----------------------------------------------------
REFLECTIONS
Inventory of ideas, collected during closing forum on 5 July 2004 (a write-up by
Robert)
Based on Bastiaan's and my own notes, I attempt to give a summary of the ideas,
commentaries, suggestions, etc. that were voiced during the closing forum of the
2004 CASA meeting. I cannot but notice that the ordering structure that I apply
follows again the dichotomy of practical vs. theoretical... but so be it.
This CASA meeting
In general, all present agreed that the basic idea of CASA – to make people
from different orientations come together and create better links between them –
was a very good one, and had also been achieved.
However, the success led to a problem: some of the sessions were felt to have
been stuffed with too many workshops or presentations, and subsequently had to
be broken up too early – possibly fruitful discussions had to be terminated
prematurely. Similarly, the program itself was quite dense, forcing participants
to choose one session and miss out on others.
On the other side, it was variously noticed that participants themselves were
prone to certain restrictions, not always able to transgress the barriers in
their own heads. Although discussions were undoubtedly open, self-censoring
seemed to cut short some arguments that could possibly be had. In some
instances, agreement should rather be argued than taken for granted. Again, this
is endangered by temporal constraints, but higher specificity of topics might
help (more on that later).
Although no outright PC was enforced, a kind of post-Freudian PC seemed to hold
– in this mind frame, what is not therapeutic would not require intention. This
might indicate an unconscious academic glass ceiling, created synergetically by
the fact that most participants were from academia – in particular the local
activist community appeared to be involved, and involve themselves, only
marginally (more on this double issue at later points, again).
In this way or another, some participants regretted a lack of collective
theorizing.
After this CASA meeting
For the aftermath of the CASA 2004 meeting, it was commonly felt that
results and thoughts prompted by it should be documented. A WIKI space was
generally felt to be a useful start, but the possibility of a reader or some
other form of hardcopy publication should not be dismissed. A summary of the
meeting in general and of the final forum in particular should be published, as
a possibility to create publicity and connect to those who weren't there. A CASA
meet-up during the ESF workshop in Bergen in spring 2005 would help to spread
the word, as well. Participants agreed that they should stay in touch after CASA
2004, and not just for evaluation purposes.
On a footnote, Julius Nil's radio show on July 25 may be considered as a kind of
soundtrack for this first meeting.
Future CASA meetings
Inspiring though the CASA 2004 meeting was for all involved, a mere
repetition would of it probably be boring. Some suggestions for future meetings:
• video: create video footage of workshops, for a media library
• organizers: as far as practically possible, an international organizing crew
would be desirable
• iconography: the poster image of the 2004 meeting was criticized. Suggestions:
less similarism, more minimalism, more aesthetics
• connection matters:
o a central point of contact to relax, sit and drink coffee together would be a
good thing to have (cf. the bar at the Barcelona conference) – the spontaneous
development of the registration desk into an info desk was one step into that
direction
o have a science fair kind of event where specific projects can present
themselves and their work (aka poster session)
o have a bulletin board for all kind of internal messages
o the Fishbowl – a mystery to both Bastiaan and me
• location issues: the university environment might have imposed certain types
of behavior; a different environment might help to break down some of the
barriers in our heads (see above). At the same, it would be a good thing if we
could have more small groups.
• time and program issues: Although everybody agreed that the length of the CASA
2004 meeting was just about right for a first, it was as much agreed that future
meetings should either be scheduled for a longer period of time overall, or with
a program less dense, or even both; the guiding idea being a better coordination
of workshops. And maybe one shouldn't start quite as early in the day. This
might be helped by sending out invitatory e-mails very early, to get early
promises of participation and figure out probable time requirements.
• contents issues: The CASA 2004 meeting had a good variety of topics, and this
variety should undoubtedly be retained. Suggestions were made, however, to
increase either the specificity of topics or their audience: on one side,
workshops might discuss more specific projects; on the other side, one part of a
meeting could contain concentrated topical gatherings on central issues like
gender or race, attended by all present, thus focusing everybody's brainpower to
the matter at hand. To promote either, better use could be made of the mailing
list: issues could be presented there, discussions and initial responses could
be had via e-mail, and the results presented at the CASA meeting. Openness will
remain an important feature, at any rate: open spaces to develop new things, and
also openness of speech: controversies are fruitful, after all, and should be
sought (see above).
• forum format: Some of the suggestions mentioned above could be considered to
apply actually to forums: why not have forums that are topical (e.g. the war in
Iraq) and/or on very specific contents? On the other hand, would that not
reintroduce authoritative structures to a format that was crafted to do without
them? Another problem of the forum format seemed to be its size, and it remains
to be considered whether it might be wiser to have forums in smaller groups in
the future.
Academia and Activism – the story continues...
Predictably, the CASA meeting promoted some thought about the connection
between academia and activism. Most noticeably (and as mentioned above), there
seemed to be some difficulties with the reception of CASA in the Amsterdam
activist community: publicity seems to have been either not in the right places,
or too theoretical; the program itself was interesting and attractive, though,
but a little late; and several alternatives seem to have been preferred over
"going to a conference."
The problem of connecting activism and academia thus persists, and actually the
two groups almost appear to have accepted the split already. To a certain
degree, this also seems to be perceived as a problem of space: it might be
helpful to offer the non-academic side a space to speak up and develop a theory
(which would require the academic side to step back from a certain arrogance
about theory-making). Or maybe choose a different space, outside academia which
organizes itself around theory, thus perpetuating its discourse. However, this
might be too simplistic a claim of "academia=bad, activism=good" – this type of
polarization undermines mutual respect. Any strategy that sees "us" going
"there", or "them" coming "here", only reproduces the dichotomy. And maybe the
dichotomy itself is based on language, and thus the clearest in an Anglosaxon
context: non-Anglosaxon discourses appear to have far less of it. In this sense,
an analysis of the academia/activism discourse, its words, labels, other
phenomena, might be rather useful.
Self-reflexivity should not paralyze us, though, but give us some space to open
up. Nothing is wrong with the notion of activist researchers; why not be one?
Or, on another pragmatic note, has anyone ever asked an activist group what kind
of research they'd need? Researches into something that activist groups do not
have time to research into themselves might be quite fruitful.
In all this debate, however, it turns out that a third group is usually
forgotten, despite always being involved with theory in some way or another:
bureaucracy, which (just for example) typically provides a kind of grounding
context for academics. On the whole, however, we find that bureaucrats may not
only use the theories of activists and academics, but also misuse or even abuse
them – a power about which there is not enough detailed information.
In the long run: maybe there is no solution. We are just ourselves, and we do
both. So we might be well advised to learn from one another, no matter on which
side of the "divide" definitions place any of us.
----------------------------------------------------
REFLECTIONS:
Notes about CASA from EEF, in German
Hallo!
Am vergangenen Wochenende (2. bis 5. Juli 2004) war ich in Amsterdam auf einer
sehr interessanten Veranstaltung, der Cultural Analysis Summer Academy (CASA).
Ich habe dort als Mensch unheimlich viel vom Konzept und der Ausgestaltung
gelernt. Ich habe es als ziemlich gut gestalteten Freiraum erlebt, wo jeder
nicht nur die Möglichkeit hatte, sondern gebeten wurde, mit Ideen zu kommen und
seine Arbeit oder seine Gedanken vorzustellen. Forscher und Lernende innerhalb
und außerhalb von Institutionen, politisch Aktive und Theoretiker, alle
möglichen Kombinationen dieser Identitäten kamen zusammen,
Menschen aus unterscheidlichen Ländern von unterschiedlichen Kontinenten mit
unterschiedlichen Wohnorten. Die Präsentationen der lokalen Amsterdamer
Polit-Initiativen war auch sehr interessant, wenn es auch schön gewesen wäre,
noch mehr Initiativen woandersher zu sehen. Hier konnte man als Mensch alles
gleichzeitig sein, und musste nicht nach Räumen und Zusammenhängen gerade
entweder die eine oder andere Identität haben. Das war echt spitze. Ich hoffe
sehr, dass entweder die Amsterdamer Organisatoren es noch einmal auf sich
nehmen, so etwas auf die Beine zu stellen. Oder, dass andere Leute hier oder
woanders die Idee noch einmal aufgreifen und jede Menge Enthusiasmus und
Gastfreundschaft aufbringen, um solch einen Freiraum zu schaffen. Andererseits
wurde der Termin für das nächste European Education Forum (EEF)
auf dieser Konferenz fix gemacht, Mai 2005 in Bergen/ Norwegen. Das European
Education Forum will zeitgleich zur Ministerkonferenz im Bologna-Prozess eine
Plattform und ein Freiraum für Diskussionen sein, was in Bildungspolitik und
-ökonomie falsch läuft. Falls es hier Gruppen oder Menschen gibt, die zu dem
Thema Bildung/ Ausbildung/ Leben arbeiten, kann es ja gar nicht so verkehrt
sein, sich mal die Prinzipienerklärung der Leutchen anzugucken und zu
entscheiden, ob man sich eventuell anschließen mag. Wer mag, kann die Infos ja
ruhig auch auf anderen Listen rumposten, lokalen/regionalen Listen oder anderen
Leftie-Polit-Listen. Ich hoffe, niemand hier ist genervt und findet es
off-topic.
Viele Grüße!
Cultural Analysis Summer Academy - CASA
Es war zwar nicht warm und sonnig, und viel von Amsterdam habe ich nicht
gesehen. Viel Methodenreflektion für meine Diplomarbeit war auch nicht drin.
Dafür war aber Informationsdichte, Teilnahmemöglichkeit und der Wohlfühlfaktor
unheimlich hoch: So würde ich für mich zusammenfassen, wie ich CASA fand. Es ist
sehr schwierig, in üblichen Kategorien des Nachrichtenverfassens
(Teilnehmerzahl, Workshops, Spektakelbeschreibung) CASA zu beschreiben.
