she put it, in order to empower youth, we need to give them the microphone and allow them to speak. We have three elections, she reminded us, before many of the youth involved in this movement can vote, but many will already be voting in the next two elections. She spoke of Trump’s and Trudeau’s empty promises. She mentioned the Tiny house being moved 22 km down the highway as their attempt to stop the pipelines. Then, she emphasized that we need a major day of action. She suggested a day of action in October to shut down cashiers and coffee shops. Finally, she spoke of how she can see how climate change is affecting our oceans and our air, and how sick the trees are. She repeated the importance of saving the trees and spoke of this webinar as an event to bring communities together, pass the microphone around and see what we can do.

Kiana Alexander, of the Raven Institute began her contribution by reminding us of the fact that what is happening to the land is the same that is happening to people. She then moved on to talk about how disconnected we have become and how we are living our lives. According to Kiana, our identities and our cultures are interconnected with our ability to connect with the land. For her it is connectedness to each other that can provide the understanding needed for healing the world. She also felt a great sense of urgency and spoke of the Raven Speak Programme; a public forum for indigenous change-makers. For Kiana, pivotal to climate action is healing ourselves. This is integral to climate change from her perspective. She also thinks that climate action is an inevitable and deeply interconnected part of our reality. Therefore, it is important to deconstruct how things have been done previously, and to reinvent new ways of being the change. People in the movement need to remember to laugh, to play, and to connect.

Keith Cherry and Rebeccah Nelems from CTI and CFGS kept their moderation fairly minimal, yet Keith thanked the participants for all their amazing work, and described the kind of power, hope and optimism that this event had generated. For Keith, the Webinar served as a reminder of the fact that every issue is a climate issue. Every person, everywhere, whether in a faculty, union or church needs to be involved. Rebeccah closed the event by thanking all the participants, the audience, the organizers and the supporters of the event.

Youth Climate Change

Closing remarks

Echoing Keith’s sentiment regarding the Webinar and the inspirational contributions of the different participants, I would like to close this blog post with some reflections on the lessons young people are teaching us with their actions. No matter where I talk with youth, there seems to be a reoccurring theme of having a voice and prefiguring the change they wish to see in their societies. There seems to be a conviction regarding the fact that we can organize breaking hierarchies and at the same time there is a huge disconnect between what they are enacting and asking for, and what leaders from around the globe propose as solutions. I agree with Rose that it seems ironic that those people we are looking at to change the world are those who have been oppressed. I think the biggest lesson we can draw from this webinar, as far as university is concerned, is that we must innovate by listening to our students. We must actively refuse becoming obsolete by incorporating changes into our educational system which draw from the multiplicity of examples presented to us by youth, indigenous people and their allies. Together coalitions of demoi from across the planet are actively being the change they wish to see. Dialogues of reciprocal elucidation with them are urgent.

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DEMOCRACY HERE AND NOW The exemplary case of Spain

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By Pablo Ouziel, Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria

Reflections on the talk and presentations given at the Political Theory Research Group seminar, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona on June 20th 2019

 

On June 20th 2019, I had the pleasure of initiating a multilogue on Spain’s 15M democratization practices, with the Political Theory Research Group (GRPT) at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona.

In 2011, Spanish public squares were occupied by a ‘collective presence’ constituted by a ‘strange multiplicity of culturally diverse voices’ shouting “Basta Ya!”(Enough!). These voices were challenging the political system of representation with the phrase “No nos representan!” (They do not represent us!). They demanded “democracia real ya!” (real democracy now!) and shouted “no somos mercancia en manos de politicos y banqueros” (we are not merchandise in the hands of politicians and bankers).

At this UPF event in 2019, everyone in the room had a certain lived experience within 15M. From 2011 until 2013 Spain was immersed in a 15M climate which altered the way in which many Spanish citizens thought about what it means to be political. Everyone who attended this GRPT seminar was in Spain during the occupations of 2011. For this reason, I thought it best, being faithful to the mode of being I have learnt-with while studying 15M, to begin my talk by asking the GRPT members present, to describe what they thought 15M was or still is. This was my way of situating my descriptions of 15M within a multilogue of reciprocal elucidation in which we all co-learnt about what 15M represents in/for Spanish politics.

