Showing papers in "Constellations in 2009"

Critical Theory of World Risk Society: A Cosmopolitan Vision

Abstract: A critical theory of world risk society must address at least three questions: (1) What is the basis of the critique? What is “critical” about this critical theory? (The question of the normative horizon of the world risk society) (2) What are the key theses and core arguments of this theory? Is it an empirical theory of society with critical intent? (3) To what extent does this theory break with the automatisms of modernization and globalization which have taken on a life of their own and rediscover the openness of human action to the future at the beginning of the 21st century political perspectives, cosmopolitan alternatives?

Post‐Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror

Abstract: In Russia, where many millions were unlawfully murdered during the Soviet period, the cultural practices of memory are inadequate to these losses. While Europeans are talking about the “mnemonic age,” a “memory fest,” and the obsession with the past “around the globe,” Russians complain about the historical “amnesia” in their country.1 Sporadically, some Russians outsource their memorial concerns abroad. Sometimes they strive to protect Russian monuments in Tallinn, Vienna, and elsewhere. Sometimes they attempt to silence the public sorrows of Russia’s neighbors in respect to a past that they happen to share with Russians. Sometimes it feels that the former Iron Curtain has become the frontline of the Memory War. But in contrast to the “amnesia” thesis, sociological polls show that Russians remember the Soviet terror fairly well, though they vastly differ in their interpretations of this terror. In contrast to the abuse of memory for nationalist purposes, the most important developments of Russian memory are structured not by nation or ethnicity, but by solidarity between different communities and generations. While the state is led by former KGB officers who avoid giving public apologies, building monuments, or opening archives, the struggling civil society and the intrepid reading public are possessed by the unquiet ghosts of the Soviet era. Haunted by the unburied past, post-Soviet culture has produced perverse memorial practices that are worthy of detailed study. While the American historian Stephen Kotkin perceives a “Shakespearian quality” in the post-Soviet transformation, it is no surprise that the participating observers of this process employ equally dramatic metaphors, partially invented and partially imported, in their attempts to understand what has happened to their civilization.2 In a land where millions remain unburied, the dead return as the undead. They do so in novels, films, and other forms of culture which reflect, shape, and possess people’s memory. Inspired by Jacques Derrida’s “hauntology,” I have developed a theory of cultural memory consisting of monuments (hardware), texts (software), and specters (ghostware).

Democracy as a Non‐Hegemonic Struggle? Disambiguating Chantal Mouffe's Agonistic Model of Politics

Abstract: According to Carl Schmitt, the political is essentially characterized by the antagonistic opposition between friends and enemies. In several recent books, Chantal Mouffe has taken hold of this central Schmittian idea and has used it as a starting point for a critique of the consensual nature of both contemporary political theory and contemporary political practice.1 On the theoretical level, Mouffe argues that the current emphasis on the need for a reasonable political consensus, as found in John Rawls’s political liberalism or in Jürgen Habermas’s model of deliberative democracy, is misguided.2 Theories like these are based on a universalistic logic which misrepresents the true nature of the political and fails to understand its dynamics. Because of its individualistic framework, so the argument goes, consensualism lacks the conceptual means to understand politics as a power struggle between collective identities. Moreover, as a result of its rationalistic premises, it refuses to accept that political oppositions cannot be resolved by rational means and that politics is ultimately about making decisions in an undecidable terrain. Finally, because of its universalistic aspirations, consensualism is unwilling to recognize that our social order is not organized on the basis of universal rational or moral principles, but rather on the basis of necessarily contingent and, therefore, “hegemonic” articulations of power relations.3 On the political level, Mouffe claims that the tendency to downplay the importance and the persistence of political oppositions is dangerous because it tends to hamper the proper workings of the political sphere. Political oppositions that are unable to appear in the political arena are bound to re-emerge elsewhere in a much less tractable guise. In this regard, Mouffe associates the rise of right wing populist parties in Western Europe with the dominance of “third way” politics and the alleged disappearance of the left/right distinction. Similarly, she believes the emergence of international terrorism to be the result of the unipolar nature of our current neoliberal world-order, in which the hegemonic dominance of the United States leaves no opportunity for the representation of real political oppositions on the international scene.4 According to Mouffe, the main problems connected to consensualist theories and practices stem from their one-sided commitment to a liberal strand of political thinking. Consensualists fail to appreciate that liberal democracy is a political regime based on a paradoxical mixture of two political traditions and thus combines the universalistic logic of liberalism with the antagonistic logic of democracy. In order to reinstate the importance of this latter logic, Mouffe elaborates her own model of agonistic pluralism. Therein, she acknowledges the importance of a thin consensus on the ethico-political values of liberty and equality as the constitutive symbolic framework of any liberal democratic regime. At the same time, however, the agonistic model emphasizes that this thin consensus remains conflictual. Democracy is characterized by an open-ended political struggle in which agonistic opponents advocate different and incompatible interpretations of the core values of liberty and equality.