Und sicher ist es für die vielen sehr unterschiedlichen Menschen jeweils was
völlig anderes gewesen. Sie sind aus ganz verschiedenen institutionellen und
politischen Zusammenhängen gekommen, unterschiedliche wissenschaftliche
Disziplinen und unterschiedliche Herkunfts- und Wohnorte. So saß der sehr
wissenschaftskarrierebewusste, aber auch politisch engagierte Ökonom aus Mexiko
(in Spanien lebend) neben dem Studentenaktivist aus Indien, die beiden wiederum
neben forschenden und poltiisierenden queer-Frauen aus Irland und Spanien. Die
wiederum neben Ingenienieurs- und Bio-Wissenschaftlern aus den USA. Und so
könnte man das alles eine ganze Weile fortsetzen, ohne die Leute wirklich
zutreffend zu beschreiben.
Auch die Motivationen der Leute, zu kommen, waren völlig unterschiedlich.
Irgendwie hatte ihr Anliegen oder ihr Problem oder ihre Arbeit was mit dem
Aufruf zu tun:
"This year CASA meeting will be exploring the relation between thought and
action, between theory and practice with particular references to communication
between universities and social movements and discussions about privatization of
education."
Wichtiger Teil des Konzepts war, alle um aktive Teilnahme zu bitten und vor
allem, die Definitionen davon, was Forschung (research) und Aktivismus ist, sehr
breit zu halten. So dass auch Gruppen gebeten wurden, beizutragen, die
vielleicht eher im kulturellen Sektor zu verorten sind: Im Sinne von
"spectating". Diese waren leider wenig vertreten. Aber lokale Initiativen
wie das Amsterdamer "Autonoom Centrum" als Teil des "no border"-Netzwerks, die
Ermittlungsgruppe über die Macht und Lobbytätigkeit von Großunternehmen "CEO"
oder die Amsterdamer Gruppe "vrije ruimte" stellten ihre Recherche-
und Acting-Tätigkeit vor. Andere Workshops waren eher sehr wissenschaftliche
Präsentationen, über nichtsdestotrotz sehr spannende Themen. Sehr viel
reflektiert wurde über die
Rolle der Akademia und einzelner Studenten/ Forscher im Verhältnis zu
Gesellschaft und Politik/ politischer Aktion. Über die Probleme, die mit der
zunehmenden Konstruktion von Bildung als knapper Ware für Einzelpersonen
einhergehen und über die Probleme, die man als wissenschaftlicher Außenseiter
haben kann, wenn man sich mit seiner sozialen/ politischen
Thematik am Rande der institutionellen Zusammenhänge bewegt. Konkret: Wer
unterstützt mich, wo kriege ich Kohle her, korrumpiert mich das. Neben diesem
Thema gab es aber auch viele andere interessante Sachen:
Utopieforschung
Kommunikationsforschung- und praxis
Literaturkritik
Diskussion über Sprache und Ausschluss von Menschen/ Gruppen
neue Modelle für emanzipatorische Forschung und Lernen
Feminismus
Rassismusforschung
!Und noch viel mehr!
Der Input an informationen über die Arbeit von anderen, das Vorstellen der
eigenen Arbeit und die Diskussion mit den anderen waren wichtig. Viel wichtiger
war aber das Gefühl, dass ich nach all dem mitnehmen konnte: Sonst zerrissen
zwischen den verschiedenen Identitäten, die ich an verschiedenen
Orten und in verschiedenen Zusammenhängen habe, konnte ich hier alles
gleichzeitig sein: Ein ganzer Mensch. Und ich habe viele Menschen aus ganz
vielen verschiedenen Orten kennengelernt, mit denen ich so viel gemeinsam habe.
Das scheint ziemlich vielen so gegangen zu sein. Denn schon jetzt,
einen Tag nachdem die meisten abgereist sind, kommen viele E-Mails über die
Liste von CASA. Wieder zu Hause angekommen, sitzen die Leute wieder im
institutionellen, wissenschaftlichen, politischen und sozialen Dilemma.
Zum Beispiel eine Frau, die über Rassismus forscht, und wahnsinnige Probleme
hat, weil sie allerhöchstens Jobs als Terrorismusforscherin bekommen würde. Sie
ist direkt weiter gereist zu einer Konferenz über Rassismus, und schreibt:
"Everyone sat in a large hall, in rows and were addressed by white, middle-aged
men somehwere far away in the distance above them. They reproduced institutional
racism for a while interspersed by some incredibly un-funny anecdotes.This is
only one of the reasons why CASA is so necessary and why we musn't let the
energy generated by all of us at the meeting die out. Rather, we must evolve,
regenerate ideas and create new energy, involve more people and communicate..."
Dieser Wunsch wurde auch auf der Abschluss-Runde von ganz vielen gefordert,und
alle hoffen, dass sich das Amsterdam-Team nochmal dazu hinreißen lässt,eine
solche "Uni für alle" zu organisieren. Allerdings war es sehr viel Arbeit. Und
wer weiß, ob sie sich mit ihrer sehr großen Gastfreundschaft nicht vielleicht
auch etwas übernommen haben und uns nie wieder sehen wollen? Aber vielleicht
steckt die Idee ja andere Menschen an anderen Orten an. Denn überall finden sich
Menschen in den immer kleiner werdenen Nischen der Unis und FHs, überall
Menschen, die sich aufgrund dieser Art des Zusammenlebens gezwungen sehen, ihre
Interessen größtenteils zu verdrängen
und die restlichen zu verkaufen. Und überall finden sich Gruppen, die über "eine
andere Welt" nachdenken, und sich gegenseitig nichtmal kennen. CASA kann ein Ort
sein, wo alle diese Grenzen aufgehoben werden, wenn auch nur für ein paar
Stunden oder Tage.
Es muss ja nicht "Cultural" sein, oder "Summer" oder gar "Academy". Und
vielleicht nicht einmal Amsterdam, wenngleich es dort doch sehr schön ist. Aber
die Idee, ganz vielen verschiedenen Menschen den Raum für ihre Ideen und deren
Entwicklung zu geben, über identitäre, institutionelle und
territoriale Grenzen hinaus, ist großartig. In dem Sinne: Ganz viele CASAs, so
schnell wie möglich! Mehr Infos und das Programm, Mailingliste und Nachbereitung
im Netz:
http://casa.manifestor.org
EEF
Das nächste Treffen der Bildungsminister Europas zur Implementierung der
Bildungspolitik ist für den 19. und 20. Mai 2005 in Bergen/ Norwegen geplant.
Das EEF hat als "Gegenpol" dazu im vergangenen Jahr als Treffpunkt sehr viele
verschiedene Menschen zusammen gebracht, die nicht mit diesem Prozess
einverstanden sind, um Informationen zu sammeln, um sich
kennenzulernen und auch, um Kritik und eigenen Widerstand zu formulieren,sowie
Alternativen zu diskutieren.
Es war deshalb die Frage, ob man es schaffen kann, für nächstes Jahr wieder ein
solches Forum zu organisieren, und wo. Während CASA (Cultural Analysis Summer
Academy) in Amsterdam in den ersten Juli-Tagen 2004 sind wiederum ganz
verschiedene Menschen zusammen gekommen. Die ganz aktiven Organisierer,
aber auch neue Interessierte an der EEF-Arbeit - nicht nur aus Europa. Nicht nur
Studenten, auch Professoren und fertigstudierte Wissenschaftler. In einer
Diskussionsrunde sammelten die Menschen ihre Gedanken über Bildung und
Ausbildung und die sich verändernden Bedingungen, an Einrichtungen der "higher
education" zu leben und zu lernen und zu produzieren. Diese Kontroverse hat
gezeigt, wie wichtig eine solche Plattform für verschiedene Gruppen und/ oder
Einzelmenschen ist und sein kann.
In einem nächsten Schritt wurden dann die Möglichkeiten eines nächsten Treffens
ausgelotet. In Bergen hat sich bereits ein breiteres lokales Bündnis
zusamengefunden und darüber diskutiert. Da wären bisher:
- die Schüleraktion
- die Schülerorganisation
- Gewerkschaft der Universitätsangestellten
- Gewerkschaft der Schullehrer
- Queer Students: Uglesett
- Rosso, Radical and Socialist Student Organisation
Da die bisher Aktiven (aktiv werden kann jeder jederzeit) des EEF (anwesend: aus
Deutschland/ Italien/ Frankreich) wegen Publicity, Informationen sammeln und
Kontakte knüpfen sehr begeistert davon waren, das Treffen zeitgleich und ortsnah
zum Ministertreffen zu machen, wurde das Angebot dankbar angenommen und
Unterstützung angeboten. Rund um das Datum 19. und 20. Mai 2005 gibt es also ein
European Education Forum in Bergen, der Stadt, die im Sonnenschein
vielleicht die schönste Stadt in Europa ist. Es finden in den nächsten Monaten
einige Vorbereitungstreffen statt, zunächst eines des lokalen Bündnisses in
Bergen im August, dann ein Vorbereitungstreffen mit dem EEF im September (Daten
stehen noch nicht fest) und ein nächstes Treffen für alle,die kommen können
während des European Social Forum in London (wobei EEF nicht Teil dessen ist).
Organisatorisches wird von der lokalen Gruppe gemeinsam mit anderen EEF-Aktiven
gemacht. Zum Programm und Aktionen beitragen kann und sollte aber jeder, der
sich am Prozess beteiligen möchte.
Genauere Informationen zum EEF, zum Planungsprozess und Zeitplan, sowie
eventuell gewünschte Kontakthilfe nach Bergen kann ich Euch gerne geben.Also
fragt mir ruhig Löcher in den Bauch! Link:
http://www.eef2003.org/
----------------------------------------------------
Racial States, Anti-Racist
Responses: Picking holes in ‘culture’ and ‘human rights’
Alana Lentin
European Journal of Social Theory, Forthcoming.
