Talking to strangers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The language used by politicians and its social effects have been of long‐standing interest to social anthropology. Opinion‐formers on both sides of the North Atlantic have recently argued that this language can inflame tensions and reinforce divisions. In the UK, the discussion has centred on relations between a white majority and a Muslim minority, while in the US, in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of a Democratic Congresswoman in Arizona, it has focused on the risk of political language provoking violence. The antidote to inflammatory language is often assumed to be moderation, defined as a (self‐) disciplined engagement with divided publics. Drawing on the insights of Danielle Allen's Talking to strangers, here I suggest that moderation might be re‐imagined, not as a vague commitment to centrism and the ‘middle ground’, but as a powerful resource for citizens and communities to challenge the ideological excesses of politics, religion and the market in the twenty‐first century.     

East and West in Jewish nationalism: conflicting types in the Zionist vision?

ABSTRACT. This article analyses the ethnic and civic components of the early Zionist movement. The debate over whether Zionism was an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement or a Western‐civic movement began with the birth of Zionism. The article also investigates the conflict that broke out in 1902 surrounding the publication of Herzl's utopian vision, Altneuland. Ahad Ha'am, a leader of Hibbat Zion and ‘Eastern’ cultural Zionism, sharply attacked Herzl's ‘Western’ political Zionism, which he considered to be disconnected from the cultural foundations of historical Judaism. Instead, Ahad Ha'am supported the Eastern Zionist utopia of Elchanan Leib Lewinsky. Hans Kohn, a leading researcher of nationalism, distinguished between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ nationalist movements. He argued that Herzl's political heritage led the Zionist movement to become an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement. The debate over the character of Jewish nationalism – ethnic or civic – continues to engage researchers and remains a topic of public debate in Israel even today. As this article demonstrates, the debate between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Zionism has its foundations in the origins of the Zionist movement. A close look at the vision held by both groups challenges Kohn's dichotomy as well as his understanding of the Zionist movement.     

President Obama at mid‐term

This article provides an analysis of President Obama at mid‐term. It looks at the mid‐term elections from the perspective of the political issues that informed the debate, the implications of Republican control of the House of Representatives for both legislation and relations between the administration and Congress, and the policy areas where cooperation and possible progress is possible. The article looks at the Tea Party movement as a collection of single issue and multi‐issue political groups ranging from ‘nativists’ to Christian fundamentalists to the eclectic and unprecedented combination of fiscal and social conservatives seen at Glen Beck's ‘honoring America’ event at the Washington Monument. This broad movement may be seen as a classical revitalization movement, not unlike those described by Anthony F. C. Wallace. It is opposed by another ‘revitalization movement’ namely the ‘American renewal’ promised by Obama as he ran for office in 2008. These countervailing narratives—in effect two different versions of America, one reflecting the Tea Party broadly conceived and the other reflecting Obama's ‘promise’—are seeking political traction among independents. The implications of this struggle are momentous. The prevailing narrative will frame policy going forward on a range of domestic issues and on selected foreign policy questions, which will include the present debate on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia and the upcoming debate on China, which will have even further reaching effects. Finally, this article describes Obama's struggle to frame his policy successes and the ensuing debate in a favourable light. His opponents have sought to limit his progress by presenting him as ‘the other”, an effective but destructive technique that could have longer term effects on the domestic political discourse. However, the author remains an optimist; he believes, together with 50 per cent of Americans, the president is likable, logical and gives a good speech, and that he will be re‐elected in 2012.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 5. October 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 5 Front cover TERRORISM IN NORWAY At the Blue Stone Monument in the centre of Bergen, Norway's second city, a young couple mourns the 77 Norwegians killed by a right‐wing extremist in Oslo and Utøya on 22 July 2011. A cut‐and‐paste manifesto published on the internet and sent to his contacts all over Europe revealed that mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik targeted government buildings in Oslo and the Labour Party youth camp at Utøya in an attempt to instigate a civil war in Europe, aimed at effacing the presence of Muslims in Norway and Europe. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues in his editorial in this issue, Norwegian social democrats were a target of Breivik's violent ire because he believed them to have paved the way for a Muslim ‘conquest’ of Europe. Also in this issue, Sindre Bangstad's account of media representations of Muslims in Norway points to a widespread sense among mainstream Norwegian media of a radical incompatibility between so‐called ‘Norwegian values’ and ‘Islamic values’, especially in the field of women's and gay rights. As Norwegians struggle with the aftermath of the terrible events of 22 July, these profoundly problematic exclusionary religious and ethnic categories may face a challenge from the other Norway, a place of compassion and solidarity in suffering. Back cover THE GREEK CRISIS Right, a poster satirically depicts Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou as the IMF's favourite employee. Under increasing pressure from international institutions – especially the IMF and the European Union (of which it is a member) – Greece has been experiencing an upsurge in street clashes between protesters and police, as well as acts of petty crime. At least since 2008, already rampant stereotypes about the Greeks have greedily fed on the images of unbridled violence. Greece was once so crime‐free that the national newspapers reported acts of pickpocketing in Athens; today, such a scenario seems the very stuff of nostalgic dreams. But does the current situation really mean, as the media repeatedly suggest, that Greece has become a violent country? In this issue, Michael Herzfeld – who was first tear gassed and then mugged in Athens in July – argues that such claims are a gross misrepresentation and indeed are part of the problem. Greece – which certainly has acted with financial insouciance in the past – has now become the punchbag for the more generic frustrations of its European partners and of international finance. In the resulting vicious circle, its financial woes threaten to drag the whole European Union into final collapse. Meanwhile, severe austerity measures and rising unemployment have provoked simmering unrest, while competition for jobs feeds anti‐immigrant resentment (especially as Greece has agreed not restrict the onward travel of undocumented migrants, thereby increasing their numbers). In the resultant stereotyping, Greece is treated as a naughty child. Its young people, many of them well‐educated and painfully aware of the corruption that has hitherto protected a privileged few, face a precarious employment environment. Under that pressure, Herzfeld argues, traditional forms of violence and ideas about reciprocal moral obligation now shape the debates that are agitating the country and the world. Anthropologists, he suggests, can help correct the often misleading media representations of what is happening and why.     

