By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, March 23rd, 2011 
There are serious arguments for and against military intervention in Libya. Michael Walzer, who is often wise about such things, makes a strong case against. Yet, on balance I am convinced by Conor Foley’s minimalist position for intervention, presented at Crooked Timber. Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s decision to defend his power by any means necessary led Foley to conclude: “I think that the situation in Libya immediately prior to the intervention passed the threshold test … the UN is fulfilling its responsibility to protect the lives of civilians in this case.” Of course, there are many other situations where such intervention on these grounds should be called for, perhaps too many, but in Libya it became possible and has been immediately successful in the stated goal of reducing civilian deaths.
But there is also a greater hope that as their lives are being defended, Libyans will contribute to the democratic transformation of 2011. If Qaddafi would be defeated, a new democratic force may emerge, what Benoit Challand calls, “the counter-power of civil society.” My heart hopes it will be so. My head suggests extreme caution. Looking closely at the way the big political issues are enacted in everyday interactions, what I call “the politics of small things,” suggests why the caution is called for, but also where there may be hopeful signs.
There is a dilemma. For a successful democratic transition, the Libyans must develop a capacity to say more than no or yes to the dictator, as I put it while speculating about the Egyptians and when studying the Central Europeans. Yet, war generally doesn’t provide the time or place for this to happen. Opposition to the perceived evil source requires resolute action, disciplined unity of purpose. Democratic life is based upon diverse opinions and judgments and civil contestation. War generally does not support such civility and diversity. Significantly, Qaddafi’s regime worked against this throughout its history.
In politics the means are the ends. . . .
Read more: Libya and the Mission Creep I Hope For
By Sergio Tavolaro, March 22nd, 2011 
Sergio Tavolaro is a sociology professor at the University of Brasília. He presents today his account of Barack Obama’s recent visit to his country. -Jeff
It is nearly impossible to speak of one Brazilian approach to the United States, given Brazil’s domestic diversity and complexity. Indifference, suspicion, admiration, anger and interest can all be found among Brazilian citizens when invited to reflect upon the North American giant partner. Yet, by and large, it is fair to say that President Obama’s first visit to Brazil was widely welcomed. More than a mere encounter of two heads of states simply complying with protocol obligations, the meeting had a great deal of symbolic charge. To be sure, the historical importance of Obama’s rise to the presidency was greatly appreciated by Brazilians from the very beginning. As the rhetoric tone of his campaign was closely followed by the local media, a significant portion of Brazil’s public opinion shared the excitement experienced by Americans when Obama was sworn in.
But many additional ingredients contributed to the success of this diplomatic event. To begin with, as President Dilma Rousseff herself highlighted, one should not underestimate the privilege of witnessing the encounter between the first US Afro-American president and the first Brazilian woman president – especially if one remembers how filled with racial problems both societies are and the subordinate status of women in Brazil.
National Congress of Brazil, Brasília © Rob Sinclair | Wikimedia Commons
Besides, there are signs indicating that Brazil – US relations are now changing in a positive way, in comparison with the recent past. One ramification of President Lula’s independent and bold foreign policy was a distancing between the two countries on a varied set of issues. The divergence over the recent political crisis in Honduras was just one manifestation of mounting diplomatic rifts, which also included different views regarding Venezuela, Bolivia and, for sure, Iran’s nuclear policies. The US reluctance to . . .
Read more: President Obama in Brazil: A View from Brazil
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, March 16th, 2011 
Yesterday, I opened my report on budget problems at my local community center. I showed that our local concerns were very much connected to global problems. Now I turn to how people took responsibility for the problems, or more accurately did not directly confront them, revealing a seamy side of politics as usual in America. The key figure is Town Supervisor Paul Feiner.
The supervisor was passionate about only one issue: the fact that there were inaccuracies on the unsigned flier announcing the meeting about proposed budget cuts of the Theodore D. Young Community Center. In Feiner’s response to the A&P closings in the primarily African American surrounding community and when it came to the budget of the center, he was the cool bureaucrat. He denounced the anonymous author of the flier, revealing real anger. On the defensive, he declared that the rumor that the center would close was absolutely not true. I was relieved. But when it came to details about the center’s budget, he was evasive, without passion, using clichés to deflect responsibility, stoking the anger of the community.