Marc Sanjaume, researcher and adviser at the Institut d’Estudis de l’Autogovern (Self-government Studies Institute, Catalan Government) was the first to describe what 15M was for him. From a personal perspective, he described 15M as an expressive movement, with a high dosage of expression and a multigenerational component, which was unwilling/unable to articulate or organize a political project. He understood 15M as vaporous, and thought that in the end, every day in the square people repeated debates on the same issues because every day new people were joining the square.

Ultimately, Sanjaume thought that the absolute and radical commitment to assembly based decision making was unable to make proposals, and argued that its voluntarist nature created a blind spot in its understanding of the political.

Pau Bossacoma Busquets, lecturer in public law at UPF and legal advisor to the Catalan Government, followed by adding that it was a social movement that brought people together and then crystalized into a political party (Podemos), and various associations which achieved numerous things in different areas of social life. He specifically mentioned the Platform of those affected by mortgages (PAH) and Democracia Real Ya. The later was actually the organization that called for the demonstration on May 15th of 2011, which later materialized into square occupations.

Bossacoma Busquets argued that 15M was unable to articulate its relationship to the Spanish state in a manner which managed to convince Catalan society. He identified a conflict between Spanish assembly based movements and secession movements in Catalonia and argued that this antagonism was not resolved. He reminded us of the fact that language was a big issue in square assemblies and of the fact that Catalan speakers were not happy with the assembly being carried out in Spanish. For Bossacoma Busquets, 15M was clearly an extremely urban movement and thus saw it disconnected from rural communities.

Peter Kraus, professor at the University of Augsburg, continued by adding that those in 15M should ask themselves how come once institutionalized, those in government had quickly become like the old parties they had previously been denouncing. Specifically, he referred to Ada Colau, who after being a spokesperson for the PAH had become mayor of Barcelona. He reminded us of the fact that in the recent mayoral elections she has pacted with mayoral candidate Manuel Valls, former Prime Minister of France from 2014 until 2016, in order to retain her position as mayor. Valls is thought of in Catalonia as a radical neoliberal politician striving for a strong Spanish state. He is seen as someone expressing no interest in listening to the voices of the Catalan independence movement. For Kraus, with this pact, Barcelona En Comú, Colau’s party (and Podemos’ partner in Catalonia) stopped being the party which could act as a dialogue facilitator between the Catalan independence movement and groups around and within 15M.

Klaus-Jürgen Nagel, Professor of Political Science at UPF, painted a similar picture of 15M. For him, it was first in the squares, it then became more organized and started a new political party. In speaking of a new party, he referred to Podemos and all the new regional and municipal coalitions made up of new parties stemming from 15M. As to to the question of what is left of 15M, he simply stated that all that is left is a political party with its internal crises.

Ferran Requejo, Professor of Political Science at UPF and director of the Institut d’Estudis de l’Autogovern (Self-government Studies Institute, Catalan Government), argued that 15M combined two things: First, citizenry disaffection building up since the 1980s against representative democracy. Second, conflict stemming from the 2007 economic crisis. For him, in the squares we witnessed a debate between pseudo-intellectualized people who used very little empiric data. To him, the language that was used seemed too abstract and he argued that people were against the state of the system rather than against the state. To him, it appeared like the kind of discourse one would expect in a high school. In addition, he found 15M to be too pro-Spain and pro-Spanish to be representative of the Catalan citizenry.

For Requejo, 15M accomplished nothing and is today a dead movement which is on the decline. He mentioned that he never understood what people were referring to when speaking of ‘real democracy now’, and he argued that people came together because of discontent presenting an unfriendly and unappealing discourse.

