Skip to main content

Home/ openDemocracy/ Group items tagged politics

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
tony curzon price

Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...English

shared by tony curzon price on 06 Apr 07 - Cached
  • To be sure, the desire to live in a modern society and to be free of tyranny is universal, or nearly so. This is demonstrated by the efforts of millions of people each year to move from the developing to the developed world, where they hope to find the political stability, job opportunities, health care, and education that they lack at home. But this is different from saying that there is a universal desire to live in a liberal society – that is, a political order characterized by a sphere of individual rights and the rule of law. The desire to live in a liberal democracy is, indeed, something acquired over time, often as a byproduct of successful modernization.
  • The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a “post-historical” world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 06 Apr 07
       
      EU vs. US - post-historical vs. historical.
  • Outside powers like the US can often help in this process by the example they set as politically and economically successful societies. They can also provide funding, advice, technical assistance, and yes, occasionally military force to help the process along.
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 06 Apr 07
       
      How the West can help transition: example, technical assistance - and sometimes military force. But not violent regime change.
  • tony curzon price on 06 Apr 07
     
    Fukuyama: desire to live modern lives not same as desire to live under liberalism ... Yes. Indeed, desire to live under liberalism is _very_ weak. It is part of the phenomenon of liberalism not inspiring a passion, or a civic religion.
Arabica Robusta

The time of the nation: negotiating global modernity | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...n-negotiating-global-modernity

neoliberalism globalization corporate-led foucault postmodernism social movements

shared by Arabica Robusta on 06 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • This depoliticised nature of the contemporary, seen as the conceptual and experiential embodiment of globalised capitalism, consequently poses problems far more significant than the mere survival of the nation-state.
  • Undoubtedly, since the demise of the postmodern epoch in the popular and academic imagination, the acceleration of technological forces in commerce and communication - that have paved the way for increased capital accumulation, exchange and crisis - have only heightened what Foucault and Jameson gesture towards as a lived sensation of pure simultaneity.
  • In opposition to the crisis of the political generated by the false amalgamation of coeval living experiences, we might propose the concept of modernity; a concept that the nation-state might be perfectly situated to help elucidate. On this model, I would argue, modernity can be seen as linked to a increased self-consciousness of a secular conception of one's individual finitude (in the form of mortality but also one's personal and societal limits), and the collective negotiation of this issue via a democratic politics.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Undoubtedly some of the impotence of movements such as Occupy can be attributed to the same false utopianism of a borderless world of cyber-communities and multinational companies, whose liberating effects have been a far cry from lived reality.
  • However, the heterotopian potential of the nation-state is vividly problematised through the realisation that twentieth or twenty-first century globalisation, divorced and independent of the influence of varying nation-states, is in fact a fallacy.
  • The question then becomes: how to conceive of the self-determining impulse of modernity - here encapsulated in nationalism - in the form of a  socio-political body that would be capable of maintaining that impulse through preserving the logic of democracy, and foster the requisite representative power in opposition to the power of transnational capitalism?
  • Borders are no longer simply dotted lines between nation-states, but often manifest themselves as ‘spontaneous’ entities such as security and health check zones all over major social and transit spaces, particularly in Europe and the West.
  • But how to conceive of a democratic entity powerful enough to appropriate the multiplicity and heterogeneity of globalised borders, that would also be able to withstand, what Balibar outlines as "the risk of being a mere arena for the unfettered domination of the private centres of power, which monopolise capital, communications and, perhaps also, arms"?
  • If this modern or modernist kernel is latent within the nation-state, then a significant reconfiguration is required since the language of nationhood and nationalism is certainly not one of contingent universality. Rather it is one of mythology: mythologies of ethnicity, of genealogy, of autochthony.
  • If we cannot do away with borders, then they must remain out of necessity. This necessity is discrimination. As Nairn rightly argues, "cultures...depend upon conflicts unsustainable without borders". Contrasts and distinctions are internal to any logic of identity, as Balibar similarly suggests; "the very representation of the border is the precondition for any definition". Once identity is philosophically understood as differential and not self-sufficient, globalisation raises a very modernist dilemma. How to make the very diversity (of choices, cultures, of the new) that modernisation and globalisation make possible, resist the paralysing repetitive logic of what Walter Benjamin terms the 'ever-same' (i.e. the temporality of the contemporary)?
  • The mythological language of nationalism asserts an enduring order, paradoxically so inasmuch as the precise origin or origins of any nationalist discourse remain a shrouded mystery. Myth, as structurally detached from historical or circumstantial origin, becomes a vehicle of interpretation and pathos, splitting into a potentially infinite number of manifestations in each 'national' subject (where each standardised narrative is appropriated as a personal one).
  • By arguing the case for global modernity in the form of the nation-state, however, one faces the immediate problem that modernity is almost unthinkable without capitalism (despite any such attempt to render modernity as a democratising force tied to a conception and experience of time).
  • Although the European tradition has established laws and institutions (including the nation-state) that remain significantly flawed, these still provide a democratic logic that guarantees the possibility of revision, of perfectibility, of the future. If the nation-state can embody a heterotopic space that permits identification through processes of willed negotiation and division, guaranteeing the possibility of the present to always be changed, then it might still serve as a tool for resistance.
Dripa B