Abtsract
This paper examines seeks to re-examine two major assumptions in mainstream
anti-racist thought of the post-war era. These are culturalism, on the one hand,
and human rights on the other, both of which have been offered as potential
solutions to the ongoing problem of racism. I argue that both fail to cope with
racism as it has been institutionalised in the political and social structures
of European societies because they inaccurately theorise ‘race’. Racism is
treated as an individual attitude born of prejudice and ignorance and not as a
political project that emerged under specific conditions within the context of
the European nation-state. A re-examination of this legacy of modernity and a
questioning of the structuring principles of anti-racism is necessary in the
current context of racism against migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.
Key words: ‘Race’, state, anti-racism, culturalism, human rights.
Introduction
The racially configured nature of the nation-state is a notion that has been
successfully theorised by a significant body of authors from the German
philosopher Eric Voegelin in 1933 to the present day (Voegelin, 1933; Arendt,
1966; Mosse, 1978; Balibar, 1991b; Traverso, 1996; Foucault, 1997; Goldberg,
2002). Nevertheless, the relationship of ‘reciprocal determination’ between
‘race’ and nation (Balibar, 1991b) entered into by western states at precise
periods in the history of modernity (most emphatically from the mid-nineteenth
century onwards) has been almost completely rejected from mainstream academic
accounts and, consequently, from so-called common sense. Moreover, since the
aftermath of the Holocaust, in Europe and the West, the discussion of racism as
a social evil has been widespread. Yet despite the general agreement in the
democratic public spheres of western Europe that racism represents a problem to
be expunged from society at all costs, it is seldom related in such discourse to
the historical or contemporary actions of European states themselves. On the
contrary, racism is typically described as an individual problem, often in
psychological terms, that connects between ‘attitudes’ and ‘prejudices’ based,
it is said, on ‘ignorance’. Racism is, therefore, generally described as the
problem of those with little exposure to the positive qualities associated with
‘cultural’ or ‘ethnic’ difference; and too much exposure to the, mainly
economic, disadvantages that such ‘difference’ is said to bring with it. The
solution to the persistence of racism in post-War European societies was often
conceived in terms of the striking of a balance between knowledge of the Other
and the restriction of her arrival in too great numbers. Under rare
circumstances, in this dominant package of diagnosis and cure, is racism ever
considered to be a problem of elites; and even more seldom, despite the work of
the authors I cite above, is it considered to be embedded in the very structures
of the nation-state.
This paper intends to unpack the reasons for which racism continues to be dealt
with in such a way. I shall do so by offering an analysis of what can be thought
of as ‘dominant anti-racism’ from the 1950s on – that practised by institutions
and many mainstream associations – and its impact upon the construction of
explanations of racism still in use today, both in everyday language and in the
social sciences. While, as Bonnett (2000) reminds us, racism has been widely
studied from a variety of often conflicting disciplinary and political
standpoints, anti-racism has rarely been the object of study. This is despite
the fact that the majority of the conceptualisations of racism available to
social scientists since the 1930s have been developed in an anti-racist
perspective. It is my intention to submit anti-racism, or at least one dominant
trend in anti-racist discourse, to a sociological analysis that refuses to see
it, merely and unproblematically, as the opposite of racism. The complicity of
dominant and institutional anti-racist discourses in upholding the vision of the
state as neutral, despite the persistence of racism at the level of the state,
is long overdue the serious attention of social scientists committed to
anti-racism.
In order to reconstruct the argument that leads us to seeing the full extent of
anti-racism’s own problematic relationship with the link between ‘race’ and
state, a few steps shall be taken. I shall argue that a dominant current within
anti-racist thinking, that continues to occupy an important place in European
anti-racism today, neglected to historicise the growth of racism as a political
idea used by states for example under the conditions of colonialism, in the
treatment of the working classes, the development of modern political
antisemitism and the regulation of European-bound immigration. However, in order
to show more precisely what it is that such anti-racism fails to treat and
explain in its discourse, the first section of the paper shall deal with some of
the main historical and theoretical consequences of the political relationship
between the idea of ‘race’ and the political needs of modern states. In
particular, I shall focus on the apparently paradoxical development of modern
racism in parallel with the rise of a heretofore unknown equality in European
societies. Modern racism, it shall be suggested following Balibar (1991a,
1991b), cannot be fully understood without a concomitant engagement with the
history of the development of the notion of universalism and the project of
conceiving a general ‘idea of man’. Furthermore, the historicist or
progressivist racism that succeeds and at times coexists with its more crude
‘naturalist’ variant (Goldberg, 2002) establishes the conditions under which
racism becomes inextricable from a civilising mission whose racist origins are
more easily concealed when applied to the post-colonial metropolis.
The continued widespread understanding of racism as part of a ‘natural’ human
propensity towards discrimination in a ‘survival of the fittest’ perspective
popularised since the advent of social Darwinism is in part due to the efforts
of early institutional responses to racism. Historicising the development of
anti-racist arguments by institutions such as UNESCO and their infiltration into
state and non-governmental discourse as well as everyday parlance, from the
1950s onwards, points to the reasons for this. In the second section of the
paper, I shall trace two of the founding principles of the UNESCO tradition in
anti-racism which, I suggest, are still central to much of the anti-racist
rhetoric proposed by European governments, supranational organisations and
mainstream anti-racist organisations. These are firstly, the necessity of
refuting racism on its own terms, namely as a science; and secondly, the
proposal of an alternative explanation of human difference to that of ‘race’.
Both these elements are central to anti-racism’s principal role: to explain
racism. Yet neither deals seriously with racism’s historical encounter with the
nation-state and therefore with ‘race’ as a political idea: ‘one of the elements
producing political communities’ (Voegelin, 1933: 1). The consequences of this
dominant tradition in anti-racism, that promotes the ‘reconciling of fidelity to
oneself with openness to others’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1983), rather than a
state-centred critique of racism as structuring the conditions of domination and
exploitation in contemporary societies, shall be illustrated in the paper’s
final section. The contemporary preoccupation with the language of rights and
the rule of law, rooted in the legacy of ‘European universals’ (Hesse, 1999:
211), and its application to the fight against racism further compounds the
dominant consensus to naturalise and depoliticise the origins of modern racism.
‘Race’, modernity and the state
In the second section of this paper I shall argue that the mainstream
anti-racism of the post-war period that grounds much of present day responses to
racism fails to effectively counter racism because it neglects to engage with
the history of the relationship between ‘race’ and state. In order to be able to
construct such an argument it is necessary, firstly, to make sense of that
relationship. While this paper does not leave me the scope to elucidate this
historical relationship in its full detail, in this section I shall deal with
the interstices of ‘race’ and state from one, very significant, point of view.
Building on the understanding of ‘race’ as a political idea and racism as a
political project as wholly modern phenomena, it is necessary to ask why racism
emerges at a time of unparalleled equality in the history of Europe, from the
mid-nineteenth century onwards? In order for the relationship between racism and
equality – or democracy – to be explored it is also important to ask what is the
relationship between racism and universalism. In other words, how does the idea
of a general conceptualisation of humanity intersect with the concomitant need
to categorise human beings upon which racism is based?
The modernity of ‘race’
One of the hardest tasks facing the theorist of ‘race’ and racism is to
convince her audience that these are modern phenomena. So ingrained has the idea
that racism is a matter of individual prejudice become – a notion largely
attributable to mainstream discourses of anti-racism as shall be later shown –
that it is difficult to insist that its widespread acceptance can be traced back
only as far as the mid-nineteenth century. Although theories proposing the
division of the human species into ‘races’ can be traced back to the late
seventeenth century, the full development of racism in its modern form cannot be
said to have come about before the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The period
known as the Golden Age of racism (1870-1914) is that which marks the emergence
of the ‘race state’, the birth of modern antisemitism, rampant imperialism and
the belief within politics, exemplified by Benjamin Disraeli, that ‘race is
everything; there is no other truth’ (Hannaford, 1996: 352).
‘Race’ as the political idea which underpins the emergence of the political
ideology of racism can be said to be wholly modern for two reasons. Firstly,
this is because it relies on a methodological shift, enabled by Enlightenment
interests in rationality and progress that enables the envisaging of humanity as
polygenetic. This represents a radical shift from the previously overriding
belief in Creation and therefore monogenesis. However, the refutation of the
notion that all people are directly created by one God does not immediately
follow Enlightenment and requires also the increase in travel that enabled the
observation of non-European, non-white Others over the course of eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
The second reason for racism’s modernity is based on its entry into a
relationship of ‘reciprocal determination’ (Balibar, 1991b) with nationalism,
itself a modern phenomenon coming to dominance in the nineteenth century,
without which it could not rise beyond the status of pseudo-scientific theory.
Balibar defies the distinction between nation and nationalism by showing how the
latter invents the former and, moreover, creates racism as a political tool for
upholding its principles and goals. ‘Race’ and nation work in tandem, rather
than in a relationship of causality, to bring about the objectives of
nationalism that, over time, become increasingly fused with those of racism. As
Nicholson (1999: 7) reminds us, understanding the modernity of racism cannot be
divorced from the particular ambitions of modern, competitive and above all
expanding nation-states:
[R]ace is not simply a peculiarity of certain nations; it is a phenomenon of
expansive nations and the emotional borderlines set by the laws that define and
constitute nations. People were turned into races when nations extended and
defined their political hegemony through conquest and expropriation. Race and
nation were born and raised together; they are the Siamese twins of modernity.
To succeed politically, racism requires both scientific legitimation and the
framework of nationalism. Ultimately, it is elevated through a combination of
rationality and political romanticist ideals which favoured the theorisation of
nations (like individuals) as naturally conceived and innately superior or
inferior to each other.
