Equal rights as the center of democratization

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Notes

1. Alan Gilbert's Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), chap. 5, stresses equal individual rights as the core of a democratic conception [cited hereafter as MGPCD?].

2. John Rawls’ Law of Peoples [hereafter LP] makes rights basic to an international conception. As a constructivist, however, and rightly wanting to deter any imperial imposing of ‘rights’ at gun-point, he weakens the basic rights, for example those of women, in ‘well ordered hierarchies.’ For an argument that every person is objectively capable of human rights and that the denial of such rights, in any historical situation, involves real harms, see Gilbert, Democratic Individuality, chap. 1 [cited hereafter as DI].

For an important discussion of deliberative democracy, see Josh Cohen and Charles Sabel's ‘Directly-deliberative Polyarchy,’ which James Bohman cites.

3. Bohman, 182.

4. Gilbert, MGPCD? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Press, 1999).

5. Both Clinton and Bush intoned it.

6. Robert Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Some features of the European Union, Bohman suggests, are cooperative in a way which the International Monetary Fund or World Trade Organization are not. See also Gilbert, MGPCD?, chap. 1.

7. For example, Europeans can study in any of the member countries, and many study in diverse settings and in other languages than their own.

8. To improve a Rawlsian formulation, however, a proponent of Rawls’ view could consistently adapt them.

9. Some years ago, the effort of Brussels to impose quasi-American restrictions on, say, the use of worms in Italy to make certain kinds of cheese is but one extreme example.

As one concrete suggestion, Bohman rightly urges more of a role for the European Parliament.

10. I use Samuel Huntington's term but for the opposite of Huntington's reactionary purposes. Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), chap. 1.

11. Despite the fact of popular and even United Nations resistance, however, that Bush succeeded in launching the war also demoralized many people in the movement. More serious forms of civil disobedience and resistance are necessary to have a chance to stop such wars. Note that there were also huge international movements, led by leftwing Social Democrats and Communists against World Wars I and II. But world wars are notoriously hard to stop. That one has not yet achieved such huge multinational victories, against all odds, is no argument against nonetheless trying. In my judgment, popular movements came amazingly close to stopping the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq; only the complete unreality of Bush and Cheney, the cowardice of most Congressional Democrats, and the fecklessness of the mainstream media in the USA enabled the invasion.

12. His escalation of the evil and counterproductive occupation of Afghanistan, however, reveals the limits of a common good. See Gilbert, ‘Corrupt,’ http://www.democratic-individuality.blogspot.com (accessed December 1, 2009).

13. On torture, alleged reporting in the New York Times commonly says: ‘some hold waterboarding is torture.’ They do not acknowledge that the name reflects international and American law. By the same logic, a reporter might say: some think murder is a bad thing. See also Gilbert, ‘Tortured Reportings,’ http://www.democratic-individuality.blogspot.com (accessed August 24, 2009).

14. These movements propelled the vote against the Iraq War in the UN Security Council. Why does Bohman see only the latter, not the former?

15. Bohman, 55–6.

16. Ibid., 62–3.

17. See Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith, eds., Globalization from Below (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000).

18. The WTO is dominated by a group of seven nations, with the USA playing a lead role. Only commercial lobbyists are allowed to testify. Before 1999, the WTO had overruled on behalf of capitalism all the environmentally protective, human rights sustaining democratic legislation from particular nations that had come before it. Lori Wallach and Michelle Sforza, Whose Trade Organization? (Washington, DC: Citizen Press, 2001).

19. That oligarchy, in this case corrupt medical insurance companies, rules can be seen in Congress's barring even of advocacy in testimony of single payer universal health care and stripping of a public option, even for a small percentage, from the final bill. The latter would, as its opponents emphasized, have lowered costs, ostensibly a leading purpose of these very opponents.

20. Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and US Secretary of Energy, has suggested that California may lose its agriculture and become a desert, unable to sustain cities: ‘I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what will happen. We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California. I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going either.’ Johann Hari, ‘The Way out of the Credit and the Climate Crunch is the Same—a Green New Deal,’ The Guardian, April 3, 2003.

21. Whether such protests can limit, however, his escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan remains to be seen.

