A Pragmatist Critique of Liberal Epistemology

Abstract

This paper wrestles with the issue of the place of comprehensive beliefs within the public space. It tries to strike a middle path between the liberal ban on comprehensive beliefs and the anti-liberal claim that comprehensive beliefs should be given full pride of place in public deliberations. The article relies on arguments that are inspired by the pragmatist tradition. It starts locating the main cause of failures at articulating comprehensive beliefs and public reason in a central feature of liberal epistemology, namely the way it conceives public reason via a preliminary distinction between public and non-public beliefs. After criticizing this distinction, the article introduces a distinction between the normative practice of justification and the normative practice of adjudication as a more perspicuous way to establish the place that comprehensive beliefs should play within political forums. It then concludes showing that this approach provides a satisfying answer to the issue of the public role of comprehensive beliefs in a liberal democratic regime that is respectful of citizens’ thick identities while at the same time complying with the requirements of respect set by the liberal tradition.     

The dispositions of ‘Good’ citizenship: Character,symbolic power and disinterest

Abstract

The problems of determining citizenly competence and finding an appropriate balance between public and private life have increasingly organized intellectual debate in civil society. Although civic republicans and liberals give different answers to these problems, they both claim that ‘character’ should be a necessary foundation for good citizenship. This article identifies a tension between character's analytical status as a category of explanation and its normative status as a moral category. Although most civic republicans and liberals recognize that the concept of character is socially constructed, the concept typically appears as a pre-political good whose social origins are hypostatized or forgotten. This article uses the sociological insights of Pierre Bourdieu in order to explain how character simultaneously appears as a social construct and as a moral good by exploring how the concept is mobilized by civic republicans and liberals as a solution to the problem of ‘good’ citizenship. The goal of the article is three-fold: first, to use Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field and symbolic power to clarify the analytical and normative aspects of the concept of character and its relation to citizenship and civil society; second, to demonstrate how power shapes and conditions character formation in civil society; and third, to offer an account of the practical means by which character is promoted by civic republicans and liberals as a solution to the challenges facing civil society.     

The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy: Democratization,Intervention, Statebuilding (Part II)

Abstract

The first part of this paper (in the previous issue) showed that the democracy promotion policies often perceived as characteristic of the New World Order are not so new. Rather, they were an integral part of the modernization theories and policies of the Cold War era. This second part of the paper shows that the democracy transition paradigm is based on precisely the same liberal assumptions as its predecessor and that, like the former, its theories and policies have widely been identified as failing. This failure leads to interventionist and statebuilding policies which in turn trigger resistances in target countries; a pattern already familiar from the Cold War period. We are confronted, thus, neither with a new world order nor with the end of history but rather with its repetition. And this repetitive cycle of counterproductive theories and policies, the paper concludes, will continue for as long as the liberal ideology underpinning it remains essentially unchallenged.     

Guinea‐Bissau's rocky path to peace and democracy

Nepad has helped to world to focus on Africa's challenges and potential successes rather than the negatives.     

Reforming government with information technology in South Korea

The South Korean government recently launched 11 major e‐government services after a long period of inter‐ and intra‐ministry politics concerning the allocation of jurisdiction over various e‐government services. This article analyses the politics of e‐government efforts in South Korea. It begins by describing the development of e‐government policy in South Korea for the past two decades, and identifies its four major features as comprehensiveness, fragmentation, the orientation toward operational efficiency and citizen services, and the inclination toward new technological solutions. The article concludes that these features can be attributed to the heavy involvement of the macro political system, its high susceptibility to inputs from experts, and the institutional design of the informatisation subsystem.     