War Memorials and the Politics of Memory: the Soviet War Memorial in Tallinn

Abstract: During the interwar years, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil brazenly wrote that, “monuments are so conspicuously inconspicuous. There is nothing so invisible as a monument.”1 Musil is partially correct – monuments all too easily fade into the landscape and are visible for either tourists looking for signs of historical interest or as meeting places for local residents. But what happens when a monument which was once asleep suddenly comes to life and is made painfully visible? Such was the case of the Bronze Soldier war memorial built in Soviet Estonia (1947) to commemorate the liberation of Tallinn by the Red Army. Nicknamed the “Bronze Soldier” by Estonians and “Aljosa” by Russians, the Soviet monument stood in the city center amidst apartment buildings, the National Library and a trolley stop. The handsome and melancholic statue suddenly came to life in 2005 sparking heated debates between Estonians and their Russian-speaking minority and in between Estonia and the Federation of Russia. In many ways, the riots surrounding the controversial relocation of the monument to a military cemetery on the outskirts of Tallinn by the Estonian center-right government in April 2007 fulfilled Marx’s prophecy that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past. The tradition of all the generations of the dead weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”2 How a statue representing an Estonian soldier in a Red Army uniform became a heroic cult for the Russian community in Estonia and Putin’s government demonstrates the enormous power of cultural symbols. The clashing interpretations of liberation versus occupation, victory versus trauma, attest to the fault lines in the East European memory landscape. In a resurgent Russia, the Great Patriotic War is an event of mythical importance separated from communism. For Estonians, however, monuments to that same war are deeply linked to the historical experience of Soviet occupation, deportation and loss of national independence. Two different understandings of the recent past are represented visually in the same war memorial. The conflict over the Bronze Soldier and the riots surrounding its relocation demonstrates that monuments are founded on a paradox. As places of memory, they are supposed to symbolize events from the past for future generations. As works of art, they are supposed to make time stand still. However, since time marches on and societies change, the attempt to freeze time visually into space is fraught with difficulty. War memorials are cultural symbols reflecting the human instinct for aggression towards one another. While they may have many different interpretations, all war memorials are attempts to make sense of the senseless: violent death at the hands of others. Death is not commemorated due to natural catastrophe or illness, but due to war. Drawing on the insights of Reinhart Koselleck and George Mosse, war memorials are visual representations of modernity linked to the development of the modern nation-state. Divided roughly into three time periods, memorials built before World War I tend to commemorate heroic leaders who died in the name of the nation. After World War I, the democraticization of the modern

The Israeli Palestinian‐Arab Vision of Transforming Israel into a Binational Democracy

