I sympathise with Chandler’s frustration at the worthy moralising about global civil society. But his nostalgia gets the better of him. His essay relies too much on generalisation and on holding the present to account for being insufficiently like the past.
The article mistakes analytic categories for concepts that have independent force in the world. His concepts of domestic/international, political/moral and autonomy/power are too rigid to be helpful. Attempts to explain these categories in their own terms always fail, because they only make sense in contexts, and in relation to one another. All of the clever accounts of ‘power’, ‘the political’ etc, are all ultimately banal because these concepts are what we make of them through circumstances. There can never be an independent ‘theory’ of these categories that can explain much. Chandler’s own academic discipline of International Relations has developed around debates about the relationship between the domestic and the international, and has rested on contested accounts of power. He should not be surprised that these concepts are still not settled.
These themes are clearest when he writes that, “Today’s global ‘revolution’ lacks a clearly defined sphere of the political. Without a prior relationship of collective aspirations and engagement individual activism loses any sense of collective meaning”. Why do we need a clearly defined sphere of the political? To make global revolution does not require clearly defining a space of the political, but clearly engaging with the messy and ill-defined sphere that is the political today. Who would have thought that obesity would be an element of the political? But a more serious error is demanding a PRIOR relationship between the individual and the collective. This relationship can never be anything other than dynamic. It’s as if he wants to settle all of the messy issues in advance so that we can do some ‘real’ politics.
Chandler is surprised at how the growth of civil society discussions has focused on the global. But our social circumstances are only trivially national. In the absence of real mass movements, it makes sense to engage at the international level. The challenge, I think, is drawing out disagreements with a movement that is so amorphous, and a ruling elite that is so keen to make friends. Historically divisive issues, like race and imperialism, no longer provoke the same reaction. Too often something that sounds radical one day has – shorn of its context – become state policy the next. Chandler’s approach of repudiating all of this, as if it is a distraction from the ‘real stuff’, won’t do.
James
James Greenstein
Full article at http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA6B9.htm
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote: [Another interesting piece from Sp!ked, which is too long to post. Here's the beginning.]
Going global: the politics of another planet by David Chandler
According to the radical guidebooks advertised in the Guardian and the New Statesman every week, a new worldwide revolution is in progress - a global movement against globalisation and capitalism and for justice, autonomy and civil society; a movement so large and diverse that it is often simply termed a new 'movement of movements'.