The Image of the Loyal African During World War II and its Postwar Use by the French Communist Party

In 1926, the United States (US) company Firestone Rubber in Akron, Ohio initiated a second practice of segregation in Liberia. The first practice began with the minority regime of the Afro-American settlers over 17 ethnic groups in the Republic of Liberia in 1847. Civil rights were unheard of in Liberia during either of these two periods. This changed when Liberian students travelled to the US on government scholarships, primarily to study in historical black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the 1940s and 1950s. When the Liberian students were exposed to the Civil Rights Movement, they fully understood the injustice of the situation in Liberia. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr and others travelled to the Gold Coast for its transition into becoming the nation of Ghana on 6 March 1957. Meetings between King and Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah led to collaborative efforts towards ending colonial racism in Africa and segregation in the US. During the Cold War, segregation in the US and Liberia was a source of shame for both nations. Liberian students returning from the US began “sit-ins” in protest against segregated Firestone facilities. The Liberian government responded by enacting its first Civil Rights Act against Firestone in 1958 and ending discrimination, except in segregated schools. This article shows, however, that it took more than another 30 years for the first decolonisation process to end the minority regime after the Civil Rights Acts of 1958, and to end the original form of ethnic segregation, which began in 1847 and ended as a result of the violent civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s.     

The European Union in the new millennium

The Bush administration has been too quick to dismiss containment as an obsolete hangover of the Cold War. Appropriately modified to operate through international institutions and regional alliances, containment provides the most viable available basis for responding to terrorist threats emanating from rogue regimes and weak states.     

Generational change: regional security and Australian engagement with Asia

The rhetoric of US foreign policy since the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001, would suggest that there has been a fundamental shift in US foreign relations. This is often summarised as a shift from multilateralism to unilateralism and, in the context of the war on terrorism, concomitantly a shift from geo-economic to geopolitical priorities. The rhetoric of the fight against the ‘axis of evil’, however, may simply cloud underlying continuities in US relations with Asia. Nevertheless the process of coalition-building by the Bush administration in the ‘War on Terrorism’ has impacted on the distance Asian countries have been able to maintain in relation to the United States. The case studies presented in this special issue raise a number of important issues concerning perceptions and the practice of US hegemony and the complex links between leadership and ‘followership’ at the inter-state level. They also draw out the impacts engendered by US–Asia relations on the wider phenomenon of regionalisation in the Asia-Pacific region.     

Singaporean foreign policy and the Asian Values Debate, 1992–2000: reflections on an experiment in soft power

Between 1992 and 2000, the international order witnessed a clash of discourses not seen since the height of the Cold War when both superpowers engaged in propaganda offensives to assert the superiority of their respective governing ideologies. However, unlike the Cold War, the Asian Values Debate did not involve a supporting cast of armed occupations, insurgencies and the preaching of revolution. It involved instead statements of difference couched in intellectual and material terms, and also relied heavily on persuasion by words and symbolic deeds. This article seeks to evaluate Singaporean foreign policy in the Asian Values Debate by using the concept of soft power as described by Joseph Nye. However, soft power, as the ability to obtain foreign policy ends through attraction or convincing rather than through coercion, is itself vulnerable to instances where the ideas propounded diverge from the practices they purport to inspire. Singapore’s role in the Debate will be examined through three events at its zenith between 1992 and 2000: the clash between Asia and the West at the 1993 United Nations World Conference on Human Rights at Vienna, the Michael Fay Caning Affair which directly pitted Singapore against the US in 1994, and the fate of the Asian exceptionalist argument in the face of the 1997–99 Asian Financial Crisis. The conclusion suggests that Singaporean foreign policy’s experiment in soft power has had its successes, but it remains qualified in its applicability to other Asian foreign policies by certain limits inherent in the Singaporean discourse.     

Between collective action and a fragmented political economy: the G20 and the return of protectionist impulses

Not unlike the 1930s, the current state of global economic governance is marked by a vacuum of leadership as neither traditional leading states nor emerging economic actors have proven able or willing to coordinate collective action. This interregnum has allowed space for the G20 to emerge as a calibrating force for the maintenance of a liberal economic order. Protectionist impulses, however, are increasingly emerging victorious as unemployment and domestic interests drive political action. The stabilizing presence of the G20 is thus tested in an environment privileging divisive domestic-oriented forces allowed greater space under conditions in a fragmented post-hegemonic global economy. These spaces for domestic concern, and the receptiveness of policy leaders to them, represent a return to the promise of embedded liberalism and away from the era of hyper-liberalization that has marked the past several decades of broadly measured economic growth.