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Subject: Tamildom & The Ideological War Within the West
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2002 09:08:58 +0530
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From: "Bala Pillai"
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Anpulla Thamil Innaiya Nanbargale,
In view of below, the Tamildom notion is a pioneer in transnational
progressivism. Let's join together and lead the world in soaring past
Fukuyama.
That with the Tamildom notion, history is not only *not* dead -- that all
that Man has done so far, when seen against ant colonies, real-life or the
wired kind, has been to prepare for the starting line!
How else can we explain the fact that ants with no government, no religion
and no bank account to blame, have no problems with food and shelter and
Man, especially Tamils are drowned by it? Given that we have creative minds
that ants don't, is not ant-state, the more plausible starting point?
Let us prove that there are galaxyloads of space for creativity, therefore
history-making, in the future.
anpudan../bala
bala@...
Asia Times Online
30 May 2002
The ideological war within the West
By John Fonte
(With permission from the Foreign Policy Research Institute)
Nearly a year before the September 11 attacks, news stories
provided a preview of the transnational politics of the future.
In October 2000, in preparation for the United Nations conference
against racism, about 50 American non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) called on the UN "to hold the United States accountable
for the intractable and persistent problem of discrimination".
The NGOs included Amnesty International-USA (AI-USA), Human
Rights Watch (HRW), the Arab-American Institute, the National
Council of Churches, the NAACP, the Mexican-American Legal
Defense and Educational Fund, and others. Their spokesman stated
that their demands "had been repeatedly raised with federal and
state officials [in the US] but to little effect. In frustration
we now turn to the United Nations." In other words, the NGOs,
unable to enact the policies they favored through the normal
processes of American constitutional democracy - the Congress,
state governments, even the federal courts - appealed to an
authority outside of American democracy and its constitution.
At the UN conference against racism, which was held in Durban,
South Africa, two weeks before September 11, American NGOs
supported "reparations" from Western nations for the historic
transatlantic slave trade and developed resolutions that
condemned only the West, without mentioning the larger traffic in
African slaves sent to Islamic lands. The NGOs even endorsed a
resolution denouncing free market capitalism as a "fundamentally
flawed system".
The NGOs also insisted that the US ratify all major UN human
rights treaties and drop legal reservations to treaties already
ratified. For example, in 1994 the US ratified the UN Convention
on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), but attached
reservations on treaty requirements restricting free speech that
were "incompatible with the constitution". Yet leading NGOs
demanded that the US drop all reservations and "comply" with the
CERD treaty by accepting UN definitions of "free speech" and
eliminating the "vast racial disparities ... in every aspect of
American life" (housing, health, welfare, justice, etc).
HRW complained that the US offered "no remedies" for these
disparities but "simply supported equality of opportunity" and
indicated "no willingness to comply" with CERD. Of course, to
"comply" with the NGO interpretation of the CERD treaty, the US
would have to abandon the constitution's free speech guarantees,
bypass federalism, and ignore the concept of majority rule -
since practically nothing in the NGO agenda is supported by the
American electorate.
All of this suggests that we have not reached the final triumph
of liberal democracy proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama in his
groundbreaking 1989 essay.
Post-September 11
In October 2001, Fukuyama stated that his "end of history" thesis
remained valid: that after the defeat of communism and fascism,
no serious ideological competitor to Western-style liberal
democracy was likely to emerge in the future. Thus, in terms of
political philosophy, liberal democracy is the end of the
evolutionary process. There will be wars and terrorism, but no
alternative ideology with a universal appeal will seriously
challenge the principles of Western liberal democracy on a global
scale.
The September 11 attacks notwithstanding, there is nothing beyond
liberal democracy "towards which we could expect to evolve".
Fukuyama concluded that there will be challenges from those who
resist progress, "but time and resources are on the side of
modernity".
Indeed, but is "modernity" on the side of liberal democracy?
Fukuyama is very likely right that the current crisis with
radical Islam will be overcome and that there will be no serious
ideological challenge originating outside of Western
civilization. However, the activities of the NGOs suggest that
there already is an alternative ideology to liberal democracy
within the West that has been steadily evolving for years.
Thus, it is entirely possible that modernity - 30 or 40 years
hence - will witness not the final triumph of liberal democracy,
but the emergence of a new transnational hybrid regime that is
post-liberal democratic, and in the American context,
post-constitutional and post-American. This alternative ideology,
"transnational progressivism", constitutes a universal and modern
world view that challenges both the liberal democratic
nation-state in general and the American regime in particular.
Transnational progressivism
The key concepts of transnational progressivism could be
described as follows:
The ascribed group over the individual citizen. The key political
unit is not the individual citizen, who forms voluntary
associations and works with fellow citizens regardless of race,
sex, or national origin, but the ascriptive group (racial,
ethnic, or gender) into which one is born.