Following reflection on these contributions, I proceeded to present my imaginary of 15M. I described what I discovered during my research trip in 2013. I explained how 15M showed civic and civil citizens practicing participatory democracy and joining hands. I argued that with their examples of civic activities and exemplars of civic citizenship, individuals being 15M were contesting while simultaneously constructing alternatives. Finally, I explained how disclosing the field of 15M in this manner, crystalized 15M as a political phenomenon in its own right that is overlooked by state-centric framings.

A precious multilogue ensued, within which we discussed distinctions between being the demos and being a demoi, we spoke of constitutive processes, of the similarities and differences between the Catalan independence movement and 15M, about crisis time versus slow time, about violence versus nonviolence, and about the national versus transnational dimension of 15M.

In an inviting yet provocative manner, Kraus asked whether I might be tinting my imaginary of 15M by wearing Tullian glasses imported from Canada when entering research in Spain. To this I simply responded that I co-constructed my understanding of 15M with those being 15M by immersing myself in dialogues of reciprocal elucidation across Spain. Nevertheless, I took his point to heart and I realize that this is something which is important to always keep in mind when arguing like Foucault that people know what they want, why they want it, and are perfectly capable of speaking with their own voice. We must avoid at all times misrepresenting agents we are entering into dialogue with. We must avoid super-imposing theories we have learnt upon social realities we observe and interact with. An ‘ethic of interruption’ (Mathias Thaler) is crucial as we engage with people we are going to write about.

Finally, in an exemplary joining hands gesture, Requejo made a valuable suggestion regarding the importance of exploring family resemblances between the Catalan Procés and 15M. This could be a valuable contribution as Catalonia and Spain undergo deep transformations. Clearly there is a lot of work to be done in this area and I hope to join hands with people at UPF to explore criss-crossing and overlapping similarities between these two crucial events marking present day Spanish politics.

Overall this was a valuable conversation in which we discussed different imaginaries of what is possible in current day Catalan and Spanish politics and explored the futures of democracies in these lands.

 

 

 

 

 

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DEMOCRACY and its FUTURES: PublicDemoS, Public Space Democracy

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By Pablo Ouziel, Post-Doctoral Fellow and Canada-Europe Dialogue Manager at the Centre for Global Studies

Reflections on the International Colloquium at the Institute for Ideas & Imagination

I am posting these reflections following my participation in the International Colloquium on Public Space Democracy at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia Global Centers-Paris  (7th and 8th of June 2019). The École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Nomis Foundation and the PublicDemoS team put on an amazing colloquium. Bringing to a close a three-year project directed by Nilüfer Göle, this public event brought together academics, artists, museum executives and art curators from multiple countries and disciplines. Through this gathering, together we explored the numerous ways in which Public Space allows for the appearance of actors and for manifestations of cultural differences.

This two-day multilogue, facilitated through four different panels – dealing with public space, visibility and agency, memory and publics, and art and norm conflicts – crystalized the severity of the crises democracies are facing across the globe. Equally important, it revealed the multiplicity of ways in which different people are presenting their diagnostics of the crises and their different suggestions on how to approach them.

Below I want to present just a few of the ideas presented by some of the speakers. There were many more presenters but I will only focus on those whose ideas are deeply related to my own work and on whose talks, I took good notes. I think of these summaries, as snippets into the thinking of different participants that might inspire people to read more of their work related to democracy and the public space:

Nilüfer Göle, Directrice d’études at the EHESS, opened the discussion inviting us to reflect on the three years of research, in which eight different groups have been meeting in Paris’ EHESS to discuss different aspect of the public demos. Her first reflection was on the fact that the imaginary of the public space is not unique to the West. As we have witnessed with the occupation of public spaces, this is an imaginary of shared family resemblances which has gained traction across the globe. For Göle, these square occupations reveal a politics of appearance. They are about occupation and habitation, and about facilitating a mixing of the population. As she puts it, “in the squares there was a joy in the heterogeneity of the encounter.” Following from this, and adding layers to her reflections on the public demos, Göle pointed to the physicality of the public space and the created accommodations generated by square occupations. Finally, she passed the microphone to the speakers with a thought on the importance of understanding how these movements make us think politics differently.