22. Rawls, LP, 128. This was Rawls's last work before he died. The citation from Kant's Rechtslehre is: ‘If justice perishes, then it is no longer worthwhile for men to live upon the earth.’

23. In America, one might also note, the international and domestic movement from below about food have resulted in Michelle Obama planting an organic garden at the White House with the aid of the White House cooks and local high-school students. This is not yet an institutional accomplishment, say, outlawing factory farms or tax relief for organic production, but it will lead to important policy and institutional results.

Jose Bove, along with other French farmers, destroyed McDonald's and has participated, at the World Social Forum, in uprooting genetically-modified organism (gmo) crops in Brazil. He is part of a mainly legal, but occasionally extralegal movement against the transformation of food into ‘food-like’ substances which do not nourish.

24. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 226. As he puts it in Political Liberalism, 357–8.

[T]he institutional arrangements must not impose any undue burdens on the various political groups in society and must affect them all in an equitable manner. Plainly, what counts as an undue burden is itself a question, and in any particular case is to be answered by reference to the purpose of achieving the fair value of the political liberties. For example, the prohibition of large contributions from private persons or corporations to political candidates is not an undue burden (in the requisite sense) on wealthy persons and groups. Such a prohibition may be necessary so that citizens similarly gifted and motivated have roughly an equal chance of influencing the government's policy and attaining positions of authority irrespective of their economic and social class. It is precisely this equality which defines the fair value of the equal liberties.

Rousseau, whom Rawls studied and taught, speaks of the ‘empire of opinion’ dominated by the rich.

25. Bohman, 67, 68–9.

26. Gilbert, DI; MGPCD?

27. Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy (New York: Broadway Books, 2002).

28. Gilbert, DI, chap. 8. See Gilbert's ‘Equality and Social Theory in Rawls’ A Theory of Justice’ The Occasional Review, special issue on Rawls and Nozick, 1978.

29. This remains true even with the Democrats. With struggle from below, remarkably different political possibilities—some realizing a common good to a considerable extent—exist under oligarchy.

30. With the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1998, corporations could become mega-banks, and AIG, but also GE and GM established large banking sectors and increasingly discovered the seemingly unending profitability of the financial sphere. Over the past 20 years, they have transformed America from a productive economy into a mainly financial or speculative, casino economy.

31. Unwilling, as a Democrat—a party which is financed and influenced by the banks, medical insurance companies, oil and other corporation—to challenge oligarchy, Obama has not so far, despite economic collapse, taken up this possibility.

32. This statistic includes those who have given up looking for work and those with part-time jobs who would take fulltime jobs if available. In consultation with some people at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, David Leonhardt has developed this figure in the New York Times.

33. In his later writings, Rawls’ downplaying of even the difference principle ironically accompanies an increasing emphasis on combating oligarchy; these two thoughts contradict each other.

34. Aggression against another people is the cardinal moral judgment of and legal principle underlying international law (Article 2, Section 4 of the United Nations Charter). If the Security Council had voted for American and British aggression in Iraq, that decision would not have made the action legal or decent.

35. The pressure of the war complex on Obama, initially inclined toward deescalating belligerence, in fostering the increased occupation in Afghanistan is fierce. See Gilbert, ‘Corrupt,’ http://www.democratic-individuality.blogspot.com (accessed December 3, 2009).

36. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 174–5.

37. Walking near the body of a two-year old floating in the war, even a Fox reporter screamed at anchor Britt Hume: ‘Where's the government?’

38. One might also consider the recent depredations of the Israeli government in Gaza against the elected government of Hamas, a striking counterexample to the inter-democratic peace hypothesis. See also Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2005).

39. Bohman, 183.

40. Jeremy Waldron, ‘Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House’, Columbia Law Review 105 (2005).

41. In the false arrests and environmentally poisonous conditions of confinement of protestors at the 2004 Republican Convention, Mayor Bloomberg, however, would distinguish himself as a would-be tyrant.

42. As Thomas Jefferson said of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798: ‘Now that the Alien Act has attacked the immigrant [removing the Scottish and Irish editors of Republican newspapers], the citizen had better not become too confident, for already has a Sedition Act marked him for its prey.’ Gilbert, MGPCD? epigraph.