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

ABSTRACT. Discussions of globalisation and identity have focused on the renewed relevance of various post‐national frameworks of belonging, including the Muslim umma. This article argues against the idea that the umma has come to constitute a primary referent in contemporary Muslim debates about identity or a form of globalised political consciousness. Furthermore, the advent of ‘post‐Islamism’ means that Islamic political mobilisation rarely seeks to establish alternative political orders within the container of the nation‐state. However, this does not mean that we are seeing a reaffirmation of the nation in Muslim contexts today. Rather, transnational Muslim solidarities represent an intermediate space of affiliation and socio‐political mobilisation that exists alongside and in an ambivalent relationship with the nation‐state. I point to two different socio‐religious movements that, without positing the primacy or exclusivity of the umma/Islamic identity, express discrepant visions of the relationship between Islam and the nation: (1) the Fethullah Gülen movement, which serves simultaneously as the vehicle for a particular vision of neo‐Ottoman Turkish nationalism and a critique of the Kemalist national order; and (2) the neo‐Salafist movement, read here as an effort to embed conceptions of public morality and accountability within the discursive tradition of orthodox Islam rather than the institutional framework of modern polity.     

The death of the right‐to‐die campaigners (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The ‘right‐to‐die’ or assisted suicide debate in the UK has recently been dominated by high‐profile litigation which has brought to public attention stories of individual suffering. The most recent case is that of Tony Nicklinson who, as a result of his permanent and total paralysis which he said made his life ‘intolerable’, wanted the courts to allow a doctor to end his life. Only six days after a Judicial Review refused his request, Tony died of ‘natural’ causes. This article compares the presentation by the media of Tony's requested death with his actual death and discusses what this reveals more generally about the way in which the right‐to‐die debate is presented to the public. It argues that in a politicised debate in which the personal stories of the disabled‐dying are given airtime because of their didactic or symbolic potential, actual death becomes less important than the rights‐rhetoric surrounding death.     