Craig Calhoun, Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University, gave a talk in which he expanded and challenged public spaces and their relationships to democracy. He warned about the danger of over identifying democracy with the visible mass, and although acknowledging the importance of public gatherings, he asked himself which people where actually gathering. This made me think of the need for understanding square occupations as demoi rather than the demos; as the ‘people’ cannot be in the square all at the same time. Having said this, Calhoun did speak to the importance of the experiential sense of being the people and was also clear about the part different demoi played in putting things on the agenda. Nevertheless, he reminded us of the fact that democracy does not make the society as society exists prior to the formal establishment of democracy. Following from this, he spoke of the change in scale our societies have undergone. Although most people attribute this change to globalization, he points out that in reality the scale has changed because of large corporations which before did not exist. Finally, in regards to the occupation of public space to protest, he spoke of a new geography being created and new infrastructure being used as people gathered. This he pointed out is completely related to ‘urban-ness’ and as he puts it, has a strange sense of public centeredness reminiscent of the parades of Kings.

Charles Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, McGill University, described the 18th century public sphere / the Habermasian idea, today finding itself in great danger. According to Taylor, the public sphere is fracturing in this great crisis as declining social mobility leads to it breaking down. A disconnect between leaders and citizens and a dumbing down of political concepts might be making people think that Trump like figures will make their lives better. Nevertheless, it could also be that there is simply a deep sense of a lack of hope. This, he attributes to the meta-topical sphere being disconnected from the problems people face in their lives. Linking this to public gatherings in a spirit of protest, Taylor asks what kind of gatherings can have a positive effect. To this question, he responds by suggesting gatherings in which a sense of solidarity is created by people enacting diverse citizenship.

Dilip Gaonkar, Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture at Northwestern University, spoke of the politics of protest. Why is there so much protest? He asked. According to Gaonkar, the history of human society has been the quest for social justice, for the good life. Nevertheless, people only get to choose an unequal society that might treat its downtrodden a little bit better; still unequal, but possibly better. For this reason, for Gaonkar, the rapid social changes our societies are undergoing obviously lead to protests. With people at the bottom suffering more than the people in the middle and the top, there is an increase in conflict. Due to this, there is a pervasiveness of protest everywhere. Yet, as Gaonkar reminded us, protest is pre-democratic. Protests, strikes and demonstrations happened in pre-democratic societies. The history of protest proceeds the history of democracy; this is something Gaonkar highlights as worth keeping in mind. At the same time, for Gaonkar the political crowd is constituted by people who have learned to be in a crowd by being in non-political crowds. As he suggests, there is a complex economy of the crowd which requires deep analysis. What is clear for him, nevertheless, is that molecular protest is going on all over the world. People everywhere are mobilizing against fuel and food price hikes. What is important to note about these mobilizations, according to Gaonkar, is that their spaciality and temporality signal to our present as the molecular moment. As politicians think and plan for the end of the world, people all over the planet are thinking about making it to the end of the month. As Gaonkar points out, the oppressed have a different temporality. This said, in order to radically democratize our societies, we require a shift from the politics of speaking towards a politics that puts the inarticulate at the center of politics.

Erdag Aksel, Professor of Art at Sabanci University, gave a very provocative talk in which he asked the following question: “Who decides on the public art which fills streets and squares across the globe? For Aksel, public spaces need people more than they need art. For him, art in public spaces is an imposition. Therefore, our societies need to reflect on the permanence of public art work on our streets. Perhaps, as Aksel suggests, by not forcing people to see art, emptiness becomes the alternative. In a gallery, the statue invites to be seen if people want to see it, this is very different to a statue in the city square or a roundabout. In the latter case, the statue tells you that you have to live with it even if you do not want to. For Aksel, democracy is not an object of art. For this reason, art may not be democratic or for the people. Why, then, should our societies force art on the public demos? This seems to be Aksel’s most pressing question; his challenge to all of us. Suggesting that emptiness might be the breathing room we need in public spaces, he asks, can something be called art just because an artist, did it?