It is important to recall that precise political reasons made it expedient to
develop racism as a political ideology. As Balibar (1991c), Foucault (1997) and
MacMaster (2001) all remind us, the discourse of ‘race’ is first applied to the
working classes whose new internationalist political consciousness in the Europe
of the nineteenth century is perceived as a threat by a weakened aristocratic or
ruling class. In such a conceptualisation the poverty of the working class -
presented as a natural condition – was seen as disabling its participation in
the strengthening of the ‘race’. Moreover, working class adhesion to an
internationalist anti-capitalism threatened the foundations of the nation-state
as the sole vessel in which the ‘race’ could flourish. The nascent eugenics
movement initially held the ‘degenerate’ working classes in its sight, proposing
the halting of public and private charity which would lead to their gradual
demise (MacMaster, 2001). Nevertheless, at the beginning of the twentieth
century racism’s target shifts, mirroring the consolidation of the idea of the
seamlessness of ‘race’ and nation, to focus on the external. Now proponents of
racist ideals are concerned with strengthening all classes by extending welfare
nationalism in the aim of the ‘technocratic and biological engineering of the
unified race-nation’ (MacMaster, 2001: 56). This shift must be understood within
the wholly modern constraints of the time, namely the pressure of inter-national
competition whose stakes were placed ever higher during this period of rampant
imperialism. The necessity for national strength – increasingly translated in
terms of racial purity – was never more necessary than during the First World
War and the onset of mass conscription. Racism then and now is a ‘a plastic and
chameleon-like phenomenon’ (MacMaster, 2001: 2) which perfectly adapted itself
to the growing pressures created by increasingly competitive modern nation
states.
Racism and the paradoxes of equality
David Goldberg (2002) sees racism as divided into two conceptions, one
naturalist and one historicist or progressivist. The development of the latter,
more ambivalent and entirely political, form of racism is at the core of
racism’s relationship with equality. Briefly, naturalism and historicism can be
distinguished in the following way: The former lasted from the seventeenth to
approximately the mid-nineteenth century and was defined by the idea that racial
inferiority was inherent and scientifically provable. Historicist racism,
altogether more complicated, came to dominate from the mid-nineteenth century
on. It continues to inform neoconservative ideas such as ‘colour-blindness’ and
what Goldberg calls, ‘raceless states’. Emerging mainly under conditions of the
administration of colonial rule, and later of immigration, it relies on the
assumption, based on the posited need for ‘racial realism’ (Goldberg, 2002: 82),
that ‘inferior’ others may become ‘civilised’ through a process of assimilation.
Despite the progress that this apparently signifies, when compared to the
rampant excesses of naturalism, Goldberg reminds us that historicist views have
not brought with them the demise of racism. On the contrary, it is the
elaboration of historicism that perhaps enabled racism to be perpetuated within
today’s state rationalities.
The naturalist-historicist distinction helps us to see how racism becomes
articulated politically at a time of increasing equality among populations of
western European nation-states from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Outside
of the colonial administrations that came increasingly to rely on a historicist
vision in order to ensure the self-regulation of European rule over colonised
‘subjects’, no case better illustrates the ‘paradox’ of equality on European
territory than that of Jewish emancipation. Modern antisemitism – as opposed to
pre-modern Jew hatred (Arendt, 1966; Bauman, 1989) – emerged as a political
force towards the end of the nineteenth century accompanying the spread of
Jewish emancipation across Europe. The permission granted to Jews to exit the
ghettos and live among their Christian co-nationals transformed Judeophobia.
From the naturalness with which the Jews’ distinctiveness was viewed while they
lived separately and enclosed, their assimilation into mainstream society now
led to their difference being rendered artificial (Bauman, 1989). Jews were now
seen as the dangerous ‘race’ among all ‘races’ (Foucault, 1997) which, in order
to maintain the rationally preserved order of modern societies, had to be weeded
out. Under the conditions of equality, when it was increasingly hard to tell Jew
from Gentile, racial theory, ancient religious myth and conspiratorial rumour
all had to be manipulated for the political aim of proving the Jews’ inherent
foreignness.
It is the condition of assimilation that leads to the fascination with the Jews’
place in society as either ‘pariahs’ or ‘parvenus’ at the core of social
antisemitism (Arendt, 1966). Assimilation functioned as a type of trap. On the
one hand, the refusal to relinquish a particular communal lifestyle meant ‘a
life-sentence of strangerhood’ (Bauman, 1991: 112). On the other hand, by
choosing to adopt the cultural hierarchy imposed by the state that saw Judaism
as inferior to national (Christian) culture, Jews and other outcasts helped to
prove both its superiority and its universal validity. The assimilation brought
about by Jewish emancipation in practice meant that Jews were forced to give up
their particularism in order to gain full membership of the nation. But both the
inability of many to amalgamate seamlessly and the overwhelming desire of others
to do so, by publicly turning their backs on Judaism, were seen as signs of the
Jews’ undeniable otherness. Emancipation assisted in creating social and
political antisemitism by imposing itself upon Jews, just as the call for
immigrants to assimilate today creates discriminatory exasperation at their
seeming unwillingness to do so. Traverso (1996), noting that the Jewish
emancipation that followed the French revolution was accompanied by a Jacobin
insistence on the outlawing of public demonstrations of religiosity, claims that
many Jews experienced emancipation as a ‘revolution from above’ (Traverso, 1996:
24). The demand to assimilate accompanied by the political manipulation of a
social mistrust of Jewish intentions is symbolic of the problem that defines
modern racism: an antidote to the spread of greater equality.
Racism and universalism
The failure to regard modern racism as functioning within the logic of an
expansionist, modernising and increasingly competitive European nation-state is
grounded in a generalised belief in the overriding value of the project of
modernity. In other words, its secular, universalistic and emancipatory
elements, upheld as the foundations of present-day democracy, have been taken at
face value, often in the absence of a problematisation of the course they have
taken in history. In reality, as the ultimate impossibility of assimilation
shows us, the power of racism is in its ability to define ‘the frontiers of an
ideal humanity’ (Balibar, 1991b: 61) into which individuals either fit in or do
not. Balibar argues that racism takes on the status of a ‘supranationalism’ that
acquires meaning at the universal level beyond the realm of individuals or even
of the singular ‘race nation’. Racism sustained the passage into the
post-colonial era because of the universal appeal of ‘racial signifiers’ which
constructed the European, rather than the individual nation, as the dominant and
therefore ideal, human type. This was achieved by means of the emphasis placed
on the degrees of difference that separated ‘man’ from the ‘savage’, so that
‘all nationalisms were defined against the same foil, the same “stateless
other”, and this has been a component of the very idea of Europe as the land of
“modern” nation-states or, in other words, civilisation’ (Balibar, 1991b: 62).
Although racism and universalism cannot be reduced to each other, Balibar sees
them as ‘determinate contraries’ that are ‘bound to affect the other from the
inside’ (Balibar, 1994: 198). Because universalist philosophy is based upon the
premise that moral equality is a natural entitlement of the ‘brotherhood of
man’, racism (like sexism) becomes the prism through which we may understand the
very possibility of talking about a universalist ideal. In other words, both
racism and sexism serve to justify the fact that there are always exemptions to
inclusion in universal humanity. Racism is therefore inseparable from the task
of creating a ‘general idea of man’ because of its implicit invocations of
superiority and inferiority. The construction of universally rational man
necessitates a definition in relation to an Other that also calls for a
hierarchisation of human beings, ranked in relation to the universal ideal.
Racism functions at the level of universals however because it struggles against
universalism’s impetus to homogenise us. By claiming ‘race’ as the universal
system for the organisation of humankind, the space for uniqueness that racism
and nationalism crave is ensured. The consolidation of the idea of ‘race’ within
politics brought with it a universalised system of ‘races’ to one of which each
individual must belong. As the notion of ‘race’ was invented by Europeans and
applied to themselves as superior and to others as inferior to various degrees,
the violence that accompanies racism is grounded in the concomitant need to
preserve the hierarchical order of things. This order was beneficial solely for
those who invented the racial classification of humanity: the Europeans.
The universalism of racism sits uneasily with the extension of humanism that
accompanies historicism well into the post-colonial era. The idea that including
more peoples in a general idea of humanity will render racism impossible – the
idea at the core of human rights – is negated by the extent to which a
universalised vision of humanity has relied on racism’s provision of a
dehumanised Other against which humanity itself can be defined. Such an idea is
dismissed by Césaire as a ‘pseudo humanism’, based on a partial interpretation
of the ‘rights of man’ that is ‘narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased
and, all things considered, sordidly racist’ (Césaire 1972; cited in Gilroy,
2000: 62). The attempt to understand racism within the contemporary hegemony of
the human rights discourse necessitates tracing the history that links
historicist racism to the ideological requirements of an expanding modern
nation-state, to the quest for an ideal of humanity and to the refutation of
‘race’ that enables the continued dominance of Eurocentrism. Behind this veneer,
racialisation and racist discriminations continue but are facilitated by the
appearance of equality that was first instituted at the time of racism’s Golden
Age. The following section shall elucidate the part that early post-war
discourses of mainstream, institutionally sanctioned anti-racism had to play in
enabling the persistent coexistence of historicist racism with a regime of
rights.
The role of anti-racism
Examining the role played by anti-racism as a political discourse and a form
of collective action can reveal the reasons for which there has been a failure
to effectively historicise the relationship between ‘race’ and state. However,
treating anti-racism seriously from either an historical or a sociological point
of view has been hindered by the predominance of polemics and prescriptions,
arising from the tendency to mobilise a common sense depiction of anti-racism as
simply the inverse of racism. As noted by Bonnett (2002: 2):
Racism and ethnic discriminations are under continuous historical and
sociological examination. But anti-racism is consigned to the status of a
“cause”, fit only for platitudes of support or denouncement.
In fact, anti-racism is essentially a heterogeneous phenomenon whose variants
reveal differing political allegiances, political aims and representative
functions. Based upon my research into the political sociology of European
anti-racist discourse and praxis (Lentin, 2002), I shall argue that by examining
one particular and central variant of anti-racism it is possible to demonstrate
the collusion between this discourse and the circumvention of the historical
relationship between ‘race’ and state. This anti-racist discourse emerges from
the post-war project of institutions such as UNESCO and subscribed to by western
governments, to explain and suggest remedies for racism in the aftermath of the
Holocaust. This mainstream form of anti-racism stands in opposition to the
state-centred critique that developed out of the anti-colonialist movement to
inform a self-determined anti-racism. Instead it focuses on racism as a
consequence of individual prejudices, replacing political explanations with
psychological ones and advocates cultural rather than politicised responses to
it. Moreover, the hegemony of this form of anti-racism has played a vital role
in bringing about the dominance of a discourse of universal human rights which
constructs racism unilaterally as discrimination.