Abstract: The idea of binationalism has risen anew as a result of several developments. It was invoked by the weakening of the nation-state which is identified with a single nation, a single language and a single culture. It was further stimulated by the ideology of multiculturalism that calls for the recognition of diversity and bestowal of cultural rights on cultural minorities. Transnationalism (i.e., activity of a certain nation in more than one country), facilitated by economic and political globalization, was an additional push. In the sphere of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the idea of binationalism rises as an option because of the political impasse and the spreading despair of the two-state solution. The Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel are also attracted to binationalism because they seek a radical remedy for their minority status in the Jewish state and fear lest the formation of a new Palestinian state alongside Israel will strengthen Israel’s Jewish-Zionist character and exacerbate their subordination. They are supported by a handful of post-Zionists, non-Zionists and anti-Zionists.1 Four “Arab Vision Documents,” in which Paestinian-Arab elties in Israel state their views of the present and desirable status of the Arab minority and Israel’s character, were published from December 6, 2006 to May 15, 2007.2 They share the demands to establish an independent Palestinian state and to turn Israel into a binational democracy. The adoption of this option entails renunciation of three other possibilities: individualbased liberal democracy in Israel in its pre-1967 borders; a single individual-based liberal democracy in the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea; and a single binational state in the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The common denominator of these four options is the eradication of Israel’s nature as a Jewish state. The ensuing discussion will focus on the binational option, addressing the following questions: What kind of binational democracy do the Arab Vision Documents advocate? What can be learned from the international and historical record of binational regimes? Does the Arab minority, apart from the Arab elites, reject Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and is it ready to wage an intense struggle for a binational democracy? Does the Jewish majority accept any form of binational democracy and what would be its reaction if Arabs fight for this goal? Will the Palestinian Authority deny Israel as a Jewish state and back up Arab minority’s endeavor for recasting it into a binational democracy? Would the international community lend legitimacy and support to the idea and campaign for setting up a binational democracy in Israel within the Green Line? Is the related idea of one-state in all of Palestine/Land of Israel acceptable and realistic? What are the likely repercussions of the spread of the Arab Vision Documents? The discussion has two dimensions: scientific-empirical and ideological-normative. Although a comprehensive scrutiny of the issues requires elucidation of both dimensions, this paper is limited to the scientific-empirical dimension as much as possible.

Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External Sovereignty in Arendt

Abstract: According to Hannah Arendt “the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.” It is very clear that Arendt considers the American abolition of sovereignty to pertain to internal affairs only; first, because she explicitly says “within the body politic,” and second because she rightly implies that one of the points of forming a more perfect union by moving from a confederacy to a federal state in 1787 was to enhance external sovereignty. The task was to “reconcile the advantages of monarchy in foreign affairs with those of republicanism in domestic policy.” It would be absurd to call this a chance or careless remark, given the correspondence of its thrust with the intentions of the authors of The Federalist that had to be entirely clear to Arendt. But is it possible to leave external sovereignty untouched, while abolishing internal sovereignty? The first part of this essay will explore the meaning of the abolition of sovereignty in Arendt’s work (I). We turn next to her conception of the American model of internal sovereignty (II) and then to the tenability of her analysis of the boundary between external and internal sovereignty in the American case (III). We provide an assessment of what is wrong with her model conceptually and historically (IV) and conclude with a proposal for a corrective in the spirit if not in the letter of her work (V).

International Law and Human Plurality in the Shadow of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin

Abstract: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin were witnesses to the twentieth-century. They both experienced the dislocating transformations on the European continent as a consequence of two world wars, lost their states as well as their homes in this process, narrowly escaped the clutches of the Nazi extermination machine, and made it to the New World through sheer luck and fortuitous circumstance. Their thought is marked by the cataclysms of the last century, and they have in turn emerged as indispensable interlocutors for all of us in understanding this past. Arendt and Lemkin were contemporaries and there are astonishing parallels in their early biographies. She was born in Hannover in 1906 (d. 1975) and grew up in Koenigsberg in East Prussia. After WWI, the Polish Corridor was created and cut East Prussia and Koengisberg off from the rest of Weimar. In 1945, Koenigsberg was occupied by the Soviets and renamed “Kaliningrad.” Lemkin was born in Bezwodene in 1900, then part of Tsarist Russia. Between the two World Wars (1918–1939) Bezwodene became part of Poland, and today is Bezvodna in Belarus. When Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo in the Spring of 1933 and was forced to flee to Paris via Prague with her mother, she had been carrying out research in the Prussian State Library at the request of Kurt Blumenfeld on anti-Semitic measures undertaken by Nazi nongovernmental organizations, business associations and professional clubs to exclude Jewish members. Her Zionist friend, Kurt Blumenfeld in turn, was preparing to present this material at the 18th Zionist Congress. During those very same years, Ralph Lemkin was a young clerk in the Polish State Prosecutor’s office who had been collecting documents on Nazi war legislation, particularly those affecting cultural, linguistic, religious activities and artifacts of cultural and religious groups. In 1933, he had sent a paper to a League of Nations conference in Madrid, in which he proposed that “the crimes of barbarity and vandalism be considered as new offences against the law of nations.”1 In 1939, he fled from Poland and reached Stockholm, where he continued to do extensive research on Nazi occupation laws throughout Europe. On April 18, 1941, he arrived in the United States via Japan. That very same year, Arendt and her second husband, Heinrich Bluecher, arrived in New York via Portugal. Yet in contrast to Arendt, who acquired world-wide fame after her arrival in the USA with her many works and university appointments, Lemkin, after the general acclaim he received with the passage of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations in 1948, fell into obscurity and died a lonely death, destitute and neglected in New York in 1959. It is certainly fascinating to speculate whether these Jewish refugees, who were caught up in the great dislocations of their time, ever met one another in some location or association in the United States. We just don’t know. What is even more astonishing is the lack of any discussion in Hannah Arendt’s work of Lemkin’s great book on the concept of genocide,2 nor any evidence that Lemkin knew Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, which certainly was the most powerful historical documentation and philosophical analysis in the early 1950s of the unprecedentedly murderous character of the Nazi regime. Arendt and Lemkin appear to

The Contradictions of State‐Minority Relations in Israel: The Search for Clarifications

Abstract: One of the best prisms to examine and evaluate the nature of the Israeli regime upon Israel’s sixty years of independence is the relationship between the state and its indigenous Palestinian minority. This relationship is important because of its implications on the identity of the state and its stability in the future. State-minority relations have undergone major developments in the last decade. The October 2000 events, in which 13 Arab citizens were killed by the police forces, mark an important indicator as to the fragility of this relationship. Despite the publication of the Or Commission Report that investigated the events and reiterated that the Israeli police forces treated Israeli Arab citizens as enemies, the Attorney General decided not to put any of the policemen to trial because of “lack of evidence.” Since October 2000, the Knesset passed several laws that have a deeply negative impact on the civil status and the political rights of the Arab minority. New official and unofficial initiatives sought to draft a constitution for the state of Israel, seeking to enshrine its character as an ethnic Jewish republic. These initiatives granted back winds to new policies of the Israeli General Security Service that declared that any challenge to the Jewish character of the state including by democratic means will be considered as a strategic threat that are deemed illegitimate. Simultaneously the Israeli Supreme Court has delivered several landmark rulings that protect basic individual liberal rights with clear collective implications for the Arab minority. The Arab minority, on its part, has been mobilizing new political and civic resources and developing new strategies of contention to improve its status in the Israeli state. Political and recently also civil institutions began reiterating the inherent contradiction between the exclusive hegemony of the Jewish majority over state institutions and resources and the probability of establishing justice and promoting democracy. In this context, political and civic leaders of the new Arab elite published new visionary documents that challenge the Jewish hegemony and demand individual as well as collective rights for the minority. Whereas these documents were introduced in order to exert pressure on the state and invite its leadership into a dialogue over state-minority relations, the Jewish majority conceived them as yet another indicator of the radicalization of the Arab minority. Understanding these developments in state-minority relations without falling into mere depiction of events could benefit from newly published theoretical and practical literature on policies of diversity regulation and conflict management. This literature draws attention to the various models of dealing with minority rights, pinpointing the advantages and limitations of each. On the other hand, examining state-minority relations in Israel may contribute to the debate regarding the advantages and limitations of various models of diversity regulation and shed light on some of their aspects that are overlooked. Minority rights and status have become a central topic in the professional literature in major fields such as constitutional law and political philosophy. Recent literature has depicted two main grand strategies for regulating diversity. One is integration and the other is accommodation.1 Whereas the first is usually applied in the case of national minorities, seeking to integrate its members into the majority society, the second is more appropriate for dealing with the basic rights of indigenous peoples. Commenting on the dominant models

Democratic Universalism as a Historical Problem

Abstract: Westerners think they own a universal democratic model. However, their confidence vanishes whenever they try to export it. Worse, this claim (...)