Parand Danesh, PhD candidate at CESPRA, EHESS, presented to the group on the subject of martyr iconography in post-war Iran. In her talk, Danesh reflected on the founding myth of the holy war, the vain and violent nature of war, and the fact that in martyr iconography the ghostly and cadaverous nature of war is not illustrated. According to Danesh, promoting a self-denying patriotic devotion and simplifying identification, the martyr is manipulated by those in power for mobilization purposes. Danesh’s most striking comment came when she said that the martyr is not dead but is in fact the most alive of all. According to her, it is the damaged veteran who has made it through the war that is socially dead as the martyr lives on.

Peter DeSouza, Professor at Center for the Study of Developing Societies, India, gave an insightful talk on the paintings of MF Husain, friend of Pablo Picasso, who went from being the most celebrated artist in India to being labelled the villain. The aim of DeSouza’s talk was to show how Indian democracy has dealt with an artist who after having been revered for his work in India and across the globe, at age 96 had to go into exile. As DeSouza quotes, when asked about how he felt about exile, Husain simply said: “I cannot eat the hot food that my sister makes for me.” Having painted around 40,000 paintings during his life, following his portrayal of Mother India as a naked woman, a campaign against him was mounted. Due to repeated death threats, he had to flee the country. De Souza makes us reflect on censorship and artistic freedom in democratic societies.

Apart from these contributions there were also talks by: Cemal Kafadar, on meydan in Ottoman-Turkish public life and in poetry; Boyan Znepolski, on theory for the new protest movements; Daniel Gamper, on religion and democracy; Christine Landfried, on the required social conditions of public space in Europe; Clifford Chanin on collective intimacy; Nazli Temir on the emergence of plural memories in public; Camil Ungureanu on nihilism, religious fantasy, and humor; Jeannette Jouili on British Muslim culture in the age of counter-terrorism; Nadia Fadil on theatre and charges of complicity of terrorism; and Misal Adnan Yildiz on the monolanguage of the state versus the silence in the park.

Overall, the colloquium served for everyone to understand the crisscrossing and overlapping family resemblances that exist between events happening across the globe. While the 15M was occupying public squares in Spain, Getzi Park in Istanbul was witnessing the standing man protest in which a silent individual standing in the middle of a public square inspired others to join him. The experiences of Turkish academics living in exile in Paris after having signed a peace petition – which Recep Tayyip Erdoğan considers an anti-Turkey and a terrorist act – served as a reminder to all of us of the fact that evermore academics are being targeted for their ideas. Going back historically to visit the meidän of 6th century Ottoman-Turkish public life, exploring the abandonment of Armenian cultural heritage in present Turkey, and discussing the rise of populism in India today, where some of the themes that helped in decentring Western imaginaries. As we collectively worked on diagnosing the crises of democracy, it became apparent that many of these crises are shared globally. As different localities are proposing different responses, it becomes clear that deep dialogues of reciprocal elucidation between peoples are paramount if we are to enter into virtuous cycles of societal development.

Göle brought the three-year research project and the colloquium to a close, by asking everyone to be patient and perseverant, while reminding all of us of the phrase we learnt from 15M during our encounters: Vamos lentos porque vamos lejos (We go ever so slowly because we are going on forever). This was the title of my PhD dissertation a few years ago and it is one of the pillars that has defined the work a group of us has been doing at the University of Victoria (UVic) for the last couple of years. The connections between the PublicDemoS research project and the Democracy and its Futures workshop that was held in Victoria in March 2019 are clear; many future collaborations will ensue. Without a doubt, the Cedar Trees Institute growing at UVic has strong allies and friends amongst those involved in PublicDemoS.

For more information on the International Colloquium on Public Space Democracy see:

https://globalcenters.columbia.edu/events/international-colloquium-public-space-democracy

For more information on Democracy and its Futures see:

https://www.eucanet.org/index.php/component/content/article/41-news-media/1-what-s-new/622-public-discussion-democracy-and-its-futures-3?Itemid=101