By focusing on the development of the UNESCO ‘tradition’ of anti-racism (Barker,
1983), it is possible to see how the mainstream anti-racist practices that it
endorsed have avoided the theorisation of the racial nature of the European
state. Two main components of the tradition have led to this neglect of the
politicised origins and implications of ‘race’. Firstly, UNESCO, in its
‘Declaration Against Race and Racial Prejudice’, first published in 1950,
attempts to defeat racism on what was seen as being its own terms, namely as a
science to be unproven. Secondly, it proposed that ‘race’, an inadequate because
unscientific way of categorising human beings, be replaced by culture. However
because the thinking that informed UNESCO’s work denied the political nature of
‘race’, choosing to see it as purely pseudo-scientific in origin, the
alternative of culture failed to eradicate the hierarchical organisation of
humankind that embodies the real perniciousness of racism. The misconception, in
both popular and academic discourse, that because ‘race’ does not objectively
exist that racism cannot do so either belies the fact that racism has always
mobilised both ‘racial’ (e.g. phenotypical) and cultural (e.g. ethnic/religious)
differences for its expression. By separating between ‘race’ and what it called
‘racial prejudice’ in this way, UNESCO ignored the power of racialisation to
determine relationships between dominant and subordinate groups.
How did the UNESCO project go about disproving racism and suggesting means for
overcoming it? The work carried out by the ‘world panel of experts’ brought
together by the organisation for the first time in 1950 was heavily influenced
by anthropology and genetics, and to a lesser extent psychology and sociology.
Geneticists mainly influenced the reasons for approaching racism as a science,
rather than a political ideology, in the efforts to explain it while
anthropologists, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss can largely be accredited for
ensuring the culturalist perspective from which the solutions to racism were
formulated.
The treatment of racism as a science was based on the perceived need to defeat
racism on what was seen as being its own terms, namely a scientific discipline,
grounded in genetics and physical anthropology, known as racial science. The
failure of ‘race’ to stand up to scientific scrutiny was summed up in the
assertion that,
The division of the human species into “races” is partly conventional and partly
arbitrary and does not imply any hierarchy whatsoever. Many anthropologists
stress the importance of human variation, but believe that “racial” divisions
have limited scientific interest and may even carry the risk of inviting abusive
generalisation.
UNESCO (1968: 270)
This component of the declaration is emblematic of the apolitical nature of its
drafting. It demonstrates how the recourse made to ‘convention’ and
‘arbitrariness’ naturalises racism and disconnects it from the political
processes with which historical analysis reveals that it is bound. This
circumvention of ‘race’ as a political invention, as ideology rather than
science or mere common sense, was largely due to the role played by geneticists
and physical anthropologists in the declaration’s drafting. Indeed, the
declaration in its original form was deemed too sociological in approach and was
supplemented by an additional ‘Statement on the Nature of Race and Racial
Difference’ (1951) that further informed the UNESCO position. The statement’s
authors called for the social phenomenon of racism to be distinguished from
‘race’ as a biological ‘fact’, considered to be a scientifically useful concept
(Comas, 1961). Their position is summed up thus:
In its anthropological sense, the word “race” should be reserved for groups of
mankind possessing well-developed and primarily heritable physical differences
from other groups […] National, religious, geographical, linguistic and cultural
groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups..
UNESCO (1951; cited in Comas, 1961: 304)
What of the solutions to the admittedly persistent problem of racism despite the
refutation of ‘race’ as good science? These too led to a framing of the problem
of racism as separate from the political usage made of ‘race’ by states both
historically and in the aftermath of colonialism and the Holocaust. The stronger
influence of anthropologists, rather than geneticists, upon UNESCO’s work led to
the search for an alternative to ‘race’ as a means of explaining human
differences. The need for such explanation became greater with the onset of
European-bound immigration in higher numbers in the post-war period, and
therefore the actual meeting of different populations. Culture and terms such as
ethnicity came to replace ‘race’ as markers of human difference. This was based
on the belief that they were stripped of any implication of superiority or
inferiority at the core of the idea of ‘race’. Different cultures were now seen
as relative to each other and any variations in the levels of progress across
groups worldwide were put down to the extent to which cultural groups had
interacted during the course of history (Lévi-Strauss, 1960). According to
Lévi-Strauss in Race and History, a key text published initially by UNESCO, only
seldom can cultures develop in isolation. The overcoming of racism, or what it
is suggested should be known as ‘ethnocentrism’, is understood by UNESCO as
being possible through greater intercultural knowledge. This is summed up in the
notion of ‘reconciling fidelity to oneself with openness to others’. This
approach is rooted in a vision of racism as a problem of individual attitudes of
‘prejudice’ that may be overcome through an increased tolerance to those
different to ourselves. A direct link is made between the proposal of culture as
an alternative to ‘race’ and the idea that persisting racism is a problem of
individuals who lack intercultural knowledge. Emphasising the importance of
re-educating prejudiced individuals results in a neglect of the racism that
persists at the level of the state by releasing it from its historical
responsibility in constructing racism as common sense through the dominance of
the politics of ‘race is all’.
This individualising and psychologising of the problem of racism is entirely
consistent with the historicist racism that Goldberg (2002) shows exists in
parallel with, and eventually becoming more powerful than, its naturalist
predecessor. According to the UNESCO view adhered to in the policies of post-war
states, different cultural groups, previously barred from participating in the
progress enjoyed by western societies are gradually admitted to this process
through both the international community and western-bound immigration. In
domestic policies, this view is translated in terms of assimilation; the need
for immigrants to give up their cultural specificities in order to become a
seamless part of the national whole. It is only through such a process that the
members of different so-called cultural groups may develop and progress: so far,
so consistent with colonialist historicism. However, it is important to note
that Lévi-Strauss himself, despite being used as a primary theorist of the
UNESCO position, did not agree with the aims of assimilation. His altogether
more ambivalent approach, which he revised in 1971 in reaction to what he saw as
the failures of the UNESCO Tradition, resisted the dilution of cultural
specificities which he felt would be brought about by greater proximity between
peoples.
To some extent Lévi-Strauss’s ideas are consistent with the multiculturalism
that came to replace assimilatory policies in many western states. This shift
represents a further culturalisation of difference that coexists with the
ongoing institutionalisation of racism. Specifically, the politics of
multiculturalism, to which the UNESCO project may be seen as a vital precursor,
have been largely responsible for the reification of groups of non-European
origins which are culturally determined and viewed as internally homogeneous.
The identification of communities with apparent leaderships who could be called
upon to liase with governments about their members’ needs has led to a
misrepresentation of those needs, often based more on the interests of such
leaders than arising from those of their purported membership. Such a system,
often referred to as a cultural ‘mosaic’, has permitted states to positively
present the richness of their society’s diverse make-up without addressing the
imbalances of political and administrative power which permit the continuity of
racist and class-based exclusion. The approach taken by the official,
state-endorsed response to racism - to condemn it as the bad science of darker
times – fails to challenge the effects of so-called racism without ‘race’
because it misdiagnoses racism’s origins and mistreats its symptoms. Racism
becomes a problem of cultural misunderstanding, adjustable through the adequate
representation of ‘difference’.
Conclusion: The problem of human rights
A reanalysis of the role played by what I am calling a mainstream strand of
anti-racist thought in the way we understand racism today is vital for those who
are interested in the theorisation of racism and anti-racism. Anti-racism as a
political discourse has all too often not been adequately historicised. Most
importantly, it is not generally understood explicitly that the way mainstream
anti-racist thought has evolved is largely responsible for the ways in which it
is possible to make sense of ‘race’ and racism today. In other words, the
explanations of racism offered by some anti-racist thinkers and activists are
those that have entered into commonsense understandings today. I refer to some
thinkers and activists because despite the success of self-organised
anti-racists in bringing about public and institutional recognition of the
phenomenon of institutional racism for example, this is often confused with the
much more widespread understanding of racism as a matter of individual
prejudicial attitudes and lack of education. The reason for which this view is
the more common one is because it was largely that promoted by institutions such
as UNESCO, adopted by governments and furthered by an anti-racism that did not
promote an active state-centred critique of racism.
It is important to show that states have been involved in ensuring this failure
to historicise the relationship between their evolution into nations, with
increasingly imperialist ideals and needs for bio-political control, and the
political idea of ‘race’. As Goldberg (2002) shows us, in the post-war period
the persistence of racism is not the result of some agreed-upon policy but
rather of the continuation of a logic of racial historicism that remains
undisturbed despite the atrocities of the Holocaust. Whereas these events led to
the call to arms to eradicate naturalist racism ‘wherever it raises its ugly
head’, they did not by association result in the targeting of what may appear to
be its more subtle or ambivalent variant. On the contrary, because of the
readiness to dismiss naturalism as irrational and unscientific ‘racism persists
behind the façade of a historicism parading itself as uncommitted to racist
expression in its traditional sense’ (Goldberg, 2002: 210). This state of
affairs leads Goldberg to describe the condition of post-war western states as
being one of ‘racelessness’: because ‘race’ does not exist neither, by
association, does racism as a problem that deserves political attention. In
fact, it is precisely this that is at the core of the historicist vision
according to Goldberg. Racelessness
is achievable only by the presumptive elevation of whiteness silently as
(setting) the desirable standards, the teleological norms of civilised social
life, even as it seeks to erase the traces of exclusions necessary to its
achievement along the way.
ibid.: 206
The racelessness of whiteness and its standardisation as the norm has led to the
installation of so-called colourblindness as a system for making possible the
denial of racism as a real experience while ensuring the de facto persistence of
discrimination against those who in fact cannot be whitened. As defined by
Goldberg (ibid.: 223),
Racially understood, colourblindness is committed to seeing and not seeing all
as white, though not all as ever quite, while claiming to see those
traditionally conceived as ‘of colour’ and yet colourless.
