‘Strangers in their own land’: Powellism’s policy impact

ABSTRACT

In this paper, Solomos provides an account of the impact of Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech on policy agendas about race relations and immigration. He argues that Powell’s intervention helped to shape policy frames around race and immigration in its immediate aftermath and beyond. By exploring the impact of the speech on the policy climate, his paper argues that perhaps the most important aspect of the speech is the way it helped to shape the policy agendas of both the Conservative and Labour parties, even as Powell himself was marginalized from mainstream politics. He concludes by suggesting that Powell’s intervention links up with contemporary debates and preoccupations about race and immigration.     

Is unauthorized immigration an immoral act? On David Miller’s ‘weak cosmopolitan’ defense of the right to exclude

While immigration is attracting increasing attention in political theory, there are as yet, few political theorists who adopt a restrictionist stance. With very few exceptions, the most political theorists have offered so far are pragmatic, not principled, defenses of the right to exclude. Looked at in this light, David Miller’s engagingly thoughtful book is surely a welcome and distinctive addition to the burgeoning literature on immigration. But readers who are looking for a normative counterpart to Joseph Carens’ Ethics of Immigration might be disappointed. In fact, the two books display more similarities than one would expect. Most notably, they share a common methodological ground: both reject top-down approaches, which proceed from abstract normative principles and apply these principles to immigration and integration policies. Yet, Miller’s realism reaches farther, giving greater weight to empirical evidence and focusing on institutions instead of on how individuals should act. This institutional focus is a key-defining feature of Miller’s political philosophy of immigration as distinct from an ethics of immigration. However, as I shall argue in the first part of this paper, Miller does not remain faithful to this distinction. He blames unauthorized migrants for acting ‘unfairly.’ But his criticism of irregular migration lacks a sufficient normative and empirical basis. The second part of the paper deals with the question whether legal coercion gives rise to a right to stay. My focus is in particular on the costs that irregular immigrants must bear when they are forced to go back to their countries of origin. These costs tend to be much higher than one expects.     

Solidarity,equality, and freedom in Pettit’s republicanism

This article discusses Pettit’s views of social justice and political legitimacy in On the People’s Terms. Although Pettit’s book presents a powerful account of the ideal of nondomination, this article probes some deficiencies regarding important questions about solidarity, equality, and feasibility.     

Uncertainty,Complexity, and Gamson’s Law: Comparing Coalition Formation in Western Europe

According to Gamson’s Law, the allocation of cabinet portfolios in parliamentary democracies is proportional to the legislative seat shares of the governing parties. However, portfolio allocation departs systematically from perfect proportionality. This paper proposes a theory of portfolio allocation that seeks to explain the variance in proportionality across different bargaining situations. It argues that the degree to which the coalition formation process is characterised by uncertainty and complexity influences portfolio allocation. In uncertain and complex bargaining situations, parties that otherwise would be in an advantageous bargaining position will have a difficult time exploiting their bargaining advantage. As a result, portfolio allocation in such circumstances will be closer to proportionality. These patterns are observed in data on coalition formation in 14 West European parliamentary systems in the period 1945–1999.     

An ‘anti-utopian age?’: Isaiah Berlin’s England,Hannah Arendt’s America,and utopian thinking in dark times

This essay challenges the influential view that Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt played a central role in inaugurating an ‘anti-utopian age’. While the two thinkers certainly did their share to discredit the radical utopian inclination to portray a political blueprint in the abstract, I show that neither was straightforwardly anti-utopian. On the contrary, both thinkers’ writings display a different kind of utopian thinking, consisting in an imaginative and idealized reconstruction of existing polities. Schematically put, Berlin’s utopia was England reconstructed as a quintessential liberal society, whereas Arendt’s utopia was America reconstructed as a quintessential modern free republic. Those two polities differ from each other in important respects, but they share two essential features in common: they are claimed to be exempt from the rise of totalitarianism; and they allegedly give men and women the decent chance to live a fulfilling life. To illustrate Berlin’s and Arendt’s overlapping and yet differing visions, I consider their contrasting responses to the upheaval of 1968 – a possible utopian moment in the late 20th century. While their responses could scarcely be more different, they were informed by their shared desire to imagine an ideal polity in what both regarded as the darkest century in human history.     