Feiner and the Town Board’s basic position: because of revenue short falls, the town was faced with a choice, there had to be either significant tax increases or program cuts to balance the budget. In order to rationally meet the challenge, the board was asking all the relevant commissioners to outline possible ways to cut programs. I am sure there was a target provided, but from the public discussion I didn’t catch it. The impact of proposed cuts would be weighed against their impact on programs by the board in the fall. Feiner emphasized that no program was being targeted and that the goal was to deliver lean and efficient good governance. Strikingly, he used procedure to evade answering any question about specific programs.
The seniors were particularly concerned about their group trips. The swim teams emphasized how important swimming was to them. A former director of . . .
Read more: Institutionalized Racism?
By Andrew Arato, March 7th, 2011 
As we have seen in my first post, Egypt is now at a critical juncture. I make this judgment not with enduring cultural patterns, civilizational characteristics, religious fundamentalism, and the like, in mind, but with some fundamental facts about regime change and revolutions.
Under a dictatorship in its modern form, revolutions rarely can bring about a democratic transformation. Either they , as mere coups, will usher in only governmental change, or old or new elites, enabled by transitional dictatorships, will be able to renew authoritarian rule in new forms, under new legitimating ideologies. Since 1989, an immense amount of literature has shown that it is negotiated transitions based on compromise among many actors that have the best chance of establishing the guarantees require by constitutional government, that represents the actual threshold of regime change beyond dictatorships. It is very important that in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the East Germany and South Africa oppositions demanded not the fall of a government, but comprehensive negotiations concerning regime change: its timing, rules, procedures, and guarantees. The fall of governments of Gierek, Kadar, Zhivkov, Honnecker and P.W. Botha, was only a first step in each, an inner ruling party affair.
In Egypt, while there were important opposition groups they did not demand to jointly negotiate with the government. Even worse, a couple of them negotiated one by one with Mubarak’s men (the Wafd Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, or the latter’s adult branch). The initially clever strategy of celebrating the military also backfired: it partially re-legitimated the regime. When Mubarak’s last speech surprised the crowds, leaders like ElBaradei openly called for a military coup without claiming any role for the opposition in the transitional arrangements.
Yet it is not impossible or too late even now to graft a negotiating process onto the revolutionary coup. This happened even in Iraq, where the attempt of the . . .
Read more: Revolution in Egypt?
By Andrew Arato, March 7th, 2011 
Andrew Arato offers in this post and the next his critical insights into the events in North Africa and the Middle East. He starts with reflections on the theoretical discussions on and historical experiences of revolutions applied to the situation in Egypt He concludes with a close analysis of the factors inhibiting revolutionary changes and the possibility of overcoming these in Egypt. The posts draw on his distinguished career studying the history of social and political thought, legal and constitutional theory, the historical problems of revolutions and radical transformations. – Jeff
We certainly said good-bye to revolutions too soon, between 1989 and 1995. Yes, we were right Romania was the exception, and the series of changes of regime certainly did not represent revolutions. Yet the fact that the latter were represented finally and definitively by the journalistic cliche as the “Revolutions of 1989” demonstrates the tremendous power of the topos. Central European ideologists of the radical right could still rely on it in the canard of the betrayed revolution, and the demand of a new revolution reversing the agreements of 1989-1990. It is indisputably true that both the revolutionary imaginary, and the empirical possibility of revolutions belong to the concept of modernity. This does not mean, however, that the critique of revolutions we inherit from Burke, Hegel, most brilliantly Tocqueville, and, despite all her sympathy, Hannah Arendt has lost their meaning and importance.
In the following analysis of the “revolutions” of 2011 I use the term revolution, from the legal point of view, as a type of internal change that transforms a system according to rules or practices other than those of the systems. This was Hans Kelsen’s definition, who could not however distinguish coups and revolutions as a result. Thus, I add that successful revolutions, unlike coups, change a system’s organizational core or its principle of organization. Better still, following Janos Kis, we should introduce a new principle of legitimacy. Either way, an illegal act of changing rules is necessary if not sufficient for a . . .