An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?" | Immanuel Kant (1784) - 0 views

sap.ereau.de/...what_is_enlightenment

Kant enlightenment ***** HumanRights democracy global international politics

shared by Dripa B on 03 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Dripa B on 03 Jan 09
     
    This remains one of the best texts of the permanent struggle for Enlightenment -- values that assert universal human freedom, dignity and equality. Values that include internationalism, participatory and representative democracy based. These values inform our struggleto end of political and social domination of persons and societies globally. - Zackie Achmat
tony curzon price

Zygmunt Bauman: globalisation, politics and Europe Ian Varcoe - openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...zygmunt_Bauman_4488.jsp

intellectuals self-knowledge

shared by tony curzon price on 02 Apr 07 - Cached
  • Reading Bauman helps people to insulate themselves from these false solutions to their difficulties.
  • might say that the problem for people today is how to resist consumer society, to find ways of caring for others, and to find a new politics that is above the nation-state. The globalisation phenomenon requires this if it is to be encountered by humanity in a more balanced form than at present when its negative side predominates over its positive side. The European integration project may offer some guidance.
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 02 Apr 07
       
      The european project as a hope for a better globalisation ... but does it have the right bottom-up legitimacy to be that? is it not too much of an elitist project?
  • The political institutions of this are parliamentary democracy and the public sphere; the former has been eroded and the latter hollowed out.
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 02 Apr 07
       
      This makes me think of Simon Zadek at AccounAbility, who believes that the future of democracy will be found in the accountability of non-state instituions, like business and NGOs. Davos and CSR, not EU and UN.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Bauman is a declared European
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 02 Apr 07
       
      a good description of the Scylla and Charibdys of the EU alternative - dialogue that paves the way between relativism and fundamentalisms
  • tony curzon price on 02 Apr 07
     
    How, I wonder ...
tony curzon price

Chicago Reader | Defending Strauss: University of Chicago philosophy prof Leo Strauss h... - 0 views

www.chicagoreader.com/...leostrauss

strauss

shared by tony curzon price on 08 Sep 07 - Cached
  • “Strauss’s interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end,” Burnyeat argued. “There is much talk in Straussian writings about the nature of ‘the philosopher’ but no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy.”
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 08 Sep 07
       
      Burenat's view of Strauss
  • Strauss said, political philosophy is good for something: “If for no other purpose, at least in order to defend a reasonable policy against overgenerous or utopian thought, we would need a genuine political philosophy reminding us of the limits set to all human hopes and wishes.”
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 08 Sep 07
       
      Strauss in a good light on politics
  • “I was certainly struck by how very skeptical he was for the prospects of establishing democracy in Germany,” Tarcov says. In “Re-education,” Strauss doubted that a just government in Germany could be constructed after the war, at least not if the effort were left to the Allies. “A form of government which is merely imposed by a victorious enemy will not last,” Strauss predicted. “Only Germans, only Germans who remained in Germany and shared all the misery of Nazi rule and of defeat, can do it. Only they will be able to speak a language understandable to post-Hitlerian Germany.”
tony curzon price

Getting democracy into focus | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...focus_2944.jsp

democracy

shared by tony curzon price on 14 Aug 07 - Cached
  • The one element clear right through representative democracy’s advance across the world has been the centrality of popular rejection of autocratic effrontery, often exhilarating at the time but in retrospect a transitory pleasure. The structure of modern representative democracy (the form of state now called by that name) does not provide a clear model for any community to rule itself in freedom, let alone in reliable serenity and prosperity. What it provides is a practical basis through which to refuse to be ruled unaccountably and indefinitely against your will. Less steadily and on far less egalitarian terms, it also provides a framework through which to explore together what people should and should not attempt to do as a community. Virtually none of the elements of an answer to that question can come from democracy as an idea. Almost all have to be pieced together arduously from somewhere else.
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 14 Aug 07
       
      Churchillian defense of democracy ... but the rest is pieced together from elsewhere
  • Crudely speaking, the political appeal of democracy lies in its claim to realise political equality. (So, soberly speaking, does its potential political menace.)
tony curzon price