Decentralization,the State and Conflicts over Local Boundaries in Northern Ghana

Decentralization projects, such as that initiated by the Rawlings government in Ghana at the end of the 1980s, create a political space in which the relations between local political communities and the state are re‐negotiated. In many cases, the devolution of power intensifies special‐interest politics and political mobilization aiming at securing a ‘larger share of the national cake’, that is, more state funds, infrastructure and posts for the locality. To legitimate their claims vis‐à‐vis the state, civic associations (‘hometown’ unions), traditional rulers and other non‐state institutions often invoke some form of ‘natural’ solidarity, and decentralization projects thus become arenas of debate over the boundaries of community and the relationship between ‘local’ and national citizenship. This article analyses one such debate, in the former Lawra District of Ghana's Upper West Region, where the creation of new districts provoked protracted discussions, among the local political elite as well as the peasants and labour migrants, about the connections between land ownership and political authority, the relations between the local ethnic groups (Dagara and Sisala), and the relevance of ethnic versus territorial criteria in defining local citizenship.     

Byron to D'Annunzio: from liberalism to fascism in national poetry, 1815–1920

ABSTRACT. From Byron's death at Missolonghi in 1824 to D'Annunzio's capture of Fiume for Italy in 1919, the nationalism of universal liberalism and independence struggles changed, in literature as in politics, to cruel dictatorial fascism. Byron was followed by a series of idealistic fighter‐poets and poet‐martyrs for national freedom, but international tensions culminating in World War I exposed fully the intolerant, brutal side of nationalism. D'Annunzio, like Byron, both a major poet and charismatic war leader, was a key figure in transforming nineteenth‐century democratic nationalism into twentieth‐century dictatorial fascism. The poet's ‘lyrical dictatorship’ at Fiume (1919–20) inspired Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922, with far‐reaching political consequences. The poet became the dangerous example of a Nietzschean Übermensch, above common morality, predatory and morally irresponsible. This article shows how the meaning of nationalism was partly determined and transformed by poets, illustrating their role as ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’.     

Walking the Middle of the Peace Road? The Emergence of JCall in France

On 3 May 2010, a ‘Call to reason’ (Appel à la raison) was presented to the European Parliament in Brussels by a number of prominent figures from European Jewish political and intellectual classes, launching JCall, which is supposedly the European version of the US J Street. JCall explicitly positions itself as pro-Israel on one hand but against the Israeli state's occupation and increased settlement of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, on the other hand. The ‘reason’ it calls for is thus a negotiated two-state settlement to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the organisation urges EU governments to apply pressure on both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to this end. This article looks at JCall within the French context, first in distinction to J Street in the USA, with which JCall shares a political position but not organisational links, and second in relation to the broader French political debate about Jewishness, Muslimness and the Middle East. Criticised by the right for its supposed disloyalty to Israel and even ‘anti-Semitism’, and by the left for its non-support of boycott, divestment and sanctions and its ongoing support of the Israeli state, JCall at first appears as somewhat middle-of-the-road in the French context. It also, from this writer's point of view, regrettably lacks a strong female presence or gendered perspective. It has, however, emerged as a serious political voice in the debate over the Middle East and could be less of a lightweight in the French political battles over Israel and Palestine than it may have first appeared.     

Heart of darkness reinvented? A tale of ex‐soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article presents the contemporary case of two Norwegian ex‐soldiers sentenced to death for murder, espionage and mercenary activity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It analyses the wider context of the historical roots of Norwegian engagement in the Congo (now DRC) as well as the mass‐mediated discourses centring around the tropes of a Conradian ‘Heart of darkness’. Further, using the insights of Johannes Fabian's seminal work on exploration, ethnography and representation (2000), it argues that contemporary Norwegian discourses on the Congo are steeped in the tradition of travelogues. Secondly, also drawing on Fabian, it argues that by representing the DRC as a topos ‐ a space without a place ‐ these discourses uncritically reproduce notions of decontextualised radical alterity.     

Looking ‘The Gift’ in the mouth: Russia as donor (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

While the Soviet Union was a significant donor of international development aid, since the 1990s, a generation of Russians has experienced the subject position of ‘recipient’ in the global political economy. However, following its G8 presidency in 2006, Russia officially signalled its intention to (re‐)emerge as an aid donor. Should the Russian government's efforts to join the global community of donors be understood as a defence mechanism against what Mauss called the ‘wounding’ experience of being treated as a perpetual recipient? International development aid is seen here as a cultural phenomenon whose underlying assumptions are both challenged and affirmed by the arrival of ‘emerging donors’ such as Russia.     

