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The Global Poverty Project asks us to proclaim ‘I am a global citizen’ as a declaration against poverty and to ‘change the world’. In a similar spirit, Oxfam UK has learning packs for teachers to guide their teaching on global citizenship. These are clearly well-intentioned campaigns which seek to highlight the injustices of extreme poverty and to foster a sense of the world as an interconnected place. Yet the idea of a ‘global citizen’, whilst seemingly universal and equitable is far from unbounded and still marked with inequality. The global citizen is more likely to be imagined as the one that can take action to fight poverty, rather than the person who is living in poverty. Campaigning against poverty, or even buying sustainable local products (one common tag line is ‘think global, act local’) are acts more likely to be recognized as an action of global citizenship than a migrant crossing a state border – legally or illegally. 

It is easier to be a global citizen when you are confident in the fulfilment of your rights as a national citizen. In the long decade since 9/11, alongside increasing calls for ‘global citizenship’, we also see the rising demand that nation-states should strengthen their abilities to monitor and control national-state borders. It is perhaps at the border that the idea of the ‘global citizen’ is most challenged. You do not leave or enter a country as a ‘global citizen’, but as a national citizen and passports, the national documents of identification, do matter. What passport you hold will also determine how easy it is to cross international borders – not all passports are equal. Indeed not all bearers of the same national passport are equal – increasingly travellers are ‘profiled’ by factors such as race, gender, place of birth, age and travel history which leads to accelerated passage through border zones for some and increased scrutiny of others. National sovereignty continues to be rigorously defended and exercised by the state. As Hannah Arendt argued: ‘sovereignty is nowhere more absolute than in matters of emigration, naturalization, nationality, and expulsion’ (Arendt 1958: 278). Citizenship of a nation state is therefore critical even while it remains unequal. 

Citizenship not only enables movement across borders, but also secures rights to residence and political and social rights. Within the state, there are many ‘internal borders’ which also police access to rights. Recently David Cameron suggested the restriction of welfare provision to British citizens only – suggesting that doctors will have to scrutinise passports before they treat patients. Or, more likely, only certain groups and individuals would be suspected of not being British and they alone would face the situation of having to prove their status. So we are clearly still tied into a state-based citizenship which defines the relationship between individuals and the state and also between individuals both within and beyond the state. One of the features shaping this relationship is the way state citizenship is intricately bound up with national identity – Arendt saw this as the conquest of the state by the nation. National identity is often spoken about in terms of identity, belonging and loyalty rather than rights and, in Britain as a multi-national state, national identity and citizenship are in a particularly complicated relationship As Bernard Crick  (Crick 1991: 90) pointed out: ‘I am a citizen of a country with no agreed colloquial name.’ 

Part of the confusion around citizenship in Britain is also due to the complex relationship between nationality and citizenship arising out of the post-colonial legacy. Under the 1981 Immigration Act, six categories of citizen were established each with differing rights (only one, British citizenship automatically carries a right of abode in Britain). Few British passport holders, when asked where they came from would answer ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ which is how their citizenship is described on the passport. Public and political debate on the nature of Britishness, its relationship with Englishness and Scottishness and Welshness have a very long history and have been particularly intense since the 1980s, sometimes fuelled by devolution and debates around Europe (Billig, 2006). 

These debates have also helped to shape the debates on citizenship. In his 2006 Party Conference speech, David Cameron declared that ‘every child in our country, wherever they come from, must know and deeply understand what it means to be British’.

But, how do we know if we’re ‘British’ and what does it mean to ‘deeply understand’ what being ‘British’ is? One of the problems with this call is that it suggests that there is a single meaning of ‘being British’ which fails to account for different experiences of being British. Britishness is often suggested as being in ‘crisis’, with that suggestion that we have ‘lost’ a sense of who we are. This relies on a particular reading of the past – where ‘we’ once knew who ‘we’ were, often with the suggestion that this was because the ‘we’ had more meaning and was more unified at some time in the past. But as Ted Cantle has pointed out elsewhere in Our Kingdom, both nations and national identities are constantly in flux, particularly perhaps when nationhood is shaped by processes of empire building.

David Goodhart argues that we need to reinvigorate our national identity – although he is flexible as to whether this should be an identity based on Englishness or Britishness. In The British Dream. Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration (Goodhart 2013), Goodhart sets up immigration as a major threat to this re-imagining and indeed as a major threat to the continuing survival of the welfare state. He argues that (ethnic) diversity undermines the bonds which communities need and that it weakens people’s willingness to partake in collective welfare via the state. Goodhart asserts that we need to be able to talk about racism without being immediately labelled as racist and he also joins in the chorus of those who have proclaimed the failure of multiculturalism. 