It is impossible to ignore the role that the discourse and practice of
mainstream anti-racism has played in bringing this to bear. As I demonstrated in
the previous section, the widely influential UNESCO Tradition of anti-racism
individualises racism as a problem of pseudo-science and proposes alternative
definitions of difference such as culture and ethnicity. It thus succeeds in
circumventing the problem of racism by denying the role played by the state in
its origins and perpetuation or, in Goldberg’s terms, by refusing to recognise
the growing hegemony of historicist views of unquestioned universalism,
racelessness and colourblindness. This failure is not confined to the authors of
the UNESCO declaration but has become the dominant view supporting state action
against racism and the activity of one, and in some contexts dominant, type of
anti-racism: one which denies the importance of grounding its actions in the
lived experience of the racialised and promotes a universalised vision of
equality that individualises humanity without seeing how racism refuses the
individuality, and thus the humanity, of non-white, non-Europeans.
It is to this problem in anti-racist discourse as the basis for action that I
wish to turn in concluding this paper. This is a thorny subject because it
could, by being misread, be confused with the ideological stances against
anti-racism taken by authors such as Pierre-André Taguieff (1989; 1991; 1995).
It must therefore be stressed that, as a rule, the failure of certain forms of
anti-racism to ignore the relationship between ‘race’ and state and to deny the
importance of racialisation by stressing the primacy of individual rights
emanates from a will to do ‘good’ and bring about change. The problem with many
solidaristic movements in general however is precisely this; because by wanting
to bring about justice they also assume that they are privy to knowledge about
the roots of discrimination that does not necessitate consulting with those
primarily affected by it. Furthermore, the hegemony of rights-based solutions to
discrimination including racism is such that it is increasingly being adopted by
black and ‘minority’-led groups as the only means of having their voices heard.
In particular, the paradigm which I argue must today be submitted to serious
scrutiny is that of ‘human rights’ as promoted through the activism of a wide
variety of organisations including those with an anti-racist agenda.
Human rights discourse cannot be divorced from the regime of racial historicism
governing the practices of western states towards non-whites and non-Europeans.
It is ultimately, although in many cases certainly unknowingly, compliant with
this system because it accepts the notion of racelessness and promotes a
universalistic vision of humanity that fails to question its relationship with
racism (Balibar, 1991a, 1991b). These two problems cannot be separated from each
other. The discourse of human rights seems to accept racelessness by emphasising
the primacy of the individual, separated from her context. In other words, it
equates the admittance of ‘race’ as a factor with discrimination on racial
grounds itself, rather than revealing how racism continues to operate under the
guise of historicist progress, which in turn relies on promoting the belief that
‘race’ has no meaning. It thus succumbs to the view, that historicism promotes
under the auspices of racelessness, that ‘racial histories’ and the injustices
they engender (Goldberg, 2002) can be passed over on the way to an era defined
only by individual access to opportunity.
This problem is compounded by the second interrelated one, namely that human
rights’ promotion of a universalised individualism fails to deal with the
relationship between universalism and racism demonstrated by Balibar (1991a,
1991b). As Goldberg reveals, the ideal of racelessness is not extended to
include whiteness, which is de-raced. Therefore, the aims of colourblind policy
for example hold only those of colour in their sight, ‘conjur[ing] people of
colour as a problem in virtue of their being of colour, in so far as they are
not white’ (Goldberg, 2002: 223). Like racelessness, universalistic human rights
also fail to question the standards set by the very people they see as
irrelevant, namely ‘whites’ or westerners. They are the setters of standards
because their hegemony is assured; it is assured because the standards have been
set in their own image. It is this that Balibar speaks of when he describes
racism and universalism as each containing the other inside itself: a universal
vision of humanity cannot be constructed without reference being made to that
which it excludes, and so the universalism of Europeans was constructed in their
own image yet set as norm.
Human rights is in many respects a naïve discourse but one which has several
questionable repercussions. It both avoids and compounds the problem posed by
failing to problematise whiteness and seeing it as inextricably bound up with
the ideal vision of humanity which we are all encouraged to attain in the
interests of greater equality and liberty. By avoiding a discussion of how this
norm was institutionalised, namely through the historical practice of racism
which ensured the dominance of the ‘Anglo-European moral tradition’ (Goldberg,
2002: 224), human rights participates in compounding the logic of racial
historicism. It does so also by refusing to admit the impossibility of equality
as premised on the assumption that each and every individual has the opportunity
to attain the humanity encapsulated by the universalist vision. Simply, if the
universalistic ideal of humanity is founded upon the European, white model it
will simply not be possible for the Others that human rights seek to protect to
gain entrance to that community of individuals. This is not to say that
individual freedom and the equality of rights is not a noble cause and that
rather we should fall back on a cultural relativism that too ignores the
heterogeneity and internal conflicts within so-called cultures. On the contrary,
I am arguing that the choice between human rights and cultural relativism is a
wholly artificial one because both rely on a view of humanity as organised
according to differential levels of progress. While cultural relativists
unproblematically accept that this situation of diversity may remain a permanent
one, human rights advocates seek to bring about a uniformity of humanity
predicated on the ideal of equal rights. What neither position sees is that they
both tacitly assume the existence of a (superior) model of humanness against
which those conceived of either as culturally different or fundamentally
subordinate can be perceived and towards which they may, it is assumed, progress
over time.
As the West is plunged into yet another phase of obsession with the ‘spectre’ of
immigration, fuelled by the addition of the dimension of terrorism to the asylum
nexus, the issues raised here take on greater importance. The solutions proposed
to racism in the post-war period have engendered a number of policies, from
assimilation to multiculturalism and from integration to diversity-management,
none of which has grappled with the problem that defines the persistence of
racism, namely the relationship between ‘race’ and state perpetuated by
historicism. Even the recognition of institutional racism brought to light by
the Macpherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK (1999) has
failed, for obvious reasons, to go beyond admitting failures at the level of
practices and organisational cultures. The facility with which these problems
have been separated from the racial histories of the British state are hardly
surprising given the way in which racelessness, as Goldberg so expertly
demonstrates, allows for the condemnation of racism to coexist with the
assumptions about human capabilities or desirabilities implied by ‘race’. In
order to indeed work towards the equal rights of all in a time of acute racism
at the level of state and society across the West, it will be necessary to
reveal the fact that such rights come neither with an absence of historical
baggage nor are they politically neutral. By revealing the role that mainstream
anti-racism has played in culturalising and ethnicising the language of
difference so obscuring the irrefutable reciprocity between racism and the
modern nation-state it may be seen how the campaign against racism itself cannot
be left out of this vital and far from complete reflection.
References
Arendt, Hannah (1966) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York & London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Balibar, Etienne (1991a) ‘Is There a “Neo-Racism”?’, in Etienne Balibar and
Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London: Verso;
17-28.
Balibar, Etienne (1991b) ‘Racism and Nationalism’, in Etienne Balibar and
Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London: Verso;
37-67.
Balibar, Etienne (1991c) ‘Class Racism’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel
Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London: Verso; 204-216.
Balibar, Etienne (1994) Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on politics and
philosophy before and after Marx, New York: Routledge.
Barker, Martin (1983) ‘Empiricism and Racism’, Radical Philosophy, Spring; 6-15.
Bauman, Zygmunt (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bonnett, Alaistair (2000) Anti-Racism, London and New York: Routledge.
Comas, Juan (1961) ‘“Scientific” Racism Again?’ Current Anthropology 2(4);
3010-340.
Foucault, Michel (1997) Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France,
1976, Paris: Gallimard Seuil.
Gilroy, Paul (2000) Between Camps: Nations, cultures and the allure of race.
London: Allen Lane.
Goldberg, David Theo (2002) The Racial State, Malden, Mass. and Oxford:
Blackwell.
Hannaford, Ivan (1996) Race: The history of an idea in the West, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hesse, Barnor (1999) ‘“It’s Your World”: Discrepant M/multiculturalisms’, in
Phil Cohen (Ed.), New Ethnicities, Old Racism, London : Zed Books.
Lentin, Alana (2002) ‘Wherever it Raises its Ugly Head’ Anti-Racism and the
Public Political Culture of the Nation-State: A political sociology of European
anti-racist discourse and praxis, PhD thesis. Florence: European University
Institute.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1975) ‘Race and History’, in Race, Science and Society,
New York: Whiteside and Morrow, for UNESCO.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1983) ‘Race et culture’, in Le Regard Eloigné, Paris:
PLON.
MacMaster, Neil (2002) Racism in Europe 1870-2000, Houndmills: Palgrave.
Meyer, Michael A. and Brenner, Michael (1996) German-Jewish History in Modern
Times, Volume II, New York: Columbia University Press.
Mosse, George (1978) Towards the Final Solution: A history of European racism,
London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
Nicholson, Philip Yale (1999) Who Do We Think We Are? Race and nation in the
modern world. Armonk NY and London: M.E. Sharpe.
‘The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry’ (1999) Report of an Inquiry by Sir William
MacPherson of Cluny, Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the
Home Department by Command of Her Majesty. London: The Stationary Office.
Stolcke, Verena (1996) ‘Talking Culture: New boundaries, new rhetorics of
exclusion in Europe’, Current Anthropology 36(1)1995; 1-24.
Taguieff, Pierre-André (1989) La Force du prejugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses
doubles, Paris: La Découverte.
Taguieff, Pierre-André, Ed. (1991) Face au racisme 1: Les moyens d’agir, Paris:
La Découverte.
Taguieff, Pierre-André (1995) Les fins de l’antiracisme, Paris: Michalon.
Traverso, Enzo (1996) Pour une critique de la barbarie moderne: Ecrits sur
l’histoire des Juifs et de l’antisémitisme, Lausanne: Editions Page Deux, 1996.
UNESCO (1968) ‘UNESCO Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice’, Current
Anthropology 9(4); 270-272.
Voegelin, Eric (trans. Ruth Heim) (1933[2000]) Race and State, Baton Rouge and
London: Louisiana State University Press.
----------------------------------------------------
World Bank and the
privatization of public university:
a South-North analysis.