Jeremy Bentham,the French Revolution and political radicalism

An unresolved debate in Bentham scholarship concerns the question of the timing and circumstances which led to Bentham's ‘conversion’ to democracy, and thus to political radicalism. In the early stages of the French Revolution, Bentham composed material which appeared to justify equality of suffrage on utilitarian grounds, but there are differing interpretations concerning the extent and depth of Bentham's commitment to democracy at this time. The appearance of Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and other essays on the French Revolution, a new volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, containing definitive texts of Bentham's writings at this crucial period, offers an opportunity to reassess this debate. First, Bentham's most radical proposals for political reform came not in the so-called ‘Essay on Representation’ composed in late 1788 and early 1789, as has traditionally been assumed, but in his ‘Projet of a Constitutional Code for France’ composed in the autumn of 1789, where he advocated universal adult (male and female) suffrage, subject to a literacy test. Second, it may be doubted if the very question as to whether Bentham was or was not a sincere convert to democracy is particularly helpful. Rather, it may be better to see Bentham as a ‘projector’ during this period of his life. Third, the nature of Bentham's radicalism was very different at this period from what it would become in the 1810s and 1820s, for instance in relation to his commitment to the traditional structures of the British Constitution. Having said that, his attitude to the British Constitution remained complex and ambivalent. At his most radical phase, in the autumn of 1789, he advocated wide-ranging measures of electoral reform while at the same time harbouring aspirations to be returned to Parliament for one of the Marquis of Lansdowne's pocket boroughs. To conclude, it was, arguably, the internal dynamic of Bentham's critical utilitarianism, rather than the events of the French Revolution, which was ultimately responsible for pushing him into a novel form of radical politics.     

Cronies,economic crime and capitalism in Putin's sistema

The books included in this review article are essential for the understanding of what I call Putin's sistema—the governance model that originated in the Soviet system but has transformed and adapted to global change. Each book tackles, from a different angle, the issues of Russia's transition and suggests ways to describe its political consequences. The books all attempt to identify some underlying logic or organizing force in a Russian society that has emerged through weak institutions. Although I join the authors in their criticisms of the ‘transition paradigm’ and its ‘opening‐breakthrough‐consolidation of democracy’ formula, transformations of the Soviet sistema seem to resonate with the ‘opening‐breakthrough‐consolidation of capitalism’. Perestroika can be seen as an ‘opening’ in shaking the foundations of sistema; Yeltsin's era as a ‘breakthrough’; and Putin's regime as the ‘consolidation’ of capitalism but with its distinct characteristics.     

Youth and the revolution in Egypt (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The 2011 popular uprising that led to the overthrow of the Egyptian regime was initiated by groups of engaged ‘internet youth’. In this editorial I offer some personal reflections on the shift in political consciousness among Egypt's urban middle‐class youth, and on the discourse about generations that has unified Egyptians during the momentous events currently sweeping the Arab world. Whereas for members of my generation, the ‘stability’ of the Egyptian regime connoted comforts and opportunities, for today's Egyptian youth, it had come to signify no prospects for the future.     

Parties in Parliament in the 18th Century: The Demolition of Robert Walcott and its Consequences*

The failure of Robert Walcott's attempted ‘Namierisation’ of Queen Anne's house of commons in the 1950s is now an accepted historiographical fact. Scholars working on late Stuart politics inevitably dismiss Walcott's work as misguided and misleading, and instead take as a given the existence of a two‐party structure as delineated by the standard authority on the subject, Geoffrey Holmes. This article returns to the controversy over ‘party’ in the 1960s, which reached a climax in 1967 with the publication of Holmes's magnum opus and J.H. Plumb's Ford Lectures. The purpose is not to revisit the debate, which was decided conclusively at the time, but to explore the context in which Walcott and his critics were writing; more specifically the connection between Walcott's work and the approach to 18th‐century political history pioneered by Sir Lewis Namier. Using private correspondence between the principals, it argues that Walcott did not properly follow Namier's methods, and was identified as a Namierite largely because Namier was unwilling, for personal reasons, to disown him. In the long run, this reluctance proved damaging, accelerating the decline in Namier's reputation in the 1960s and the shift towards different forms of political history.     