It should of course be true that we should be able to talk about immigration policy without being accused of racism, but that would mean that we would have to ensure that our debate wasn’t racialised. We would have to de-couple race from immigration. This involves more than pointing out that Polish immigrants are white and yet some are opposed to their recent immigration in large numbers. We would need to know, for instance, that it doesn’t take longer, or more generations, for the offspring of a black immigrant to become one of ‘us’ than it does for the ancestors of a white immigrant. For example, Goodhart explains that two of his grandfathers were American, but there is no suggestion that he would describe himself as a ‘third-generation immigrant’. Yet, somewhat oddly, he describes Lenny Henry, who was born in Dudley, as a ‘Caribbean’ and continually refers to ethnic minority communities or individuals as second or third ‘generation’.

Much of the debate around nationhood and particularly multiculturalism can be understood within the production of what Engin Isin calls ‘neurotic citizenship’ (Isin 2004). For Isin, anxiety has been constructed as the norm for citizens and governance has become about managing or tranquilising those anxieties. The home and border are two critical sites of these productions of a sense of risk and the governance of risks (thus the concept of ‘homeland security’). The home is constructed as the ultimate space of security and the domain for managing anxiety. But homes can also be seen as a threat to the security of the nation. William Walters calls this ‘domopolitics’ where the relationship between home, nation and security are reconfigured which ‘rationalizes a series of security measures in the name of a particular conception of home’ (Walters 2004: 241). It’s also worth noting that the concept of home generally implies a set of gendered relations, threats to which can also provoke anxiety.

This neurosis around the home and incursions to the nation by others can be seen in David Goodhard’s concern about homes where English is not spoken (enough). He anxiously recites statistics from the 2009 labour survey which tell how various ethnic minorities ‘come from homes where another language is spoken’ (Goodhart 2013: 57) and repeatedly asserts the dangers of homes where English is not the primary language. An Englishman’s home may be his castle, but the immigrant to England may expect the intimate family practices of home language to be under scrutiny. Here Britishness is presented as threatened within the domestic space of the home and most threatened by the failure of mothers in particular to speak English. Many might argue that the ability to speak more than one language in a globalising world could be seen as a core strength that ethnic minorities bring to Britain. However within this anxious neurosis bi- or multi-lingualism, particularly in the home, is presented as a threat to the nation. Yet the finding that, for example, 64 percent of pupils of Chinese-origin and 78 percent of pupils of Bangladeshi-origin pupils come from homes where another language is spoken tells us nothing about the proficiency of English in those homes and in particular of the pupils surveyed. 

As the more recent 2011 Census tells us, less than half a percent of residents over 3 years old in England and Wales could not speak any English and only 2 percent could not speak English ‘well’ (2013). Despite the evidence that immigrants to Britain want to, and can, speak English, the refrain of the need to coerce them to learn English continues, across the political spectrum. For example Labour Leader Ed Miliband on a visit to Crawley on 30th April 2013 argued: ‘If you come to this country, you should learn English’.

Miliband was standing on a wooden pallet in Crawley town centre, echoing the successful campaigning of John Major’s soapbox, designed to show him as a man of the people speaking to the people. His tone is disciplinary and focuses on the apparent unwillingness of migrants to learn English rather than the severe cuts in the provision of ESOL classes and the impact this has on new arrival’s capacity to participate fully in the social, political, economic and cultural life of Britain. The injunction to immigrants feeds anxieties about a Britishness apparently under threat from those who cross its borders and settle here.

Re-imagining nationhood in Britain would surely require a way of reframing Britishness and Englishness in a way that expressed a sense of value in and confidence about the diversity of Britain rather than a neurotic response to it. Diversity needs to be embraced as a fact not a threat. Those who claim that multiculturalism has failed tend not to acknowledge that ‘multicultural’ means very different things in different contexts and that there has not been a coherent policy in Britain which can be called ‘state multiculturalism’. Nonetheless, however you consider the politics of multiculturalism, Britain surely is a multicultural society with a diversity of religious, ethnic, classed, regional, gendered and sexual cultures. Neither John Major’s spinsters cycling to Evensong, nor Gordon Brown’s list of ‘classic’ literature representing British values were able to encapsulate how a diverse post-colonial nationhood might be understood.

One problem with the current trend of critiquing all that is ‘multicultural’ is that it becomes impossible to positively reassert a multi-cultural, multi-national nation. This does not have to mean a naïve celebration of ‘saris, samba and samosas’ without paying real attention to the politics of who gets to represent and speak for different ‘communities’. Nor does it mean that we can proclaim an end to racism and racialised hostility and inequality in Britain (as Goodhart claims against a wealth of evidence to the contrary). Rather it requires a re-assessment of Britishness which is not built on racialised superiority and which adapts our sense of ourselves in a way which takes us somewhere other than a melancholic remembrance of things past (Gilroy 2004). This would suggest that there will be many ways of being British, and also that the British will have many ways of being ‘global’. One of the features of our multicultural society, as Nira Yuval-Davis (Yuval-Davis 2008) points out, is that citizenship is ‘multi-layered’. Our sense of ourselves, our emotional, social and economic ties with others are varied and stretch from the local, to the national and the global. This should be seen as an opportunity rather than a threat.

