Critical IR Theory

It has been awhile since I visited their webpage, so I only recently learned that State University of New York (SUNY) Press has posted a pdf of chapter 1 from Democratizing Global Politics (2004), my coauthored book written with Nayef Samhat.

The chapter is "Critical Theory, Habermas, and Internatioanal Relations."


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Journolist: Reading the comments so you don't have to

Daily Caller has been cherry-picking embarrassing emails from thousands (probably tens of thousands) of Journolist emails written over a period of about three years. Publisher Tucker Carlson admits they have to cherry-pick because "a lot of the material on Journolist is actually pretty banal."

Keep in mind that Journolist was an off-the-record listserv that Carlson tried to join ("I can promise you I have no interest in flaming anyone or even debating"), so the leaks are pretty sleazy.

After the Daily Caller hypes the material (frequently on Fox News), the right-wing blogosphere has been referencing these examples as if they reflected the typical conversations of Journolist and the views of the 400 or so members of Journolist.

Daily Caller emphasized one tasteless post from someone working in public radio being unwilling to help if she suddenly confronted a suffering Rush Limbaugh and another from a better-known columnist sneering at NASCAR fans just after the 2008 election results. Suddenly, all list members are guilty-by-assocation. It's not a lot different than the "real America" campaign of 2008.

Clearly, the message seems to be that J-listers are not part of the "real America."

I've read a lot of the right-wing blogs "reporting" on Journolist this past week and have been appalled at how the writers so often generalize from the same few examples -- even when they are pretty weak tea. Fellow former J-lister Kevin Carey explains:

For example, in the course of a long string of Journolist emails about Fox News, a law professor wondered whether the FCC could legally decide not to renew Fox's license. A journalist from Time responded by saying, in essence, "that would be a terrible idea." Nobody mentioned it again. Yet this exchange produced a gigantic 60-point Caller headline: "FOX HUNT: Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News." It was an obvious lie: no journalist, much less journalists, plural, had suggested any such thing.

Much more disturbing, however, are the comments left on these right-wing blog sites. Posters are only too willing to reveal what should happen to non-real Americans.

For example, take a look at a recent FreeRepublic post, which alleged that it had identified 107 J-listers:

MindBender26: At the risk of being called an anti-semite, (which I am the opposite of, I am very pro-Israel), has anyone noticed that this list seems to have a very large percentage of Jewish names?

detective: Thanks for the list. Can we add party affiliation, sexual orientation and a short bio? I have never heard of most of these people and it would be nice to be able to put them in context.

oldbrowser: What is curious is that these are mostly Jewish names with white faces.

Tallguy: I probably could have come up with at least 30 of them right off the top of my head. We're not talking about center-left political writers here... these people are flaming communists.

hosepipe: Look at them.. A whole generation of traitors.

From an American Thinker post:

wbhickok: get all 600 something names of these slimy JournoLists... I'm sure it goes much deeper. This is an impressive list of the old communists and red-diaper babies. But there is more...Lot more will come out and more, and more of these people will be exposed as evil anti-American Marxists that they are.

Syrin: Holy ****ing cow. The grand list of traitors of the state. "Journalists" in favor of censorship. These people should ALL be tried for treason and given the appropriate penalty.

Cynthia: Are any of the names associated with Saturday Night Live? A sad reality, another one, from 2008 is that an unseemly number of people got their news, their NEWS from snl. pathetic. It's as if the masses have had a frontal lobotomy.

rashputin: The companies represented by these people are ignoring so they're actually admitting that they're a single monolithic propaganda machine, not multiple competing organizations.

Pete: Treason.What they have conspired and done is undermine the freedom of the press, and subvert the Constitution. They have conspired and lied to the public, they have broken the trust. Since they have gotten together to defraud the public, they should be prosecuted under the RICO act as a minimum. Treason, or high crimes against the Constitution, seems more appropriate.

From Patterico's Pontifications:

Aaron Worthing: My big takeaway is how much these people sound like the idiots at Daily Kos.

JosephD: This isn’t just scheming to spin the news. This is fascism.

Journolisters have been taken to task for talking privately and sometimes making intemperate comments that seem indefensible (especially when taken out-of-context).

By contrast, these members of the right are willing to make intemperate comments anonymously on public blogs.

I can see why that's so much better [sarcasm -- OFF]. J-listers have been vilified for not publicly rebuking the list members who made dumb remarks. Where are the right-wing blog posts condemning their reader reactions?

There's more vile invective in these few threads than I recall in nearly three years on J-list. Some J-listers strongly disliked some of the views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict held by the publisher of The New Republic, but they didn't really say anything much different on the list than what they were willing to defend in public.

Of course, Journolist occasionally hosted heated debates -- but they were generally civil and genuinely dedicated to what Habermas might call "the forceless force of the better argument."

We've seen nothing made public about the long 2008 primary campaign debate threads about which kind of health care system was needed. And the Hillary Clinton supporters certainly backed their candidate against the lists Obama backers. I'm interested in climate change politics, but even I sometimes felt overwhelmed by long (and well-linked) discussions of the merits of cap-and-trade versus carbon taxes versus regulatory approaches.


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Satire

Here's another nugget for the comedy project. From comedian-turned-Senate candidate Al Franken (MN), as quoted in the Washington Post, December 17, 2007:

"Let me tell you what a satirist does," he says. "A satirist looks at a situation and sees the inconsistencies and hypocrisies and absurdities, and cuts through the baloney and gets to the truth. And I think that's pretty good training for the U.S. Senate. Don't you?"

