Democracy – Page 4

April 12, 2019March 18, 2022

The Un-united Kingdom

April 12, 2019March 18, 2022 by eucanet

By Christen Allen, student, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria

The Brexit debate rages on as the United Kingdom prepares to leave the EU. Theresa May’s Brexit deal is running out of time. The deal has been met with criticism by the Labour party, for May not allowing another vote to be held. While May and the Conservatives desire to escape the hold of the EU, they have become fractured through resignations like Jo Johnson. While the Labour party has proven to be united. Johnson supported a second referendum, while May continues to shoot down the idea. Johnson has said of the agreement that “it will leave our country economically weakened, with no say in the EU rules it must follow and years of uncertainty for business”.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/nov/14/theresa-mays-brexit-deal-everything-you-need-to-know

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/nov/09/jo-johnson-quits-as-minister-over-theresa-mays-brexit-plan-boris

How people feel about the deal?

As the opinions of the people have changed so have the opinions of the Members of Parliament, while the conservatives cling to the vote of three years ago. Parliament has been unable to decide on a deal and now the Conservatives have lost their majority government. Even as support for remaining in the EU has grown among the people, the Conservative’s still push for leaving. Data form pollsters BMG Research gathered in December 2018, reveals that the support for staying has gained significant tractions since last summer and reached about 50% in December 2018 as the realities of what Brexit would bring become more and more apparent (Independent).

This research by BMG asked 1,500 respondents “should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union, or leave the European Union”, 52 per cent said “remain”, 40 per cent said “leave”, six per cent said they did not know and one per cent refused to say. The research continues, about whether these people believed the withdrawal agreement proposed my Prime Minister May, 49% said it was a bad deal, one in ten (13%) said it was a good deal and 23% said they were indifferent and did not see it as good or bad, and the final 15% said they did not know.(independent)

Where we are now

The deal has led to further divides that have left no one happy. The Theresa May’s Conservative fear being trapped in a customs deal with the EU and continue and at being forced to continue accepting EU regulations to boot. While the Labour party does not believe that the deal is beneficial for jobs and the people. Currently the deal remains in a state if arrested development. Parliament only has 12 days to decide on a new plan, they only possess two options either stay in the EU customs union or hold a second referendum on Brexit that would allow the people to reaffirm or change their minds. May has rejected both of these options but is left with few choices. Her deal has been rejected three times by Parliament and now time is running out for the United Kingdom to decide.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5116915/more-brexit-options-after-failed-deal/

Possible solution

A true solution to the problem would be to hold confirmation vote to put the power back into the people’s hand and decide from their whether or not the United Kingdom should remain in the EU. Another vote would allow the people to reaffirm or change their minds on the referendum. As Tom Watson said “ Brexit that can unite our members, voters, MPs and, yes, the leadership too. I respect the different judgments reached by some of our MPs – none of these decisions is easy – but more than 80% of Labour MPs backed Margaret Beckett motion saying that any deal to leave the EU should not be pushed through by parliament unless it has also been approved by the people.” Parliament has proven to be unable to reach a deal amicably, so the decision should go back into the hands of the people. Since the initial vote , more information has become more readily available about what leaving the EU would actually look like and how if would affect the United Kingdom’s economy and people.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/30/labour-plan-for-peoples-vote-on-final-brexit-deal-can-unite-country

Picture: Christoph Scholz

March 3, 2019March 18, 2022

DEMOCRACY and its FUTURES: Moving away from jargon and excessive theoretical baggage

March 3, 2019March 18, 2022 by eucanet

Graduate students in Victoria, Canada, debate the approach to readings on “democracy from below”

by Ryan Beaton, Trudeau Scholar, Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria

While the preparations for a gathering of a scholarly discussion on the Futures of Democracy in Victoria BC take place, a pre-seminar organized by graduate students discusses a series of readings by Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz, Robin Celikates, Antje Wiener, and Peyman Vahabzadeh, gathered loosely under the heading of “democracy from below”. While we took a dive into the substantive content of those pieces, particularly by Celikates, I won’t rehearse that aspect of our conversation here. What stuck with me from our group discussion is a commitment to two rather “procedural” points, using that term loosely and with the understanding of course that this is simply my subjective recollection of our discussion, always subject to revision and clarification by other members of our group.