Joseph’s Squinting Eye: Race and Individualism in Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country

Peter Matthiessen’s novel Shadow Country offers a fictionalized account of the life of real-life character Edgar Watson. Matthiessen’s portrayal illustrates Jack Turner’s argument in Awakening to Race that atomistic individualism both justifies an individual’s success as a product of that person’s hard work and masks the racial inequality on which that success is actually predicated. Turner advocates an “awakening to race” as an important step toward replacing atomistic individualism with democratic individualism in American society. Matthiessen’s work deepens Turner’s analysis by showing that the whiteness of Watson’s atomistic individualism is inflected by masculinity. Further, Matthiessen depicts the difficulty of awakening to race for many white Americans. The Edgar Watson narrative serves to show that while closing one’s eyes to race may appear to be an advantage for most white people, not awakening to race actually exacts a devastating psychological tax. That kind of insight, which approaching political theory through literature affords, may help white Americans circumvent psychological mechanisms of denial and acknowledge the difficult history of their country.     

Financializing the poor: ‘dead capital’, women’s gold and microfinance in Pakistan

This study examines how Pakistani microfinance banks’ (MFBs) collateralized microcredit arrangements take advantage of the cultural centrality of gold in women’s lives. In so doing, it contributes to the wider debate on financial inclusion and financialization. The product, processes and narratives examined are a local manifestation of global finance’s emphasis on engaging commercially viable means to bring previously ‘unbanked’ populations within its fold. Based on fieldwork in Lahore and Karachi, two of Pakistan’s largest cities, this paper highlights how the ‘financial inclusion’ agenda of microfinance has effectively financialized the lives of poor Pakistani women. Our analysis finds that Pakistani MFBs draw on patriarchy’s hierarchical norms and the precariousness of low-income living in ways which bolster their own financial positions. This is supported by the country’s central bank, which has granted collateralized microfinance products a ‘risk-free’ rating, easing the path to the financialization of jewellery which in a South Asian context is directly associated with women’s social standing and economic security. The outcome is a deepening of deep-seated vulnerabilities.     

Gender,Development and Security in Yemen’s Transition Process

ABSTRACT

How policies at international level approach the gender dimension becomes salient, even urgent, for women whose countries are immersed in war and conflict, and who without effective governance at more local levels, rely entirely on these policies. The way Yemen is presented in the documents and media reports from selected members of the ‘Friends of Yemen’ donor group is in this study discussed in light of a range of narratives identified by Stern and Öjendal (2010) 2005; Cockburn 2007; Henry 2007; Shepherd 2008), ‘gender’ seems to be relevant to international and put into a feminist security perspective. The further aim is to reflect on the inter-linkages of gender, security and development at the level of donor motivations for aid, given on the one hand the recent prominence of the security agenda in the policy discourses of international interventions, and on the other the international attention to women’s contribution to development in Yemen. I ask if a gender dimension is highlighted, subsumed, or absent. Despite feminist analyses of security as deeply gendered (e.g. Tickner 1992) ‘gender’ seems to be relevant in international security policies by implication only: Since it is necessary to include and consider gender in development processes, gender is relevant for the security-development nexus. This is how ‘gender’ feeds smoothly into existing policy discourses which claim that development is dependent on security in the country that needs to develop and vice versa; its security is dependent on development.     

Religion, Nationalism, History, and Politics in Hungary’s New Constitution

Positive and negative factors in Hungary??s history, politics, and society contribute to controversies over the new Constitution. Hungarians in Budapest conversed with the author about religion and secularism, nationalism and authoritarianism, the legacy of 1956 and 1989, and the work of the Constitutional Court.     