Gian Carlo Delgado-Ramos
Autonomous University of Barcelona
PhD candidate on Environmental Sciences
giandelgado@hotmail.com
Co-author with John Saxe-Fernández of
“Imperialism and World Bank” (Editorial Popular. Spain, 2004)
Abstract
The impacts and consequences of privatizing the public university in the
North and the South are already of mayor order because, among other issues, ‘the
market’ is reconfiguring the quantity and type of eligible students, programs’
structures, teaching procedures, as well as the kind of science and technology
that should be carried out. The effects on the skill characteristics of labor,
the ‘marriage’ between corporations and universities, the brain drain phenomena,
and the level of technological (in)dependency of nations would be some of the
topics to be discussed from the perspective of the World Bank’s key role in such
process.
Key words: World Bank, higher education, privatization, public university.
What’s the World Bank?
After World War II, the architects of the World Bank (WB) and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), says correctly Joyce and Gabriel Kolko,
“…designed [them] not merely to implement disinterested principles but to
reflect the United States’ control of the majority of the world’s monetary gold
and its ability to provide a large part or its future capital. The IBRD [WB] was
tailored to give a governmentally assured framework for future private
investment, much of which would be American.”
Afterward, it is not a surprise that United States, the “winner” of the War,
holds until now an important percentage of the vote power within the World Bank
Group, particularly in the main divisions. As is known, the World Bank is formed
by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBDR) – 1944; the
International Finance Corporation (IFC) – 1956; the International Development
Association (IDA) – 1960; the International Centre for Settlement of Investment
Disputes (ICSID) – 1966; and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA)
– 1988.
United States holds a 16.39% of the vote power in the IBDR and a 23.68% in the
IFC (the main division that moves private investments worldwide). Considering
that it is needed an 80% of votes to approve any resolution within the Bank,
United States has a veto power. A similar condition has that country within the
IMF with a 14.17% of the vote power in a context where an 85% of the vote power
is needed to approve resolutions.
Considering the above one can understand better why at that time, the former
president of the US Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, explained that under the WB
stimulus, “…international trade and international investment can be carry out on
by businessmen on business principles.”
For example, the just mentioned above, it is finely reflected within the IFC. It
operates under a pack of “working clusters” and each one under another or
several clusters more. In the “BPD – Water & Sanitation Cluster” one may find at
the end of the chain of clusters some of the business partners of the WB such as
Vivendi, Ondeo (Suez), Thames Water, etc. In the “BPD – Natural Resources
Cluster” actors like Conservation International, USAID, WTO, Inter American
Development Bank (IBD), etcetera. In the “BPD – Global Partnership for Youth
Development”: American Express, Cisco Systems, Kellogg Company, Microsoft, Nike
Corporation, USAID, and etcetera. Other working clusters have relationships with
multinational corporations, must of them American, such as some of the mentioned
before.
The WB and the commodification of higher education
In 1998, the WB published a report on The Financing and Management of Higher
Education in which it is presented the worldwide agenda for the educative
reform. With the goal of adjusting the education system to “actual and future
needs”, the WB followed the ‘suggestion’ of Frans van Vught -rector at
University of Twente (Netherlands) - by stating that, “…the reform agenda of the
90s, and almost certainly extending well into the next century, is oriented to
the market rather than to public ownership or to governmental planning and
regulation.” Therefore, said the WB, the fundamental concepts of the WB Agenda
are: privatization, deregulation and the orientation to the market.
Leaving aside the long historical experience of the European University as the
production vortex of humanism and scientific knowledge, and as a public figure,
the WB argues that the education and the science and technology (S&T) are
commodities, and consequently manageable by ‘market solutions’. This means that
education is framed in a context of limited supply and that it is available for
a price.
Also, if we see the other side, the demand side, actually financing it has a
peculiar meaning. In WB’s words this has to do with the fact that “…when the
government shifts costs to the students, it must introduce a parallel system of
financial assistance”. Consequently, among the measures listed by the WB Report
are:
a) The introduction of, or substantial increases in, tuition and full –cost fees
into higher education sector.
b) Charging the full cost fees for institutionally-provided room and board.
c) Introduction of means tested grants and loans.
d) Offering student loans based on market rates of interests
e) Improving the students’ loans payments by subcontracting private companies.
f) Implementing a tax fee to all graduated students.
g) Encouraging the philanthropy for endowment, for direct operations, and for
scholarships to students.
h) Improve the ‘quality’ of education by an entrepreneurial training.
i) Selling the research, instructions and all services via grants or contracts.
j) Incrementing the number of private institutions with a constant decrease of
the public ones.
One of the WB’s justifications for implementing such pack of guidelines, reads
as follows: “…much of what may look like the agenda of the neoliberal economist
may also be more opportunistic than ideological. With taxes increasingly
avoidable and otherwise difficult to collect and with competing public needs so
compelling on all countries, an increasing reliance on tuition, fees and the
unleashed entrepreneurship of the faculty may be the only alternative to a
totally debilitating austerity.”
The necessity of reducing what seems to be assumed as a “non-productive”
spending in order to save money for other needs (such as public health, public
safety or public infrastructure) vanishes when we consider that the whole public
sector is being privatized under similar excuses. That privatization tendency
-which is being assumed by the conventional wisdom as the only alternative for
economic growth- has responded to the private interest of looting the public
sector (first by the public asset’s sales and then by milking the public
treasury). This is a process that particularly in the South, far from
stimulating the investment on public demands and productive processes, it is
misusing the public treasury (which now includes the money obtained by the
privatization processes) with real non-productive payments such as the external
debt interests or by covering the expenses that financial and other
privatization frauds constantly leave behind. This means in lingua franca the
denationalization of the periphery’s strategic infrastructure and public
treasury to benefit the multinational corporations of the North and its
governments.
In addition, by fomenting the “entrepreneurship”, the WB’s reforms are reducing,
even more, the power of the academic and scientific staff to define the research
and development (R&D) agenda. Now is the “market” the one that decides, and it
does not matter if there is a divorce between the problems that affect our
societies and the national R&D agendas. In this context, it is important to
point out that the conventional wisdom, like the one of the WB, is constantly
using a linguistic code useful to cover the actors that are behind the so called
“market forces” and the business that they are doing. The “market” does not
demand but, instead, the CEOs of multinational corporations do.
For the WB, “…a greater reliance on market signals brings a shift in decision
making power not just from government, but also from higher educational
institutions –and specially from the faculty- to the consumer or client, whether
student, business, or the general public.” This should be seen as a WB’s
campaign against the “traditional University” and the supposed “excessive power
of the professorate” with the final goal of commercialized higher education
under the argumentation of seeking quality and efficiency. Such
commercialization is already generating 365 billions of dollars on earnings
worldwide for the auctioning of courses, trainees, etcetera. A business that may
be even more juicy if the higher education is consider as a commodity under the
General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).
In order to achieve such quality and efficiency, the WB assures that it is
required “a greater productivity”. And adds that, “…the principal higher
educational productivity problems lie not so much with excessive costs (sic),
but with insufficient learning”. Thus, the next step for the WB is to compromise
the universities’ budget to a commercially verifiable evaluation of their
performance. That supposes standardized indicators focus on diverse criteria and
interests articulated by entrepreneurs and other businessmen.
For example, says the WB, “…among Mexican universities there is an increasing
realization that regular operating subsidies from the government will not grow.
Hence, they must be entrepreneurial, earning extra income and involving faculty
and students in this effort. Some of the departments are beginning to generate
income on their own through the sale of services, specialized courses, etc. Even
in disciplines where this was once unthinkable, it is happening by imitation.”
In this same direction the WB’s Country Assistance Strategy 2002-2006 (for
Mexico) also promotes a “new educative culture” in which “…supervisor and parent
participation will have to focus less on process and more on actual results, as
measured by published student scores in standardized national tests.” Hence, it
seems that there is no longer important what is being taught.
Following the WB’s instructions, the Mexican government announced at the
beginning of 2004 its intention to determine extra-budget to the application of
standardized proficiency tests at universities. Afterward, such extra budget
-said the Government- would come as a result of the interest of the private
sector to finance efficiency and quality in Mexican universities. One may
clarify that in reality there is no public extra-budget for universities but
instead a huge reduction while it is replaced by highly conditioned private
loans, donations or other kind of agreements. In addition, the remaining public
budget is refuntionalized because, as the WB says, “…Mexican government is very
keen to increase demand-side financing –that is, financing students rather than
institutions, to improve access to higher education.”
Ironically, while the economic crisis goes deeper and the salaries shrink to an
unsustainable point, the tendency of privatizing the higher education is
reducing dramatically the enrollments because the public options are becoming
limited. Thus, by placing the private institutions as the remaining
alternatives, the higher education is turning into a commodity that only middle
and high classes are able to purchase. In this scenario, the ranking system of
higher education can be better understood because it clearly responds to the
capitalism necessity of ranking the workforce in relation to the amount of money
that the client (student) was “willing” to pay.
The WB knows the “costs” indicated above when it recognizes that in Latin
America, “…the statistics indicate that the proportion of students attending
private institutions has more than double over the last 15 years. But at the
same time the proportion of people being educated nation wide is dropping in a
preoccupating rhythm.”
Such tendency along with the recent technical nature of middle and higher
education is better understood if we analyze briefly the worldwide composition
of workforce and the South-North / North-South transfers.
Educating the worldwide workforce
As it can be seen in the image below, the left block corresponds to the
North and the right one to the South. While in the South the group of illiterate
persons (I) can be in some countries as huge as the half of the population, in
the North, it just represents a small percentage. A similar affinity can be
verified in the non-qualified (Nq) segment, which represents the population with
primary education.
The group of qualified of 3rd class (Q3rd) corresponds to those with technical
training in middle school. In the North it represents a short proportion of the
total workforce. In the South it figures as the third biggest segment of our
whole block of the worldwide workforce composition, but of course it is smaller
than the I and Nq groups.