43. Prime Minister Gordon Brown was reluctant to do it but understands the importance of the rule of law.

44. They refused to submit themselves for trial.

45. In general, the covert operations wing of the CIA is engaged in aggression (secret operations in Iran), torture, murder, and kidnapping. As one looks over the long series of overthrows of democracies by quasi-secret intervention of the ‘intelligence’ services, one might conclude that abolition of all covert activities over the last 60 years and restriction of such agencies to intelligence collection would have been better for human rights and democracy in the world and for American democracy in particular.

46. In Spain, Judge Balthasar Garzon has initiated investigations for suspicion of committing war crimes, under ‘universal jurisdiction,’ of six Bush administration lawyers and Cheney aides.

47. So is his ambiguous but sometimes condemnatory stance on the recent coup in Honduras.

48. Aristide, President of Haiti, twice. In addition, see Gilbert, ‘A Tale of ‘Powerful Pacifists’: Empire and Political Science’ and ‘Political Science and American Aggressions,’ http://www.democratic-individuality.blogspot.com (accessed October 22 and 24, 2009).

49. Gilbert, MGPCD?, chap. 5 tells of a General's daughter in Honduras who fought with the guerillas and was captured and tortured by Battalion 316 for 80 days. The general threatened to publicize the name of ‘Mr. Mike,’ the CIA officer who oversaw the torture, unless they released her. They did.

50. Some Black Congressional democrats protested vehemently against the American kidnapping of Aristide to the Central African Republic in 2005, but their voices surfaced only on Democracy Now, not in the mendacious mainstream media.

Chalmers Johnson, Blowback. Gilbert, ‘New Institutions for Peace and Democracy’ in The Future of Peace in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Nicholas N. Kittrie, Rodrigo Carazo, James. R. Mancham. (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2003).

51. Rawls, LP. P. 37. Principle 5 states ‘Peoples have the right of self-defense but no right to instigate wars for reasons other than self-defense.’ But this is the central point of the first five principles.

52. Perhaps because America shunned torture during World War II—his experience—and the army has not previously been involved in widespread torture as at Abu Ghraib.

53. Article 6, Section 2 of the Constitution reads: ‘This constitution and the laws of the United States that shall be made pursuant thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States shall be the Supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every state shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.’ American law also explicitly bars torture at 18 U.S.C. 2340 and 2340a.

54. Rawls, LP, 53, and Note 69.

55. Rawls, LP, 50–4. Ironically, the novel combination of the internet and a mass movement enabled Obama to out-fundraise his opponents, without such restrictions. The laws Rawls idealized have long been circumvented.

56. The US Government also overturned democracies in Haiti and Venezuela. The Haitian regime was weak, among other reasons, because Aristide dissolved the army.

57. Bohman, 174.

58. This standard, often self-destroying feature of imperial democracies has been traced by Thucydides for Athens, Machiavelli, and Montequieu for Rome, and stressed by Rousseau and Marx as well as in my MGPCD? and ‘New Institutions for Peace and Democracy.’ MGPCD? uses this central insight from historians and political theorists to criticize internally and revise the leadings versions of realism and neo-realism in international relations.

Bohman has a formulation like mine at 184: ‘Instead of democracies making international relations among states more peaceable, the new constellation of political violence is potentially making democratic states less democratic and less open to applying their standards of human rights and legal due process to those they deem to be threats to security.’

59. Woodrow Wilson and James Burgess, two leading political scientists, regarded ‘Aryan’ or ‘Teutonic’ Germany as a democracy before World War I. In German elections between 1890 and 1914, the German Social-Democratic Party became a leading force, with a large delegation in the Reichstag. The operational declaration that Germany was not a democracy because the Kaiser appointed the cabinet is also spurious. Since World War I is supposedly a paradigm for the inter-democratic peace hypothesis, this fact casts doubt on the latter. See Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

60. Bohman, 174.

61. The 12 billion dollars that ‘disappeared’ under the Transitional Coalition Authority and Jerry Bremer is one striking example.

62. David Rieff has strikingly changed his view, for example. See his At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).