First, a number of us expressed a desire to move away from jargon, esoteric references, orother specialist language, to the extent we can manage it. It’s important to move away from jargon both to ease the discussion across disciplines and also (here I may speak only for myself) because jargon is our distinctive mode of defensiveness as academics, signaling an expertise that is often hard-earned but that too often also distances us from the phenomena we are meant to be illuminating and from non-specialist discussions of them.

Second, picking up where the above point left off, we also seemed to share a common desire to ground our discussions squarely in the phenomena under discussion (for instance, the illegal crossing of borders as an act of civil disobedience, or the contestation of fisheries regulations and related international law). One of our key aims, as I understand it, is to avoid placing excessive theoretical baggage between ourselves and the phenomena we are discussing, so as to avoid also falling into the trap of cherry-picking the phenomena for confirmation of our preferred theoretical angles.

By a happy coincidence, a friend just yesterday forwarded me a lecture by Edward Said in which he captures the above points most eloquently. Below is an extract, followed by a link to the full lecture for those who are interested:

[In the academy,] there’s always the danger of specialization, and of what has come to be called professionalization. That is to say, I think that the tendency in the academy to focus upon membership in a guild tends, therefore, to constrict and limit the critical awareness of the scholar. And this kind of restriction is manifest in a number of things. For example, the use of jargon, specialized language that nobody else can understand. One of my early works — well, perhaps not that early; but it was written, or published seventeen or eighteen years ago — was a book called Orientalism, which took its main subject from the way in which a field, as all fields are, is constituted by its language; but that the language itself becomes further and further removed from the experiences and the realities of the subject, in this case the orient, about which the language was supposed to turn.

http://archives.acls.org/op/op31said.htm#said

February 25, 2019March 18, 2022

Negotiating identities and histories through monuments and memorial landscapes

February 25, 2019March 18, 2022 by eucanet

By Julianna Nielsen, undergraduate student in the departments of history and political science at the University of Victoria, Canada.

Border walls and fences—as physical and discursive boundaries between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ ‘us’ and ‘them’—construct and communicate sharp differences between communities imagined to be historically, culturally, and territorially bound. Although these physical boundaries impose and express a clear distinction between ‘inside(rs)’ and ‘outside(rs),’ the negotiation and assertion of ‘our’ communal identity is also managed through the creation and transformation of memorial landscapes. The act of dismantling or erecting monuments, which publicly mark and symbolize the memories, identities, and ambitions of the communities for which, and by whom, they were constructed, may be interpreted as an answer to the uncertainties, new horizons, and anxieties engendered by a community’s dramatic social and demographic change.

Rather than approaching and understanding a monument as an object with meaning in itself, I propose an examination of the ways in which monuments and memorial landscapes are made meaningful by the communities co-existing and co-evolving with those edifices and spaces. A statue, in other words, is nothing more than what we come to make of it; the act which removes or erects it, then, is meaningful and political insofar as we make it so. To move towards more concrete examples, I briefly consider the following two ways in which memorial landscapes and monuments of ‘national importance,’ in Canadian and European contexts, have been transformed and challenged within the last few year, each corresponding with movements to (un)settle questions around ‘our’ communal/national identity.

In Canada…

In the summer of 2018, a statue of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was removed from Victoria City Hall and placed in storage with the intent to relocate and re-contextualize the figure at a later time. Although many Victorians interpreted the act to remove the statue as a reconciliatory gesture towards acknowledging the historic and continuing injustices of settler-colonialism, many groups opposed the decision to remove the figure of Macdonald characterized the act as an ‘attack on our history’ and an ‘assault on Canadian identity.’ I would argue that the either-or nature of the debate to remove or keep the statue unfortunately polarized important conversations around who ‘we’ are and where ‘we’ are going—the symbolic move to ‘unsettle’ Canada’s past and present inadvertently re-entrenching exclusionary, colonial identities and visions based on limited, unexamined readings of history.

In Europe…

In late December, 2018, the statue of Imre Nagy—the 44th Prime Minister of Hungary executed for his prominent role in the Hungarian Uprising of 1956—was removed from where it stood between Szabadság tér (Liberty Square) and the Parliament Building. This instance of ‘de-statueing’ might be understood as part of a longer series of controversial acts, spearheaded by nationalist movements and populist parties, to transform Budapest’s memorial landscape and re-narrativize Hungarian history. While controversies have enveloped the House of Terror—a state museum memorializing victims of National Socialism and Soviet Communism while overlooking Hungarian involvement and complicity in those regimes and crimes—so too have the latest monuments added to Szabadság tér been criticized as rehabilitating some of the aggressive and exclusionary politics of the Horthy-Era (with a bust of the Admiral set behind glass near the square) and presenting the idea that Hungary was an ‘innocent victim’ during the Second World War (with the memorial for the victims of German occupation, wherein Hungary is depicted as an angel).