« “Gabba-Gabba we accept you, one of us.” Vulnerability and Power in the Relationship of Recognition »

Abstract: Current Hegelian theories of recognition assume a concept of the subject as always being available for harming. This emphasis placed on vulnerability, whose validity is not being called into question as such here, leave a certain number of elements on the nature of the harm threatening the person expecting recognition unclarified, especially the fact that it cannot be perpetrated without the victim being aware. At the same time, it fails to address the nature of the relationship of recognition, omitting from consideration the exercise of power and the mechanisms inherent to this relationship. These omissions, as I show, cause a particular dimension of recognition-driven struggles to be neglected, a dimension which I will refer to as the politics of exit.

Entrenching the status-quo: Religion and state in Israel's constitutional proposals

Abstract: The article aims at analyzing the proposed constitutional solutions for the most disputed issues in the religious-secular conflict in Israel. It focuses on the three complete constitutional drafts published between 2005-2006. The article shows how the three constitutional proposals not only refrained from reforming the existing religious arrangements in the area of personal law, observance of Sabbath, and the question of conversion or “who is a Jew?” In addition, all three proposals limit potential future reforms of the religious status quo by the Supreme Court, which is perceived as representing a liberal-secular worldview. The proposed constitutions limit the court’s authority through various constitutional tools which are geared to maintaining parliamentary supremacy in regulating controversial issues of religion-state relations. Thus, the article argues, the debate over the future of the constitutional arrangements in the religious sphere in Israel is a conflict not only between two opposing views of the appropriate relationship between religion and state institutions, but also involves a clash between fundamentally different views of the role of constitutions and constitutional law under conditions of deep societal disagreement. On the one hand advocates of Israel’s secularization hold a liberal understanding of the role of constitutions as vehicles for the introduction of principles of constitutionalism. On the other hand, the authors of the proposed drafts expect constitutions to serve as the basic charter of the state’s identity, and therefore to rest on a broad consensus, reflecting the common vision and shared basic norms of society as a whole. At present the broad consensus of Israeli society seems to prefer the preservation of the religious status quo.

On Barack Obama

Abstract: While studying here, my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor my grandfather signed up for duty; joined Patton’s army, marched across Europe. Back home, my grandmother raised a baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through F.H.A., and later moved west all the way to Hawaii in search of opportunity.

Towards a Constitutional Counter‐Revolution in Israel?