A dichotomy of groups: Oppressor versus victim groups, with
immigrant groups designated as victims. Transnational ideologists
have incorporated the essentially Hegelian Marxist "privileged
versus marginalized" dichotomy.
Group proportionalism as the goal of "fairness". Transnational
progressivism assumes that "victim" groups should be represented
in all professions roughly proportionate to their percentage of
the population. If not, there is a problem of
"underrepresentation".
The values of all dominant institutions to be changed to reflect
the perspectives of the victim groups. Transnational progressives
insist that it is not enough to have proportional representation
of minorities in major institutions if these institutions
continue to reflect the world view of the "dominant" culture.
Instead, the distinct world views of ethnic, gender, and
linguistic minorities must be represented within these
institutions.
The "demographic imperative". The demographic imperative tells
us that major demographic changes are occurring in the US as
millions of new immigrants from non-Western cultures enter
American life. The traditional paradigm based on the assimilation
of immigrants into an existing American civic culture is obsolete
and must be changed to a framework that promotes "diversity"
defined as group proportionalism.
The redefinition of democracy and "democratic ideals".
Transnational progressives have been altering the definition of
"democracy" from that of a system of majority rule among equal
citizens to one of power-sharing among ethnic groups composed of
both citizens and non-citizens. James Banks, one of American
education's leading textbook writers, noted in 1994 that "to
create an authentic democratic Unum with moral authority and
perceived legitimacy, the pluribus [diverse peoples] must
negotiate and share power". Hence, American democracy is not
authentic; real democracy will come when the different "peoples"
that live within America "share power" as groups.
Deconstruction of national narratives and national symbols of
democratic nation-states in the West. In October 2000, a UK
government report denounced the concept of "Britishness" and
declared that British history needed to be "revised, rethought,
or jettisoned". In the US, the proposed "National History
Standards" recommended altering the traditional historical
narrative. Instead of emphasizing the story of European settlers,
American civilization would be redefined as a multicultural
"convergence" of three civilizations - Amerindian, West African
and European. In Israel, a "post-Zionist" intelligentsia has
proposed that Israel consider itself multicultural and
deconstruct its identity as a Jewish state. Even Israeli Foreign
Minister Shimon Peres sounded the post-Zionist trumpet in his
1993 book in which he de-emphasized "sovereignty" and called for
regional "elected central bodies" - a type of Middle Eastern EU.
Promotion of the concept of post-national citizenship. In an
important academic paper, Rutgers Law Professor Linda Bosniak
asks hopefully, "Can advocates of post-national citizenship
ultimately succeed in decoupling the concept of citizenship from
the nation-state in prevailing political thought?"
The idea of transnationalism as a major conceptual tool.
Transnationalism is the next stage of multicultural ideology.
Like multiculturalism, transnationalism is a concept that
provides elites with both an empirical tool (a plausible analysis
of what is) and an ideological framework (a vision of what should
be). Transnational advocates argue that globalization requires
some form of "global governance" because they believe that the
nation-state and the idea of national citizenship are ill-suited
to deal with the global problems of the future.
The same scholars who touted multiculturalism now herald the
coming transnational age. Thus, Alejandro Portes of Princeton
University argues that transnationalism, combined with
large-scale immigration, will redefine the meaning of American
citizenship.
The promotion of transnationalism is an attempt to shape this
crucial intellectual struggle over globalization. Its adherents
imply that one is either in step with globalization, and thus
forward-looking, or one is a backward anti-globalist. Liberal
democrats (who are internationalists and support free trade and
market economics) must reply that this is a false dichotomy -
that the critical argument is not between globalists and
anti-globalists, but instead over the form global engagement
should take in the coming decades: will it be transnationalist or
internationalist?
Transnational progressivism's social base: A post-national
intelligentsia
The social base of transnational progressivism constitutes a
rising post-national intelligentsia (international law
professors, NGO activists, foundation officers, UN bureaucrats,
EU administrators, corporate executives and politicians.) When
social movements such as "transnationalism" and "global
governance" are depicted as the result of social forces or the
movement of history, a certain impersonal inevitability is
implied. However, in the 20th century the Bolshevik Revolution,
the National Socialist revolution, the New Deal, the Reagan
Revolution, the Gaullist national reconstruction in France and
the creation of the EU were not inevitable, but were the result
of the exercise of political will by elites.
Similarly, transnationalism, multiculturalism, and global
governance, like "diversity," are ideological tools championed by
activist elites, not impersonal forces of history. The success or
failure of these values-laden concepts will ultimately depend
upon the political will and effectiveness of these elites.
Human rights activists
A good part of the energy for transnational progressivism is
provided by human rights activists who consistently evoke
"evolving norms of international law". The main legal conflict
between traditional American liberal democrats and transnational
progressives is ultimately the question of whether the US
constitution trumps international law or vice versa.