In Victoria and in Budapest, the debates around taking down monuments, and transforming memorial landscapes, go far beyond advocating for or against the presence of bronze, marble, or concrete. How a community decides to remember and to communicate its past is not something that should be taken lightly, nor should decisions to memorialize the past in a particular way be understood as the end of the conversation to address historical injustice, trauma, and the legacies thereof. In the end, the act of dismantling or erecting a memorial can only do so much; it is the duty of a community to discuss and remember the past, and enact change in the present.

I leave readers to consider the counter-memorial at Szabadság tér, where citizens have constructed and maintained an informal memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Hungary, consisting of personal stories of trauma, memorial candles, and calls to action. But, most importantly, this counter-memorial is a space for open dialogue, represented by the centrally positioned pair of empty chairs. Perhaps, moving forward, the focus of debates around memorial landscapes ought not to be on whether or not a monument is absent or present, but how it is we might create and preserve a space to voice and negotiate memories as a way to acknowledge past wrongs and forge new bonds.

January 31, 2019March 18, 2022

Alternative Identities

January 31, 2019March 18, 2022 by eucanet

By Robert Gould

The title of this blog contribution is a reference to the name of the far-right party in Germany Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany: AfD) now represented in the parliaments of all sixteen individual states (Bundesländer) of Germany and in the Bundestag.

In the elections in Andalusia on 2 December 2018, Vox España (a new far-right party whose name can readily be understood as the ‘Voice of Spain’) won 12 seats in the Andalusian Parliament, the first time it had achieved any parliamentary representation. This was enough to give it significant leverage in the selection of a new premier to set the direction for the parliament and government of Andalusia. It is now quite conceivable that later this year (2019), after the wave of elections on May 26^th, Vox could be represented in the parliaments of the majority of Spain’s sixteen autonomous communities and in the European Parliament. These ‘autonomous communities’ play a large role in Spanish government and political life and possess many of the characteristics and responsibilities of a German Bundesland or a Canadian province. And, like the AfD, Vox is certainly proposing an alternative identity for Spain.

Beginning some years ago, I started a series of analyses on discourses of national identity in individual member states of the European Union as presented in parties’ election platforms and official statements. It quickly became clear that ‘identity’ was of increasing significance as one moved from parties of the centre-right such as the CDU or CSU towards, for example, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, the Rassemblement national in France and the Alternative für Deutschland. This is a phenomenon also shared by parties on the Right of the political spectrum which are now taking on more prominence in other countries across the EU. And within this concern for national identity and the desire to cultivate, strengthen and protect it, the topic of religion receives increasing political attention – at a time when, paradoxically, reliable statistics indicate that in many European countries Christianity is playing an ever-decreasing role in people’s lives.

These two factors of ‘national identity’ and religion link the positions of both AfD and Vox, and also other right-leaning parties. ‘Identity’ is usually represented by an idealised and sometimes distant past which all citizens share, and also by the feeling of being part of a region and sharing local customs and practices. This is summarised in the German-speaking areas by such terms as Heimat (the area of the individual’s origin and emotional attachment) or (deutsche) Leitkultur (the defining culture which produces German-ness), or by arraigo (rootedness) or hispanidad (Spanishness) in Spain. All of these factors have led, we are told, to the realisation of the ‘nation state’ and the creation of a unity and commonality of which all citizens can / should / must be proud.

As alluded to above, the key term in much of this political discourse is ‘protect’. But protect from what or who? As was all too often the case in the past, it is protection from difference or from ‘outsiders’ who are widely defined as constituting a threat to ‘our’ identity and values: migrants / immigrants (whether from within the EU or from third countries), Islam in Europe, and the EU itself. These are all cited as unwelcome factors for changes which should be repudiated.

Thus, both implicitly and explicitly, the existing parties of centre-left or centre-right are branded as being incapable of protecting the Nation as the larger focus of identity and the Local as the closer or personal element of identity.

In addition, and arising from a definition of democracy and the attribution of greater importance or relevance to the nation state, increasing emphasis is being placed on the notion of ‘popular sovereignty’ (where ‘popular’ refers to the ethnic people / nation) or ‘national sovereignty’. Logically, this stands in contrast to the transfers of significant political power and decision-making to supranational organisations in Europe which have been occurring over the past several decades.