Scholarly Authority and Lay Mobilization: Yusuf al‐Qaradawi's vision of da‘wa, 1976‐1984

The late 1970s and early 1980s were a propitious yet challenging time for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, as its elites sought to define the movement's priorities in the face of new opportunities to spread their call (da‘wa). The debate over preaching, while one of strategic assessment, also involved a negotiation of intellectual hierarchy: Should laymen lead Egypt's oldest Islamist organization, or should scholars? In contrast to previous studies that focus on how laymen led the Brotherhood's return to grassroots preaching, this article reintegrates scholars into the story of da‘wa by focusing on the organization's most prominent ‘ālim, Shaykh Yusuf al‐Qaradawi, and his vision of institution‐based preacher education and extra‐institutional activism. Drawing on three books written by Qaradawi on this topic between the mid‐1970s and early 1980s, this article casts lights not only on this Islamist scholar's claim to religious authority as he sought to mold the Brotherhood, but also on the ways in which projects of mass mobilization – whether grassroots preaching or the reform of state‐sponsored educational curricula – have transformed scholarly claims to authority more broadly.     

The house gun: White writing,white fears and black justice (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

One way of understanding the Pistorius case is through the powerful writings of white South African authors such as Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer's anticipatory post‐apartheid novel, The house gun, in which she imagined a scenario similar to the one played out in the Pistorius trial where white fears and black justice met in the courtroom. South Africa is not unique. The mobilization of white peoples' fear of black or brown ‘intruders’ has infected other divided nations, like the United States and Israel. Here the social and architectural construction of ‘white’ settler or settler‐like special enclosures fortified by the legal right to self‐defence with private weapons has reproduced a colonial ‘paranoid ethos’ and a dangerous denial of the violence that is nested like a coiled rattlesnake from within their own segregated and hypervigilant enclosures.     

'Homo Sacer' out of left field: communist "slime" as bare life in 1930s and Second World War Sweden

This article maps ways in which radical left‐wing politics in 1930s and Second World War Sweden were conceived in medico‐biological and eugenic terms that expressed strong dehumanizing sentiments. The article engages Agamben's and Foucault's thinking on ‘biopolitics’ and ‘biopower’, and extensively exemplifies dehumanizing discourse as deployed by leading Social Democratic politicians, leading figures of government within the police and military, as well as by editors of both right‐wing and Social Democratic press. Ways in which individuals labelled ‘Communists’ were spatially managed in terms of extensive surveillance, registration, detainment planning and forms of incarceration are addressed. I further discuss state measures that may be seen as elements of a state of exception, some measures implemented against ‘Communists’, and others against individuals deemed to have undesirable characteristics seen to be hereditary. In employing Agamben's notion of ‘inoperosity’ in a discussion of a state paradigm of social productivity, eugenic measures in the building of the Swedish welfare state are then related to the dehumanizing framing of ‘Communists’. In conclusion, conditions for regaining a place in the body politic are briefly addressed. The article's focus on ways in which the ethnic and racial same was dehumanized within a democracy on political grounds results from a conscious effort to complement studies of dehumanization as related to colonialism, dictatorial regimes as well as identity politics.     

Piero Gobetti and the Liberal Revolution in Italy

Abstract

Piero Gobetti, who died at an early age in 1926 after a severe beating by Fascist squadristi, is one of the most remarkable figures in twentieth‐century Italian culture. A writer and thinker with deep political commitment, Gobetti launched the reviews and journals during the political crisis in Italy between 1918 and 1925 which provided a meeting point for the otherwise dispersed forces of the Italian Left. The republication of his essay ‘The Liberal Revolution. An Essay of the Political Struggle in Italy’ ‐ the fifth edition since it first appeared in 1924 — has reopened the debate on Gobetti and provides an opportunity to consider Gobetti's ideas outside the context of the often politically motivated interpretations that have been placed on them.