The qualified of 2nd class (Q2nd) with high school training, either humanistic,
scientific or technical, are the most important segments of the worldwide
“qualified” workforce in the North and the South. The difference is that this
type of workers are considered in the South as technicians and in the North
-this last type of workers- corresponds to the group of qualified of first class
(Q1st) which have a bachelor degree on technical areas and, in a less
proportion, master degrees on technical specializations.
The group of scientists of 2nd class (S2nd), those with master and doctoral
training that do basic activities in S&T research, is the most reduced segment
of all, excluding the scientists of 1st class (S1st) which are involved in the
development of advance science and high-tech researches. It is important here to
point out that the S2nd and S1st are bigger groups in the North than in the
South mainly because of the considerable support they received in comparison
with their counterpart of the South (among other reasons).
The tendency in the North is to expand the group of S1st and S2nd along with the
reduction of the groups below (at least in the areas with mayor private
investments). In the South the tendency is the expansion of the group of Q3rd
and, in less proportion, the Q2nd group in order to have enough trained workers
able to operate and fix the machines used by a growing multinational maquila
production in those nations. The groups below could be slightly reduced but it
will depend on the stimulus generated by the demand of Q3rd and Q2nd.
The transfers of more S2nd and S1st from the South to the North it is an
expected fact because of the lack of budget and other kind of support in the
periphery. For example in Mexico the National Council of Science and Technology
(Conacyt) has just canceled the mechanisms for repatriation of scientists in a
moment where the former president of that institution has proudly announced that
the brain drain phenomena should not be seen as that but either as the natural
exportation of “Mexican ambassadors”. That statement could not be more precisely
coming from a member of a presidency lead by an ex-manager of Coca-Cola!
In contrast, the legal transfer of the rest of the working force from the South
to the North will have to continue strictly controlled in order to push down the
salaries of the working class in the North as a result of the illegal labor
market (mostly composed by I and Nq foreign workers) “willing” to do the worst
jobs by less money.
All the mentioned above it is a result of the application of neoliberal policies
that the WB and its loans have been promoting worldwide with the active
participation of the “country managers” of the WB in each nation (meaning the
power elite of Latin America’s countries –as the ex president of Costa Rica,
Rodrigo Carazo called them). For example, in Chile since 1981 most of the
education sector has been privatized; in Argentina, the 1995 Higher Education
Law lets the universities decide whether or not they want to charge fees and; in
Mexico there has been a constant pressure for the privatization of public
universities and their research, particularly in the UNAM, the biggest
university in Latin America that ranked 1st place in the region based on data of
the Academic Ranking of World Universities 2003. The social movements opposing
the privatization of the UNAM have been considered by the WB as a “fiercely
resistance”, hence one of the WB’s last moves was clearly expressed in the
Country Assistance Strategy 2002-2006 when it compromises the Mexican government
to “…change the culture in Mexico’s education system, a change that will take
time but that can start during the current sexenio.” This is the WB telling a
nation State what “should do” or more precisely, what most do (of course, if it
want to keep opened the flow of WB`s loans and, in order to extend the loans’
deadlines).
The privatization of Science and Technology (S&T)
Besides, as mentioned before, other type of arrangements in most
universities –and even in middle education institutes- have been those with
enterprises seeking to finance informatic centers, libraries or other
infrastructure going from research laboratories to garbage management sites. The
conditionality is diverse and ranges from the participation of the private
sector in the evaluation and actualization of study plans and the rights to
patent innovations generated by public universities, to the concession to manage
garbage.
The privatization of S&T is one of the most worrying issues, especially in the
South (but also in the North as for instance the Berkeley-Novartis experience
demonstrates ). The WB’s Millennium Science Initiative (MSI) is an attempt to
promote the privatization of those activities by supporting and stimulating the
operations of its corporations in what may be called the Latin America’s
education business sector. The result is not only the privatization of S&T but
also the denationalization of any scientific and technological advance achieved
by the South.
Holm-Nielsen, a specialist on higher education from the WB explains that the
MSI, “…is an umbrella for new lending, through which the Bank’s client countries
can borrow to improve their scientific and technological capacity. Projects
under the MSI generally take the form highly selective competitive funds to
support research. These funds will differ according to a country’s specific
needs and circumstance, but they share a few essential characteristics. All MSI
project would provide targeted support that focuses on (i) research excellence;
(ii) human resources training; and (iii) linked to partners in the international
science community and in the private sector.”
This third point is the most important because researches of “high excellence”
are being linked to others of major size but done by the universities and/or
industries of the North (holding, the last ones, the exclusivity of the
strategic areas). Even with the WB participating “only as a supervisor”, its
role is more than just that. The WB is in reality consolidating a subsidy in
behalf of the private sector because the WB’s loans under the figure of the MSI
at the end are going to be paid by the WB’s client countries. Meanwhile all the
benefits would be privatized and mostly denationalized.
The tools used by the MSI, says Holm-Nielsen, are “…a variety of mechanisms to
stimulate research commercialization, and to place students in private
industry.” In this manner, with the deplete of qualified workforce in favor of
the private sector (national and foreign) that was trained with public money,
the WB and its MSI indicates that the countries will get nothing but debts
because the MSI do not allows to finance any type of infrastructure. These ones
would have to be covered with other funds (public? private? both?) since among
the MSI loans' conditions there is one that reads as follow: “…the MSI projects
will fund the performance of the research itself where it is found, and not the
construction of buildings or major infrastructure for new centers or
institutes.”
One of the MSI programs was born within the conformation of the Science
Institutes Group, dedicated to “promote development by closing the gaps in S&T
between the developed and developing worlds”. It is financed mainly by the WB
and the Packard Foundation to, “…garner support for revitalizing science
research in the developing world”. Among such “efforts” it figures the first MSI
project lunched in Chile (1999) and where one of the enterprises involved was
Microsoft. Other projects, like this one, were approved for Venezuela (April of
2000) and Brazil (2001).
Final thoughts
The commoditization of higher education –including R&D- is an issue that in
1908 Torstein Veblen warned about. For Veblen the introduction of market
principles is the main force that would convert teaching and researching
“…meanly into a commodity to be produced, evaluated, purchased and sold.”
The implications are of major order because the public University veers away
from public national interests losing the criticism capacity and the domestic
generation of knowledge while multinational corporations are placed as “the
agent” that defines what and how to do research, and what should not be taught
and researched.
In the case of the South, it is increasing the penetration of foreign interests
as a result of the lack of initiative that historically has characterized most
of the periphery’s businessmen to encourage a national S&T research body of high
quality. Instead of placing the public University as an active actor in the
re-production cycle of their countries, a structure well known by the North
countries, the power elite of the South (or the WB’s country managers) is
privatizing and denationalizing one of the most important pillars of
development.
Cuba’s education system and pharmaceutical industry -even with all the
observations that one may made- is a good example of what the power elite in the
South is not doing and should do, considering the domestic necessities,
capacities and potentialities.
----------------------------------------------------
Feminist Roundtable questions – CASA meeting,
5.07.04:
Brief intro into how we organized the roundtable: each participant wrote one or
more questions onto a piece of paper, which we placed in a hat. Then we split up
in small groups of 4-5 people and each one in the group drew a random question
from the hat, which we then discussed in the small group. In the end each group
presented their questions/discussions to the large group.
1. Is there a solidarity between lesbianism and feminism?
2. Is radical feminism the ‘true’ feminism?
3. Does the multitude of feminism(s) lead to the falling apart of feminism?
4. A lot of our theorizing today has been strongly influenced by feminist
scholarship. How do we understand this impact and how does it (or does it?) have
implications for our practice in different contexts?
5. Is there a feminist agenda today in the academy and in wider politics?
6. Is feminism about women’s issues only?
7. How, in what way, can feminist research/activism make explicit their choices
to include and exclude issues/persons/politics?
8. Feminism also has to (must) make decisions to exclude / of exclusion?
9. How to bring the ‘personal is political’ into daily practice? (inside and
outside the university)
10. Is it still necessary to base a movement/theory on sex/gender?
11. Did feminism end up in just being ‘gender mainstreaming’?
12. Do we (feminists) reinstall sexism?
13. Where did/do you feel the chances and frustrations of feminist practice lie?
What choices did/do you make in the face of these?
14. What could be the probable reasons for feminist movement not being able to
expand its social base? I mean it still consists mostly of females and there has
been little participation from males.
15. What are the goals of feminist movement? Is it going beyond building of an
equal society for both sexes and replacing patriarchy with matriarchy?
16. How is your personal feminist project (activist/research) related to you
personal experiences?
17. From a feminist perspective what are the political implications of our
research / activism?
18. Is practicing feminist research necessarily/automatically a political
act/activism?
19. What does the East/West division mean?
20. In a backlash of feminism where many young women and men of all genders do
not embrace the term how to we do effective feminist work?
21. Is feminism’s goal to deconstruct gender binaries and create a fluidity of
gender?
22. Do you feel the need to convince others of the great importance of your
feminist project? Of your being right?
23. Is striving for change/transformation the basis of feminism – and is this so
for feminist research (necessarily)?
24. Looking at reality through feminist spectacles does sometimes provoke you a
sense of not enjoying reality completely?
25. How is your personal feminist project (activist or research) related to the
concept of solidarity?
26. How do you imagine feminist interventions (academic, practical, theoretical)
and how does this work in practice?
27. Feminism – a broad concept for social change? But why then feminism?
28. How did/do you try to engage in a dialogue or alliance, while simultaneously
trying not to obscure the differences between partners/allies?
29. What are your feminist desires and beliefs? What is for you feminist
activism or research? Are there principles you follow?
30. Is there an antifeminist backlash and do we have to start over again?
31. How does feminist theory reach/affect the everyday reality of women outside
academia?
32. Is feminism your ‘main’ emancipatory project? Why/how?
33. Do you have experiences of major clashes with (other) feminists in basic
principles?
34. As the subject is research in the streets and I was homeless can feminism
also have as a theme the deconstruction of (patriarchal) reality? Such as for
instance criticizing mainstream types of buildings and homes?
----------------------------------------------------