All of the above are also related to a return to an earlier view of the position of women in society and the nature (and function) of the family. This is now defined in what can be regarded as very conservative terms: wife-plus-husband-plus-several-children. One function of this is economic — to provide more workers of the right background for the national economy, and the other is political – to provide more voters of the right background (i.e. not of immigrant families) for the nation state. Both these trends would also reduce the need for immigration. For the sake of promoting this view of women as primarily belonging in the home, one force which has to be combatted is, it is claimed, the EU with its ‘gender ideology’ or ‘gender mainstreaming’.

And where is Islam in this? It is presented as an anti-model: an anti-model of women’s and human rights, an anti-model to the European way of thinking and to the bases of European society, and an anti-model to an open and plural society [the reader will grasp the irony in some of these statements]. Just as national politicians and Brussels are an enemy within and without, so also is Islam: present in traditionally Christian Europe but representing an alien invasion.

Ever since Germany and Spain emerged from the destruction of war and from their separate traumatic and traumatising authoritarian pasts, each has been defining itself as a ‘normal’ European country. Led from above by political elites, the two countries have been integrating into a broader economic and political European community, developing and emphasising shared characteristics, and attempting to put aside as atavistic those facets of national self-understanding which divide.

In contrast, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Voice of Spain (Vox España) are suggesting that they are voices from below with a political orientation and a view of the nation and its values closer to those which people really hold, or want to hold, but have been deprived of by out-of-touch elites. And one aspect of these voices from below, the most important one, is the deliberate and explicit weakening of ties to the European Union in the name of a more distinct alternative national identity.

Represented by UKIP and the Leave campaign, these were also the voices from below which have led to the fantasy and folly of Brexit, the disturbing ramifications of which are now becoming ever clearer.

Seville, January 2019

For an analysis of AfD’s five election manifestos in 2017: https://www.upo.es/investiga/demospain/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/2018.10.22_DT.Demospain_2018.003.pdf

For a commentary on the election of Vox España to the Andalusian parliament and its implications for European politics, see: https://carleton.ca/ces/?p=11034

For more analyses by Robert Gould: https://carleton.ca/slals/people/gould-robert/

Photo by Daniel von Appen

January 6, 2019March 18, 2022

Navigating the global jungle full of political, economic, and social interactions

January 6, 2019March 18, 2022 by eucanet

By Franziska Fischer, PhD student at the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria

Globalization has us all moving closer together. Space has become a relative concept, which is overcome through technology, through economic agreements and political collaborations on a global scale.

But while in many aspects this transgression of physical and imagined space is celebrated and supported under the slogan of progress, a different aspect has emerged that produces anxiety and uncertainty in the population and in the political and economic landscape. Issues over security, inequality, environmental degradation, migration and questions concerning the interrelationship between global and national politics have shaped the contemporary discussion on globalization.

We can witness these issues rise, especially after moments of crisis, whether that takes the shape of a terrorist attack, human rights violations, rising unemployment and a widening gap between rich and poor, natural disasters due to climate change and an influx in migration and refugees due to conflict and war. What follows these nodal points are the installment of mechanisms of control that aim to contain these issues, and to provide some relief for the uncertainty and anxiety that evolved around globalization.

These mechanisms of control may take various shapes and forms through law, policy-making, economic and political agreements and even the shaping of perception through various media channels. They are initiated on a local, national or global level, within communities, by nation-states, and through supranational or international organizations or cooperation, such as the United Nations, the European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, just to name a few.

But how do we navigate this global jungle full of political, economic, and social interactions that make it very difficult to find a clear path towards the solution to our current problems, while providing an encompassing understanding of the pros and cons, and all the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ that rise with every new turn we take? One point of departure may be to focus on these mechanisms of control that emerge out of crisis and that shape the ongoing direction of political and economic agendas, that determine the future tone and attitude towards the issues, and that provide an understanding of the uncertainties and anxieties different societies deal with. We can split these mechanisms of control into three different subsections, dealing with the public perception of a crisis reflected in media channels, the legislative approach that may already be in place, and emerging public policies as a result of a crisis. All the mechanisms are highly interactive and regularly depend on each other or evolve as a consequence of each other. Thus, the public perception may impact the policy-making process, laws may shape the public standpoint on an issue, and policies may contradict or support legislative agreements.

Pics by Oscar Nilsson