Britain's future: Labour candidates respond | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/ture_labour_candidates_respond

shared by tony curzon price on 10 Jun 07 - Cached
  • Britain’s future: Labour candidates’s view
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 10 Jun 07
       
      Anthony - nice to see this was picked up by the observer - see: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/constitution/story/0,,2099735,00.html
    • Anthony Barnett
      Anthony Barnett on 10 Jun 07
       
      Yes, they wanted exclusive first right and I gave it them. What you can see in the paper edition but not on the web, it that they put the story at the top of the page on the right hand column. Positioning is much more than half the story in a newspaper. Its layout tells people what to read. Is it the same onthe web?
  • I am agnostic on the need for a written constitution, because of the power it hands to the judges.
  • so I let's have a national debate.
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 10 Jun 07
       
      "let's have a national debate" ... this seems to be a today-program, motherhood-apple-pie mantra. what is this national debate? where is it to be had? on radio4?
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 10 Jun 07
       
      see Cruddas below - getting a bit more specific on what a "national debate" might mean
    • Anthony Barnett
      Anthony Barnett on 10 Jun 07
       
      Benn's remark is rhetoric. Harmann above has thought about the need for mechanisms for ensuring public respect. The issue is a defining one. A wonderful constitution produced from Brown's inside pocket will be scorned as the gimmick of a 'Scot'. A less well worded one that emerges from a South African style process which people feel they 'own' could initiate a democratic process. What matters is not that it is written but how it is written!
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • It needs to be relevant to the man or woman in the street as a way of restoring trust in politics.
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 10 Jun 07
       
      is the constitution being asked to do too much. the mistrust of politics has many sources; the real powerlessness of national governments over many of the areas they pretend to rule is one. there is a whole process of resetting expectations that a consittuional convention is unlikely to do. in fact, there is the risk that a constitution will raise hopes that _it_ cannot fulfill, and contribute to the mistrust.
  • Gordon Brown has spoken of the need to empower communities at a local level. Should the decentralization of power and money to local authorities form part of any new ‘constitutional settlement’?
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 10 Jun 07
       
      not one of the candidates raises the BIG RED FLAG of localism: how do you continue to operate redistributive policies when income, wealth and opportunity differences are geographical?
  • evise but not block
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 10 Jun 07
       
      I wonder what "revise but not block" actually means ... if you can revise a piece of legislation out of all shape, that is tantamount to blocking, no? and once the body is elected, does equal legitimacy not entail equal power?
  • We need a public debate
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 10 Jun 07
       
      another public debate ... see above. again - who with? how? and what is the outcome of a "public debate" worth looking at this article: http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-edemocracy/idcard_2537.jsp by sara forsstrom, about the Swedish database ... that goes back to the 17th century. Trustworthy states can have databases; so how do we make the state trustworthy? maybe exchanging access to our personal information with access to its private information?
Peter Neis

Rick Perry's Stem Cell Treatments - 0 views

www.politicolnews.com/ick-perrys-stem-cell-treatment

Rick Perry-stem cell Treatments Texas on stem cells FDA funding Embryo research Pres. Obama's Executive Orders politics of medicine.

shared by Peter Neis on 28 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Peter Neis on 28 Aug 11
     
    The controversy is more one of pharmaceutical interests v.s. cures for disease rather than political beliefs and in this case it is a case of what's right and what is terribly wrong with our current government under President Obama.
Susan Thur

Demography is Destiny | Mother Jones - 0 views

motherjones.com/...demography-destiny

GOP Voters

shared by Susan Thur on 13 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Susan Thur on 13 Jul 10
     
    Research suggests that a socialization process occurs that leads young adults to hold onto the party identification and opinions that they developed in their formative years. This is especially true with partisan identification. Party identification is the single strongest predictor of how people vote and tends to stick with individuals once they form an attachment early in their political lives. Even if the Republican Party eventually softens its views on social issues, it won't make much difference once the Millennials have reached age 30 and their party identification has hardened. If Teixeira is right, by the time this process is over an entire cohort of voters will be heavily pro-Democratic for the rest of their lives. As it happens, 2010, like 2002, might not be such a great year to make this prediction: a brutal recession and the usual midterm blues are likely to produce big Republican gains this November. In the long term, though, the longer the Republican Party continues to rely on its intolerant, ultraconservative base for support, the more likely they are to write their own obituary for 2020 and beyond.
tony curzon price