Read more: The Return of Revolutions
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, March 4th, 2011
 Hypocrisy and human rights, hate speech, and the surprising role of young people and their social media in the world historic changes occurring in North Africa and the Middle East have been our issues of the week at DC. While I know, from my ability to track levels of readership, each of the posts attracted more or less an equal degree of our readers’ attention, it was hate speech that stimulated an interesting discussion, interesting on its own terms, but also in the way it sheds light on the other posts of the week.
Gary Alan Fine is not worried about hate speech. Most of us are. He thinks it excites and draws attention, and that its negative effects are overdrawn. Iris “hates hate speech,” but thinks that we have to learn to live with it. It is the price we pay for living in a democracy. Rafael offers a comparative cultural approach, agreeing that in English hate speech may not be as pernicious as it may first seem. But he, nonetheless, reminds us that sometimes hate and its speech have horrific consequences, citing the case of a local preacher “insisting on an idea of building a memorial reminding folk that Mathew Sheppard is now in hell.” Rafael underscores that sometimes hate speech and aggressive actions are intimately connected, sometimes, even, hate speech functions as an action. Esther looks at the problem from a slightly different angle. She thinks that concern about civil discourse is a good idea, but asks: “shouldn’t we be thinking, talking and doing some more about cause and prevention of violent outbursts by lost individuals?” While, Michael is more directly concerned with hate speech and action, maintaining that it undermines democratic culture. “Hate frequently destroys the cultural underpinnings needed for democratic processes to emerge and thrive.” He then expresses his concern about the hate speech in Madison, echoing those who were most concerned with the relationship between hate speech and the massacre in Tucson.
© Akiramenai | Wikimedia Commons
And then, in a sense, the Supreme Court joined our discussion, supporting . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Civility Matters
By Benoit Challand, March 3rd, 2011 
The great changes in the Middle East didn’t come from the usual sources. Religion was not nearly as important as many expected. Class was far from the center of the action, as youth stole the show. And internationally backed civil society was not nearly as important as Western donors would hope. In fact, Western aid may have been more of the problem than the solution.
Religion
The Islamic movement, in particular in Egypt, is in a state of relative weakness, very much connected to economic change. When Egypt embarked on structural adjustment programs and started privatizing its state-owned enterprises in the late 1970s, the economic reform was a façade, masking the enrichment of a handful of high-ranking officials who were the only ones who could do business. In the process, state and welfare services were dismantled, and the regime encouraged non-governmental charities. In this context, the Ikhwan (the Arabic name for Muslim Brotherhood) was able to build many private mosques and new charitable organizations, leading to significant social support. Yet, in the 1990s, when the Ikhwan started running for elections (culminating with the 20% of the seats in 2005), it paid the price of this political engagement by having no choice but to let people close to the government gradually take control over their charities. The movement became complexly connected to the regime and began to lose its credibility, increasingly so when it refused to boycott the 2005 elections and, more recently, because it took on positions that were viewed negatively by the viewpoints of the lower classes. One example is the Ikhwan’s condemnation of the strikes of Muhalla al-Kubra in the textile sector in 6 April 2008. Similar anti-union positions from Islamists are documented in Gaza and Yemen, creating a rift between the working class and the Islamists. Interestingly, in his 2005 book the sociologist Patrick Haenni, calls this new strand of Muslim businessmen ‘the promoters of Islam of the Market.’
As a result, the Muslim Brotherhood has become both politically and socially a much more fragile actor than it was in the past. Only the lack of alternative opposition and . . .
Read more: 2011: Youth, not Religion / Spontaneity, not Aid
By Benoit Challand, March 2nd, 2011 
Benoit Challand, the author of Palestinian Civil Society: Foreign Donors and the Power to Promote and Exclude (2009), is currently Visiting Associate Professor at the New School for Social Research. He is affiliated with the University of Bologna where he has been teaching Middle Eastern politics since 2008. He has been Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute at the Center on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding in Geneva, working on its Religions & Politics project. -Jeff
We are witnessing the emergence of the counter-power of civil society in the wave of revolts in the Middle East and North Africa. It is embedded in nationalist revolts in which youth and trade unions have played and very well may continue to play important roles. I choose the phrase ‘counter-power of civil society’ to describe the ongoing developments in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya, and also the little covered protests in the Palestinian territories, because I believe that there is more to civil society than its organized form. There is more to civil society than NGOs and the developmental approach which imagines that the key to progress is when donors, the UN or rich countries, give aid to boost non-state actors, in particular NGOs, in the “developing south.” In fact, overlooking this, leads to a complete misunderstanding of present transformations.