Inaction,under-reaction action and incapacity: communication breakdown in Italy’s vaccination governance

This article explores why governments do not respond to public compliance problems in a timely manner with appropriate instruments, and the consequences of their failure to do so. Utilising a case study of Italian vaccination policy, the article considers counterfactuals and the challenges of governing health policy in an age of disinformation. It counterposes two methods of governing vaccination compliance: discipline, which uses public institutions to inculcate the population with favourable attitudes and practices, and modulation, which uses access to public institutions as a form of control. The Italian government ineffectively employed discipline for a number of years. Epistemological and organisational constraints stymied its efforts to tackle a significant childhood vaccination compliance problem. With a loss of control over the information environment, vaccinations were not served well by exogenous crises, the sensationalism of the news cycle and online misinformation. Hampered by austerity, lack of capacity and epistemic shortcomings, the Italian government did not protect the public legitimacy of the vaccination programme. Instead of employing communications to reassure a hesitant population, they focused on systemic and delivery issues, until it was too late to do anything except make vaccinations mandatory (using modulation). The apparent short-term success of this measure in generating population compliance does not foreclose the need for ongoing governance of vaccine confidence through effective discipline. This is evident for the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, with many Italians still indicating that they would not accept a vaccine despite the devastation that the disease has wrought throughout their country.

     

Deficits,Democracy, and Demographics: Europe’s Three Crises

This article argues that the EU and, above all, the eurozone are facing not one crisis – an economic and fiscal one – but three: an economic crisis, a crisis of institutions, and a crisis of demography. These crises are not simultaneous; they are overlapping and self-reinforcing, and there is a high degree of feedback across all three crises. Economically, the euro inflated economic growth and government revenue in the peripheral economies, giving those member states a false sense of their economic prospects. Institutionally, mechanisms were too weak at the EU level to prevent a dangerous escalation of asset (above all house) prices and too fragmented to confront the crisis through an immediate and decisive plan that would provide calm to the markets. Demographically, Europe’s economic and fiscal problems are and will increasingly be exacerbated by the continent’s demographic situation and its projected development, especially in southern Europe.     

Xiang Gao,Delegation and Development: Local Government in China’s Market Transition

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

Totalitarianism and justice: Hannah Arendt’s and Judith N. Shklar’s political reflections in historical and theoretical perspective

We locate Arendt’s and Shklar’s writings within what Katznelson has identified as an attempt to create a new language for politics after the cataclysm of the twentieth century, and Greif has called the new ‘maieutic’ discourse of ‘re-enlightenment’ in the ‘age of the crisis of man’. More specifically, we compare and contrast two related, but in many ways also differing, ways of thinking about totalitarianism and its legal repercussions. To this end, we examine two sets of studies: Arendt’s The origins of totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil and Shklar’s After utopia: The decline of political faith and Legalism: An essay on law, morals, and politics. While The origins of totalitarianism and After utopia discussed totalitarian ideology and its consequences for modern political thought, the Eichmann report and Legalism dealt with the question of whether and how justice is possible after the extreme experience of totalitarianism. We argue that the maieutic impulse led Arendt and Shklar to find distinct routes to address a common concern. Our paper ends with a discussion of some of the surplus meaning that was generated by the different maieutic performances of the two thinkers.     

Determining ‘truth’ at the border: immigration interviews,Chinese marital migrants,and Taiwan's sovereignty dilemmas

As Taiwan transitions from an immigrant-sending to an immigrant-receiving country, it struggles to build an immigration bureaucracy while its status as a sovereign nation-state is not recognized by much of the international community. Taiwan's largest immigrant group, marital migrants from China, are perceived as posing the greatest challenges to border control due to longstanding political tensions between the two countries and governmental and societal suspicions about Chinese spouses' marital motives. Based on research conducted with immigration officials and during immigration interviews at the border, this article interrogates the status of ‘truth’ in official efforts to determine definitively immigrants' marital intentions. It analyzes such truth demands in relation to Taiwan's anxieties about its national standing and the ability of an immigration bureaucracy to generate ‘sovereignty effects’.