Long-time readers may recall my interest in the promotion of public dialogue at the global level. My coauthored book was inspired by the social theory of Jürgen Habermas, whose "discourse ethics" aspire to promote consensual truth-seeking and discursive democracy.

Can satire and humor promote truth-seeking in global politics?

I think political theorist Sammy Basu would agree with Franken about the importance of humor, as he has called for acceptance of an "ironic speech situation" (ISS) -- a "speech situation that grants illocutionary validity to humor."

In locating irony under the rubric of humor, I want to split the difference again between Habermas and Rorty. Rorty affirms detailed historical narratives at the expense of Habermasian philosophical meta-narratives. For Rorty, all commitments ought to come unglued privately even as we publicly affirm loyalty to the liberal status quo, whereas with Habermas our parochial private commitments must be abandoned publicly unless they are intersubjectively intelligible and agreeable. The joke, I submit, can fall somewhere in between as a kind of little, public, ironic "shock-narrative."(n73) Humor enables the withholding liberals insist upon, while enriching the public debate democrats affirm. Humorously, one can attempt the self-disclosure of intimate feelings while managing the potential for social disruption.

The ISS is a better regulative ideal inasmuch as it is more likely to result in a just outcome to which the parties involved will feel committed.

Earlier in the paper, Basu writes "Habermas is perhaps the apogee of interlocutory humorlessness."

Put simply, Habermas is skeptical about the discursive value of humor, but Basu and I think that humorists like Franken can make a valuable contribution to political discourse.

I've been thinking about comedy a great deal because satire and farce are integral parts of my film class -- and the next section begins on Monday.


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Montreal

I'm in Montreal, attending the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association. At 8:30 tomorrow morning, I'm the discussant on a panel featuring a number of specialists on international ethics and political philosophy: James Bohman, Molly Cochran, Nayef Samhat and Martin Weber.

The papers mostly focus on the development of a transnational public sphere, with some leaning to a Habermasian perspective and others to Dewey's pragmatism.

Let's hope I have something interesting to say about their papers.

Montreal is a great locale to talk about transnational identity and communication. And one of the papers discusses the role of the internet in fostering deliberative democracy.

Unfortunately, to fly to Montreal, I had to land in Cleveland.

Actually, I've got nothing against Cleveland, it's just that the weather caused our little regional jet to sit on the runway for 90 minutes, return to the terminal for fuel, and then undergo a second round of de-icing. We were on the plane for four hours, even though the flight itself was only about 60 or 70 minutes.

My hotel has free high speed internet access, though it isn't the fastest connection I've ever had. Still, I should be able to do some blogging over the next few days.

Stay tuned for ISA updates!

Habermas on the Bush Doctrine

I'm still working on my prospectus for "The Bush Doctrine and Norms of Deliberation," a paper for a conference I'm attending in DC in a few weeks.

Thursday, I found an interesting article in Constellations: an international journal of critical and democratic theory (September 2003) by Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas that addresses the Bush Doctrine and war on terror.

Surprise: Habermas thinks that America's new preemptive war doctrine creates deliberative requirements. He also offers a lethal critique, pointing out that its reliance upon unilateral use of military is bound to be illegitimate -- even if some advocates claim that they are helping to democratize the world.

First, by making new claims about self defense, the Bush Doctrine creates the need for public justification. This snippet is from a translation on-line at Interactivist Info Exchange:

this connection of hegemonic unilateralism with defense against an insidious danger mobilizes the additional argument of self-defense.

At the cost however of then being saddled with a new burden of proof. The American administration had to seek to convince world public opinion of contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida.

We know how that turned out.

A few paragraphs later, Habermas added this thought about the audacity of America speaking for the world on matters of shared security and democracy:

There's no way of avoiding the question of the justification of the war in general. The decisive controversy revolves around the question whether justification in the light of international law can and should be replaced by the unilateral global politics of a self-empowering hegemon.

Some of the criticisms offered by Habermas focus on practical concerns, while others are moral and legal:

A nation which reduces all options to the dumb alternatives of war and peace runs up against the limits of its own organizational powers and resources. It also leads the negotiation with competing powers and foreign cultures in false channels and pushes the coordination costs to dizzying heights.

Even if this hegemonic unilateralism were realizable it would still have side-effects which would, by its own criteria, be morally undesirable. The more that political power manifests itself in the dimensions of military, secret service and police, the more does it undermine itself -- the politics of a globally operating civilizing power -- by endangering its own mission of improving the world according to liberal ideas.

In the United States itself, the permanent regime of a "War President" is already undermining the foundations of the rule of law. Quite apart from the practiced or tolerated torture methods beyond its borders, the war regime is not only denying the prisoners of Guantnamo Bay the legal rights conferred on them by the Geneva Convention. It confers powers on the security services which encroach on the constitutional rights of its own citizens.

However, the best argument against the regime-toppling element of the Bush Doctrine is its failure to deliver on its own premises. After pointing out that Kuwait's "liberation" did not include democratization, the German scholar concludes,

"It is the very universalistic core of democracy and human rights itself which forbids its universal propagation by fire and sword....'Values' -- including those for which one could expect global recognition -- don't hang in the air; they become binding only in the normative order and practices of specific cultural forms of life....even the good hegemon (presuming for itself trusteeship in the name of the common good) has no way of knowing whether the actions it claims to be in the interests of others is indeed equally good for all.

There is no meaningful alternative to the further cosmopolitan development of an international system of law in which the voices of all concerned are given an equal and reciprocal hearing."

Habermas can make for difficult reading, but I think his point is pretty clear. And spot on.