Abstract: In 2007–2008 then Minister of Justice, Daniel Friedman (Kadima), waged a campaign to curb the power gained by Israel’s Supreme Court (SC) since the 1980s. On the first of April 2009, Friedman congratulated his successor, Yaakov Ne’eman, one of Israel’s leading private lawyers, on his appointment, saying he was sure that Ne’eman “will work to advance matters of judicial importance.”1 Friedman was not joking: he knew very well that Ne’eman, like him, wished to carry out reforms in the judicial system in order to diminish its power. Ne’eman – who has no official affiliation with any political party but was appointed on the quota of Yisrael Beitenu, Yvette Lieberman’s extreme right-wing party – may turn out to be a greater reformer than Friedman. His appointment signaled that Friedman’s campaign had not been the whim of one person, but rather the beginning of a new era in the relationships between the executive and judicial branches. In this essay, we analyze the social-historical context of this offensive against the judiciary, which enjoys the support of a significant cross-section of Israeli society and its political class. We argue that while this campaign constitutes a reaction against the “rights revolution” and the “constitutional revolution” that had taken place in the 1980s and 90s, it does not mark a revolutionary change in the relations between the political and economic elites, on one side, and the SC on the other. These relations had been showing signs of tension already since the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1988, but have deteriorated significantly since 2000 due to changes in both the security sphere – the outbreak of the second Intifada and 9/11 – and in the political economy of Israeli society – the progression of privatization, and of neo-liberal economic policy in general, that has resulted in much greater concentration of wealth and enhanced the symbiotic relations between government and big capital. On the most general level, the conflict can be conceptualized as one between two strands of liberalism: a J.S. Mill-inspired strand, espoused by the SC, whose utilitarianism is tempered by universal values and concern for minority rights, and a strict utilitarian strand, represented by Friedman, that believes in majority rule as the best and only way of discovering the greatest good for the greatest number. Similar conflicts exist in the political and legal cultures of other capitalist societies as well, but the Israeli case is particularly poignant due to the country’s peculiar situation as a deeply-divided, highly developed capitalist society, engaged in a protracted frontier-type struggle with the Palestinians. At issue in the current phase of the conflict is a clash between the value-activism of the SC, a legacy of former Chief Justice (CJ) Aharon Barak, manifested, inter alia, in concern for the rights of the Palestinians, both citizens and non-citizens, and in a firm stand against political corruption, on one side, and Friedman’s and Ne’eman’s legal positivism, the executive’s neo-conservative policy towards the Palestinians, and the business-government symbiosis, on the other. The conflict can also be conceptualized in terms of the famed dispute between Lon L. Fuller and H.L.A. Hart on the nature of law.2 On one side stands Barak who believes, with Fuller, that law and morality cannot and should not be separated. On the other stand Friedman and Ne’eman who, like Bentham and Austin, distinguish law as it is from law as it ought to be. It is still too early to predict how the conflict will be resolved, but we

On Spirit as a Part of Nature

Abstract: The theme of my paper is the relationship between nature and spirit – the term “spirit” being taken as an equivalent of the German term “Geist.” To speak about “spirit” instead of “mind” has the advantage, that with Hegel we can distinguish between “objective” and “subjective” spirit and thereby connect two different problematics with each other: first of all, the problematic already discussed by Kant as an “antinomy” of determinism vs. freedom, and secondly, the problematic of the relationship between the natural sciences and the cultural sciences (“Geisteswissenschaften”). The German term “Geisteswissenschaften” carries the suggestion that the manifestations of “Geist,” that is of “objective spirit,” are the objects of theses sciences, in contrast to nature as the object of the natural sciences. “Geist” in the sense of objective spirit signifies something specific to the human world: history, literature, art, the plurality of languages and cultures and even the natural sciences as a part of the human world. All these manifestations of objective spirit are constitutive of a sphere of empirical reality that requires methods of research which are characteristically different from those of the natural sciences. This is because the cultural scientists are related to their field of research in a way that is different form the way the natural scientists are related to theirs. The cultural scientist is not only – as the natural scientist also is – part of his field of research, but she is part of it as a participant in the very normatively structured cultural field which is the object of her study; she is related to it as a speaker and actor as well as an interpreter of historical and cultural phenomena, of literature and art. Let me illustrate the difference between the two different spheres of reality which are the object of the natural and the cultural sciences respectively by way of an example. A painting, as for instance Picasso’s famous painting Guernica, is, in a way, part of both theses different spheres of reality. As a work of art it is an object of aesthetic experience and, as such, it is an object of a critical discourse on art. Works of art are also the objects of a form of scientific study (“Kunstwissenschaft”), which may explore the painting with respect to its relationhips to other works of art, to the occasions of its being created, or the way it has been influenced by other paintings or its place in the work of Picasso, etc. This is not to mention biographical, sociological or psychoanalytical studies which in one way or another may shed light on the origin or the content of this painting. However, the same painting is also a material object which may become the object of study from a natural scientific point of view. Already when it is weighed or its spacial dimensions are measured – which may be important for transporting it form one place to another – it is taken as a mere material object. It could also become the object of a radiological research, which may be important for determining the date of its creation or its authenticity. In one sense of the word, it is the same object in both cases, wthether taken as a painting or as a mere material object; in another sense, however, there are two entirely different objects, a work of art, on the one hand, and a material object, on the other. As a work of art, the painting belongs to the sphere of “objective spirit.” Taken as a material object, it belongs to that sphere of reality, nature, which is the object of natural science.