In western social theory, civil society is described by Hegel and Tocqueville (among others) as opposition to the State, or as an intermediary layer of associations between family and the State. This has been the counter – power in the Middle East and North Africa. Thus, when we read in this Sunday’s New York Times that “Libya has no civil society,” it is not only a conceptual error. It makes it impossible to understand what is happening in the region. It’s one thing to say that Libya does not have a national chapter of Human Rights Watch, or a cohort of service-providing NGOs. It is quite another matter to say that Libyan or Tunisian people cannot organize themselves on their own to cover their needs and express . . .
Read more: The Counter-Power of Civil Society in the Middle East
By Gary Alan Fine, March 1st, 2011 
Half a century ago, Tom Lehrer, our iconic musical satirist, paid ironic tribute to National Brotherhood Week. In introducing his cracked paean to tolerance, Lehrer asserted that ‘I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that.’ His grievance is all too common. We have resided for some time in an age that frets about hate speech, but when does distaste become hatred? And is sharp and personal talk bad for the polity? The shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords temporarily invigorated the debate over civility, but such moments have a way of not lasting. That was so January. Biting discourse draws attention and motivates both supporters and opponents.
In the immediate aftermath of the Tucson killings, some on the left focused their attention on those in the Tea Party who expressed vivid – and yes, offensive – animus for President Obama. There surely are those whose colorful language hides an absence of mindfulness. But, as conservatives knew well, their time for grievance would come soon. After all, we have a United States senator who titled his literary effort, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. And there was the backbench Democrat from Memphis who compared Republican tactics to Nazi propaganda. Hitler would have George Soros’ wealth if he could receive a tiny royalty for each use of his name or image.
Even more dramatic is the boisterous crowd of teachers on the mall in Madison, Wisconsin. Protesters are fighting for collective bargaining rights, and in the process compare their newly elected governor, Scott Walker, to Hosni Mubarak and worse. Others will judge the justice of the Badgers’ cause, but who has taught these demonstrators about the villains of history? By the way, as an Illinois resident, I welcome the fleeing Democratic state senators and urge them to pay our newly increased income tax, part of which will go to teachers’ pay.
The question is how concerned should we be with Governor Walker’s and President Obama’s detractors? What is hate speech? Is it just . . .
Read more: Hate Speech or Biting Political Provocation?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 23rd, 2011 
Alexis de Tocqueville thought, as I observed in an earlier post, that after the grand principled politics of the earliest years of the Republic, American parties and politics would be about minor issues. About dividing up the spoils, not about the definition of what democracy is and how it should be enacted. His important insight was to distinguish between two different forms of political contestation. He correctly noted that American politics would be mostly about dividing the spoils, resting upon a general consensus about fundamental principles. But what he missed is that fundamental conflicts have a way, episodically, of reappearing, sometimes quite unexpectedly, and even with a slight of hand. Such is our present situation.
This became clear to me as I was surfing the web this morning and came across a post by Jonah Goldberg at the National Review online. He openly made the move from petit to grand politics in Tocqueville’s sense.
“The protesting public-school teachers with fake doctor’s notes swarming the capitol building in Madison, Wis., insist that Gov. Scott Walker is hell-bent on “union busting.” Walker denies that his effort to reform public-sector unions in Wisconsin is anything more than an honest attempt at balancing the state’s books.
I hope the protesters are right. Public unions have been a 50-year mistake.”
Goldberg argues against the very idea of public employee unions, going a step further than the aggressive Governor of Wisconsin. For Goldberg it is all about the principle, as he supports a politician who must get on with practical political concerns. As Max Weber would put it, Walker uses an apparent ethic of responsibility, fiscal balance, to hide his ultimate ends; attacking the public employees’ unions. Walker governs responsibly, moving toward the principled goal.
But there is more than meets the eye in Goldberg’s essay, which is framed around the idea that unions in the private sector fought a valiant and historic struggle against capitalist exploitation, while public unions just stand for stealing from the public coffers. On the page where his post appears, . . .
Read more: Libertarianism versus Workers’ Rights in Wisconsin
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