References

ONS (2013). 2011 Census: Quick Statistics for England and Wales, March 2011, Organisation of National Statistics.

Arendt, H. (1958). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland and New York, Meridian Books.

Crick, B. (1991). The English and the British. National Identities. The Constitution of the United Kingdom. B. Crick. Oxford, Blackwell Publishers: 90-105.

Gilroy, P. (2004). After Empire. Melancholia or convivial culture? Abingdon, Routledge.

Goodhart, D. (2013). The British Dream. Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration. London, Atlantic Books.

Isin, E. F. (2004). “The neurotic citizen.” Citizenship Studies 8(3): 217-235.

Walters, W. (2004). “Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics.” Citizenship Studies 8(3): 237-260.

Yuval-Davis (2008). Intersectionality, citizenship and contemporary politics of belonging. Contesting Citizenship. B. Siim and J. Squires. London and New York, Routledge: 159-173.

On Saturday the 18th May the future of the piece of
legislation most treasured by women activists in Afghanistan looked more
precarious than ever as a high stake parliamentary debate about it was brought
to an end after only
15 minutes. After a series of
inflammatory remarks from conservative MPs, which suggested that support
for the Law on Elimination of
Violence against Women ( EVAW law) was tantamount to being against the
Sharia, and that even questioned the President’s judgment in issuing it as a
decree in the first place, the speaker
quickly declared the debate to be over and the law was  sent on for further review.

For years, the wisdom of presenting the EVAW law to parliament for
ratification has split Afghanistan’s women’s rights community, with the
majority seemingly strongly against the idea. Instead, they have argued that
the law, which was signed into force by President Karzai in 2009, should be
left as a presidential decree as it would never survive parliamentary
ratification in an acceptable form. The
constitutional grounds for this course of action are shaky, but the fact that
it has been the preferred strategy highlights the tensions and dilemmas that
have plagued  women’s rights promotion
in Afghanistan since 2001.

Many Afghan women, be they MPs, activists or government officials have
embraced the opportunities over the last 12 years to put in place stronger mechanisms and
institutions that secure women better protection from violence and abuse. The
EVAW law, hailed as the greatest single achievement in this regard had been in
preparation since 2005. It lists 22 acts as violence against women and
prescribes punishments for them as well as setting out various related
government responsibilities. Although the country’s penal code, dating from
1976 and still in force, cover crimes such as bodily harm, forced marriage and
murder, it makes no explicit references to violence within the family or to
underage marriage. (The country’s civil code stipulates the legal marriage age
for girls at minimum 15, but there are no punishments in the penal code for
violators). The penal code also conflates rape with consensual adultery, both
criminal acts. It was therefore felt
that having a separate law specifically on violence against women would send a
strong signal that there could be no impunity for abuses against women and
force the Afghan government to take the issue more seriously.

In the years that followed, a somewhat drawn-out drafting process – occasionally diverted by the donor-fuelled competition between individual
women – saw several drafts being prepared and presented to government ministries.
By early 2009, however, the EVAW law was on the agenda of the Ministry of
Justice for technical improvements. At
this point in time, the law suddenly found itself fast tracked due to other
developments. An international outrage
was growing over the Shia Personal Status Law ( SPSL) , a new family law for the country’s Shia
minority with a host of articles discriminating against women. Local activists and Western diplomats made frantic attempts to stop or
alter the law, but the final version still sanctioned underage marriage, made
women’s right to marry dependent on their fathers’ or grandfathers’ permission,
and constructed a martial relation in which wives were meant  to submit to sexual relations on demand lest
they forfeit claims of maintenance from their husbands.

It seems that the EVAW law was increasingly perceived as a
counterbalance to the SPSL. US embassy cables from this period show that the US
was closely following the status of the EVAW law, repeatedly reiterating their
wish to see the law approved by the Afghan cabinet in meetings with government
officials. Eventually the EVAW law was offered up as compromise to national and
international opponents of the SPSL by the president, who curiously is reported
to have signed them both into force on the same day. At this point, SPLS had
already been ratified by the parliament, albeit in obscure circumstances, but
the signing of the EVAW law was based on article 79 of the Constitution, which
allows room for the president to adopt legislation during parliamentary recess
in ‘emergency situations’ . Decrees signed by the president under this
disposition become laws upon signing but are to be submitted to parliament
within thirty days of the first session of the parliament that has the power to
reject the laws decreed. Whether the EVAW law qualified as an emergency
situation was perhaps debatable, but in fact, a number of laws (11, by one
count) have been put into place in this way and remains in force even though parliament has not ratified them.
Undoubtedly, an important factor in this ‘law-making by decree’ has been
international pressure- for instance, it was even alleged that the US embassy
one summer sent an email out to various international aid organizations and
actors in the rule of law field, wondering if anyone had suggestions for laws
that they wished to see enacted as presidential decrees before the parliament
was due to return from their recess.