Before the mid-20th century, traditional international law
referred to relations among nation-states. The "new international
law" has increasingly penetrated the sovereignty of democratic
nation-states. It is in reality "transnational law". Human rights
activists work to establish norms for this "new international
[ie, transnational] law" and then attempt to bring the US into
conformity with a legal regime whose reach often extends beyond
democratic politics.
Transnational progressives excoriate American political and legal
practices in virulent language, as if the American liberal
democratic nation-state was an illegitimate authoritarian regime.
Thus, AI-USA charged the US in a 1998 report with "a persistent
and widespread pattern of human rights violations", naming the US
the "world leader in high-tech repression". Meanwhile, HRW issued
a 450-page report attacking the US for all types of "human rights
violations", even complaining that "the US border patrol
continued to grow at an alarming pace".
Anti-assimilation on the home front
Many of the same lawyers who advocate transnational legal
concepts are active in US immigration law. Louis Henkin, one of
the most prominent scholars of international law, calls for
largely eliminating "the difference between a citizen and a
non-citizen permanent resident". Columbia University
international law professor Stephen Legomsky argues that dual
nationals holding influential positions in the US should not be
required to give "greater weight to US interests in the event of
a conflict" between the US and the other country in which the
American citizen is also a dual national.
Two leading law professors (Peter Spiro from Hofstra and Peter
Schuck from Yale) complain that immigrants seeking American
citizenship are required to "renounce all allegiance" to their
old nations. Spiro and Schuck even reject the concept of the
hyphenated American and endorse what they call the "ampersand"
citizen. Thus, instead of traditional "Mexican-Americans" who are
loyal citizens but proud of their ethnic roots, they prefer
post-national citizens, who are both "Mexican and American", who
retain "loyalties" to their "original homeland" and vote in both
countries.
University professor Robert Bach authored a major Ford Foundation
report on new and "established residents" (the word "citizen" was
assiduously avoided) that advocated the "maintenance" of ethnic
immigrant identities and attacked assimilation as the "problem in
America". Bach later became deputy director for policy at the INS
in the Clinton administration.
The financial backing for this anti-assimilationist campaign has
come primarily from the Ford Foundation, which made a conscious
decision to fund a Latino rights movement based on
advocacy-litigation and group rights. The global progressives
have been aided - if not always consciously, certainly in
objective terms - by a "transnational right". It was a determined
right-left coalition led by libertarian Stuart Anderson, who
currently holds Bach's old position at the INS, that killed a
high-tech tracking system for foreign students that might have
saved lives on September 11. Whatever their ideological or
commercial motives, the demand for "open borders" (not simply
free trade, which is a different matter altogether) by the
libertarian right has strengthened the left's
anti-assimilationist agenda.
The EU as a stronghold of transnational progressivism.
The EU is a large supranational macro-organization that embodies
transnational progressivism. Its governmental structure is
post-democratic. Power in the EU principally resides in the
European Commission (EC) and to a lesser extent the European
Court of Justice (ECJ). The EC, the EU's executive body,
initiates legislative action, implements common policy and
controls a large bureaucracy. It is composed of a rotating
presidency and 19 commissioners chosen by the member-states and
approved by the European parliament. It is unelected and, for the
most part, unaccountable.
A white paper issued by the EC suggests that this
unaccountability is one reason for its success, "The essential
source of the success of European integration is that [it] is ...
independent from national, sectoral, or other influences." This
"democracy deficit" represents a moral challenge to EU
legitimacy.
The substantive polices advanced by EU leaders on issues such as
"hate speech", "hate crimes", "comparable worth" for women's pay
and group preferences are considerably more "progressive" in the
EU than in the US. The ECJ has overruled national parliaments and
public opinion in nation-states by ordering the British to
incorporate gays and the Germans to incorporate women in combat
units in their respective military services. The ECJ even struck
down an English law on corporal punishment, declaring that
parental spanking is internationally recognized as an abuse of
human rights.
Two Washington lawyers, Lee Casey and David Rivkin, have argued
that the EU ideology that "denies the ultimate authority of the
nation-state" and transfers policy-making from elected
representatives to bureaucrats "suggests a dramatic divergence"
with "basic principles of popular sovereignty once shared by both
Europe's democracies and the United States".
In international politics, in the period immediately prior to
September 11, the EU opposed the US on some of the most important
global issues, including the International Criminal Court, the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Land Mine Treaty, the Kyoto
Global Warming Treaty, and US policies regarding missile defense,
Iran, Iraq, Israel, China, Cuba, North Korea and the death
penalty.
On most of these issues, transnational progressives in the US -
including politicians - supported the EU position and attempted
to leverage this transnational influence in the domestic debate.