BBC NEWS | UK | Murdoch: I decide Sun's politics - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...7110532.stm

advertising macarthur montpelerin

shared by tony curzon price on 27 Nov 07 - Cached
  • Rupert Murdoch decides the political line of the Sun and News of the World, but not the Times and the Sunday Times, he has told a parliamentary committee.
Patrick Müller

Byzantium: always an Empire, never a Nation | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...lways_an_empire_never_a_nation

byzantium opendemocracy

shared by Patrick Müller on 14 May 08 - Cached
    • Patrick Müller
      Patrick Müller on 14 May 08
       
      It does indeed sound a lot like the European Union, and not by accident. But actually it makes more sense to compare the Union to the Holy Roman Empire than to Byzantinium as in contrast to the later, they both lack an imperial center, a metropolis like Rome for the Roman Empire or Constantinople for Byzantinium, but are federal political structures. A comparison that has actually been made in the political science, for example by Jan Zielonka (Europe as Empire. The Nature of the Enlarged European Union). For some reason I cannot comment on the article ... ("please specify a valid author)
Arabica Robusta

Tibet, Palestine and the politics of failure | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ne-and-the-politics-of-failure

independence opendemocracy palestine postcolonial sovereignty tibet

shared by Arabica Robusta on 12 May 08 - Cached
  • The victims of "post-colonial sequestration", by contrast, failed to make it past the barrier of independence and international recognition. Instead they fell into a state of half-recognised, but contested, existence. After the war of 1948-49 the "Palestine question" disappeared almost entirely from the international scene, only to re-emerge with the defeat of the Arab armies in the six-day war of 1967. Tibet too has undergone long years of neglect in the international arena, punctuated by periodic (and notably near-half-century) reincarnations of interest: the bloody British occupation of Lhasa in 1904-05, the insurrection against Chinese rule and flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959, and now the uprising of March 2008 (see Gabriel Lafitte, "Tibet: revolt with memories", 18 March 2008).
  • Arabica Robusta on 12 May 08
     
    The victims of "post-colonial sequestration", by contrast, failed to make it past the barrier of independence and international recognition. Instead they fell into a state of half-recognised, but contested, existence. After the war of 1948-49 the "Palestine question" disappeared almost entirely from the international scene, only to re-emerge with the defeat of the Arab armies in the six-day war of 1967. Tibet too has undergone long years of neglect in the international arena, punctuated by periodic (and notably near-half-century) reincarnations of interest: the bloody British occupation of Lhasa in 1904-05, the insurrection against Chinese rule and flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959, and now the uprising of March 2008 (see Gabriel Lafitte, "Tibet: revolt with memories", 18 March 2008).
tony curzon price

Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net - 0 views

www.metamute.org/...New-Left-Old-Pessimism

economics

shared by tony curzon price on 14 Oct 07 - Cached
  • In 1988, NLR Editorial Board member Anthony Barnett distracted a disappointed left into the desert of Constitutional Reform to complete the bourgeois revolution with the organisation Charter 88; in 1995 Will Hutton retailed a version of the Nairn-Anderson thesis in his book The State We’re In effectively drafting Tony Blair’s apolitical modernisation agenda.
  • Far from being too theoretical the Review was not theoretical enough. The tendency to manufacture deep sociological explanations for transient events certainly showed literary productivity, but it would be wrong to see that as necessarily representing theoretical work. ‘Theories’ were produced that in the end only echoed contemporary trends, without really criticising them. So between them Anderson and Tom Nairn manufactured the theory that Britain’s political revolution was, unlike its Continental counterparts, incomplete; an argument that became known as the Nairn-Anderson thesis. The idea was that the emerging capitalist class in Britain had done a deal with the old aristocracy to gain influence, leaving the old pre-democratic power structures in place; the inordinate influence of the City of London over the British economy, with its old-Etonian clubbishness, Nairn and Anderson thought, was evidence of the persistence of a ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’.
  • NLR is financially buoyant because of the library subscriptions from American colleges.
Dripa B