At the same time, the Bush administration on some of these issues
had support in Europe, particularly from parts of the British
political class and public, and elements of European popular
opinion (for example on the death penalty.)
After September 11, while some European nation-states sent forces
to support the US in Afghanistan, many European leaders have
continued to snipe at American policies and hamper American
interests in the war on terrorism. In December 2001, the European
parliament condemned the US Patriot Act (the bipartisan
anti-terrorist legislation that passed the US Congress
overwhelmingly) as "contrary to the principles" of human rights
because the legislation "discriminates" against non-citizens.
Leading European politicians have opposed extraditing terrorist
suspects to the US if those terrorists would be subjected to the
death penalty. Even a long-time Atlanticist, like the Berlin
Aspin Institute's Jeffrey Gedmin, questions the "basis for a
functioning alliance" between the US and Western Europe.
Both realists and neoconservatives have argued that some EU, UN
and NGO thinking threatens to limit both American democracy at
home and American power overseas. As Jeanne Kirkpatrick puts it,
"Foreign governments and their leaders, and more than a few
activists here at home, seek to constrain and control American
power by means of elaborate multilateral processes, global
arrangements and UN treaties that limit both our capacity to
govern ourselves and act abroad."
Conclusion
Talk in the West of a "culture war" is somewhat misleading
because the arguments over transnational vs national citizenship,
multiculturalism vs assimilation and global governance vs
national sovereignty are not simply cultural, but ideological and
philosophical. They pose Aristotle's question, "What kind of
government is best?"
In America, there is an elemental argument about whether to
preserve, improve and transmit the American regime to future
generations or to transform it into a new and different type of
polity. We are arguing about "regime maintenance" vs "regime
transformation".
The challenge from transnational progressivism to traditional
American concepts of citizenship, patriotism, assimilation and
the meaning of democracy itself is fundamental. If our system is
based not on individual rights (as defined by the US
constitution) but on group consciousness (as defined by
international law); not on equality of citizenship but on group
preferences for non-citizens (including illegal immigrants) and
for certain categories of citizens; not on majority rule within
constitutional limits but on power-sharing by different ethnic,
racial, gender and linguistic groups; not on constitutional law,
but on transnational law; not on immigrants becoming Americans,
but on migrants linked between transnational communities; then
the regime will cease to be "constitutional", "liberal",
"democratic" and "American" in the understood sense of those
terms, but will become in reality a new hybrid system that is
"post-constitutional", "post-liberal", "post-democratic" and
"post-American".
This intracivilizational Western conflict between liberal
democracy and transnational progressivism accelerated after the
Cold War and should continue well into the 21st century. Indeed,
from the fall of the Berlin Wall until the attacks of September
11, the transnational progressives were on the offensive.
Since September 11, however, the forces supporting the
liberal-democratic nation state have rallied throughout the West.
In the post-September 11 milieu there is a window of opportunity
for those who favor a reaffirmation of the traditional norms of
liberal-democratic patriotism. It is unclear whether that segment
of the American intelligentsia committed to liberal democracy as
it has been practiced on these shores has the political will to
seize this opportunity. In Europe, given elite opinion, the case
for liberal democracy will be harder to make. Key areas to watch
in both the US and Europe include immigration-assimilation
policy; arguments over international law; and the influence of a
civic-patriotic narrative in public schools and popular culture.
Fourth dimension?
I suggest that we add a fourth dimension to a conceptual
framework of international politics. Three dimensions are
currently recognizable. First, there is traditional realpolitik,
the competition and conflict among nation-states (and
supranational states such as the EU). Second is the competition
of civilizations, conceptualized by Samuel Huntington. Third,
there is the conflict between the democratic world and the
undemocratic world. My suggested fourth dimension is the conflict
within the democratic world between the forces of liberal
democracy and the forces of transnational progressivism, between
democrats and post-democrats.
The conflicts and tensions within each of these four dimensions
of international politics are unfolding simultaneously and
affected by each other, and so they all belong in a comprehensive
understanding of the world of the 21st century. In hindsight,
Fukuyama is wrong to suggest that liberal democracy is inevitably
the final form of political governance, the evolutionary endpoint
of political philosophy, because it has become unclear that
liberal democracy will defeat transnational progressivism. During
the 20th century, Western liberal democracy finally triumphed
militarily and ideologically over National Socialism and
communism, powerful anti-democratic forces, that were, in a
sense, Western ideological heresies. After defeating its current
anti-democratic, non-Western enemy in what will essentially be a
material-physical struggle, it will continue to face an
ideological-metaphysical challenge from powerful post-liberal
democratic forces whose origins are Western, but, which could be
in the words of James Kurth called "post-Western".
(Republished with permission from the Foreign Policy Research
Institute)