A Basic Income for All | Philippe Van Parijs (2000) - 0 views

bostonreview.net/...vanparijs.html

basic.income freedom economics HumanRights

shared by Dripa B on 28 Jun 09 - Cached
  • productivity, wealth, and national incomes have advanced sufficiently far to support an adequate UBI. And if enacted, a basic income would serve as a powerful instrument of social justice: it would promote real freedom for all by providing the material resources that people need to pursue their aims. At the same time, it would help to solve the policy dilemmas of poverty and unemployment, and serve ideals associated with both the feminist and green movements.
  • in 1999, the Alaska Permanent Fund paid each person of whatever age who had been living in Alaska for at least one year an annual UBI of $1,680.
  • By universal basic income I mean an income paid by a government, at a uniform level and at regular intervals, to each adult member of society. The grant is paid, and its level is fixed, irrespective of whether the person is rich or poor, lives alone or with others, is willing to work or not. In most versions–certainly in mine–it is granted not only to citizens, but to all permanent residents.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The idea of the UBI is at least 150 years old. Its two earliest known formulations were inspired by Charles Fourier, the prolific French utopian socialist. In 1848, while Karl Marx was finishing off the Communist Manifesto around the corner, the Brussels-based Fourierist author Joseph Charlier published Solution of the Social Problem, in which he argued for a "territorial dividend" owed to each citizen by virtue of our equal ownership of the nation’s territory. The following year, John Stuart Mill published a new edition of his Principles of Political Economy, which contains a sympathetic presentation of Fourierism ("the most skillfully combined, and with the greatest foresight of objections, of all the forms of Socialism") rephrased so as to yield an unambiguous UBI proposal: "In the distribution, a certain minimum is first assigned for the subsistence of every member of the community, whether capable or not of labour. The remainder of the produce is shared in certain proportions, to be determined beforehand, among the three elements, Labour, Capital, and Talent."
  • It was seriously discussed by left-wing academics such as G. D. H. Cole and James Meade in England between the World Wars and, via Abba Lerner, it seems to have inspired Milton Friedman’s proposal for a "negative income tax."6 But only since the late-1970s has the idea gained real political currency in a number of European countries, starting with the Netherlands and Denmark.
  • Dripa B on 28 Jun 09
     
    If you really care about freedom, give people an unconditional income at a level sufficient for subsistence. Productivity, wealth, and national incomes have advanced sufficiently far to support an adequate UBI. And if enacted, a basic income would serve as a powerful instrument of social justice: it would promote real freedom for all by providing the material resources that people need to pursue their aims. At the same time, it would help to solve the policy dilemmas of poverty and unemployment, and serve ideals associated with both the feminist and green movements.
Arabica Robusta

Democracy and democracy-support: a new era | open Democracy News Analysis - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...nd-democracy-support-a-new-era

democratization fukuyama david held

shared by Arabica Robusta on 29 Mar 09 - Cached
  • The "end of the end of history" has many architects. Today, several states (an increasingly assertive Russia and China in particular) embody alternative political models that have come to challenge any notion of liberal-democratic hegemony; others (such as Venezuela and Iran) experiment with forms of rule that too take them further away from its orbit. These models and forms face many problems of their own, but they may not be quite as unattractive - either to the people of these countries or to many observers around the world - as lingering triumphalists in the west might assume.
  • There has been a tendency to focus the work of democracy-support in very practical ways: toolkits, implementation, strategy and policy. This was and remains essential; but there is also a need to reflect on the underpinnings of these practices in how democracy itself is understood in this new, testing global environment.
  • The dominance of a liberal-democratic conception with an American accent is reflected in the overwhelming predominance of United States institutions, academics, journals - and ideas - in the democracy-support "industry". Again, this is not in itself a problem: all discourses of democracy are grounded in specific social-political contexts and  power-relations. But the current circumstances of the kind described above - authoritarian challenges, stalled democratic transitions, discontent with democracy, deep and growing economic problems - suggest that an expanded understanding of democracy might be a route towards a healthy redefinition of democracy-support.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This is not to advocate a simplistic "mix and match" approach, but to suggest that a creative inclusion of new elements from different sources could contribute to democracy's rethinking from within.
  • For most people, at the heart of democracy is toleration of difference combined with an openness to listen to a plurality of voices and opinions. This makes it more than a little strange that there is so little debate over what democracy can and should mean in relation to democracy-support. The logic here is that democracy-support itself needs to be "democratised" - in part by engaging in continuing dialogue, interaction and learning between communities moving to democracy and those seeking to support these processes.
  • Arabica Robusta on 29 Mar 09
     
    This article is good in that it advocates examination of the many models of democratization/democracy. However, it does not adequately question the terms of the debate, in particularly looking more deeply at how the movement is driven and what the role of corporations and other key exploiters (members of the "capital class"?) is.
M J

e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics » Survey Says: Social Media Doesn... - 0 views

www.epolitics.com/...snt-dominate-u-s-elections-yet

politica Gobierno 2.0 modelo Estadisticas presentación

shared by M J on 12 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • M J on 12 Mar 13
     
    Survey Says: Social Media Doesn't Dominate U.S. Elections…Yet
avinash puli

Why India is still developing? - 0 views

http://avi-mypercept.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/hereditary%20politics

Hereditary politics in India Ignorance Duped by government

started by avinash puli on 03 Jul 12 no follow-up yet
1 - 20 of 40 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page