But with the EVAW law, an attempt to get parliamentary acceptance was
made already in autumn 2009, spearheaded by the same MP Fauzia Kofi who was at
the center of the controversial plenary debate on the 18th of May.
Discussions on the law in the parliament’s joint commission, tasked with
garnering as much consensus as possible before the debate in plenum, reached
quite an advanced stage at this time. But the progress came at a cost; for
instance, conservative male MPs were insisting on exempting fathers from
punishments for underage marriage. Then, as now, maintaining fathers’
prerogatives over their young daughters’ sexuality appeared an overarching
priority for conservatives. They were also up in arms about an attempt to make
polygamy, outside certain conditions, a punishable offense. However, when
discussions in the joint commission broke down in late 2009, it was not so much
over substantial disagreements as over the trading of petty insults between two
individuals that escalated into a shouting match. The result was that the
debate was halted for the time being. The news was received with relief by many
of the supporters of the law. They argued that the idea of seeking
parliamentary approval had been misguided from the outset, because it would
never get past the conservative MPs in an acceptable form, and might even lead
to the law being declared null and void.

In any case, a large apparatus was set in motion to implement the EVAW
law straight after it was signed into force in the summer of 2009. The
International Development Law Organization (IDLO) organized the establishment
of special prosecution units within attorney generals’ offices, workshops and
trainings on the law were organized in many provinces and yearly reporting by
the UN keenly monitored progress, although they struggled to obtain systematic
data from Afghanistan’s secretive court system. By all accounts, implementation
was sketchy, with the UN estimating that by autumn 2012, only 4 percent of all
reported incidents were adjudicated on the basis of the new law. The patchy
implementation of the law was one of the arguments presented by Fauzia Kofi, in
her capacity as the head of the women’s rights commission in parliament, as she
prepared to take the law to plenary debate on the 18th of May this
year. She argued that the law would attain greater legitimacy with
parliamentary approval, improving implementation rates. For weeks, others
attempted to stop her, lobbying embassies and UN agencies, as well as the
speaker and the President himself in a bid get the law off the parliamentary
agenda.

The disagreements over the EVAW law speak of the larger strategic
dilemmas facing proponents of women’s rights in Afghanistan: Do they seize the
opportunities that have materialized through Western leverage and funds to put
in place legal frameworks and infrastructure that are untainted by compromises
with Afghan conservatives, or do they engage in long term negotiations with
national groups, sacrificing both urgency and feminist ideals in the
process? 

Many Afghan activists will protest that the notion that they should make
compromises with conservative MPs is unreasonable and even hypocritical. As
they point out, many of these MPs came to power twice on the back of Western
military agendas; first as Western allies against the Soviet Union during the
cold war, and secondly as rehabilitated partners to the US-led invasion in 2001.
Qazi Nasir Hanafi, the head of the legislative commission during two
parliamentary terms and an ardent opponent of the EVAW law seems a case in
point. Reported to have risen to influence as an Islamic judge during the jihad
against the Soviets, meting out severe
punishments for religious non-adherence, post-2001, he again wields power as
an influential member of the ulema council, boosted by his jihadi credentials.
For many women’s rights activists, both inside and outside the parliament, the
suggestion that they must reach a compromise with these kinds of actors is
ludicrous, or at the very least, unhelpful. Two years ago, a similar kind of
dilemma erupted over the women’s shelters. Against a growing conservative
backlash against these institutions, accused by Hanafi and others of encouraging
immorality and ‘destroying the family’, the Afghan government sought to
nationalize the shelters, which are run by NGOs. One of the outcomes that this nationalization would entail was
to subject abused women who sought access to the shelters to a local admission
committee, where charges of adultery would serve as one disqualifying element.
Shelter staff and women activists, mobilising international outrage, succeeded
in getting the government to back down, leaving the shelters as independent
entities, run with donor funds for the time being. However, Hanafi and others
seem to be still smarting from the defeat, since the article referring to
shelters has been added to their current set of objections to the EVAW law.

In the eyes of many women’s rights activists then, the EVAW law and the
shelters are among the key achievements of the last 10 years and even though
they have been secured through narrow deals and partly through external
pressure, they are still important victories that have made a real impact on
individual women’s lives. That is true despite the low implementation rates of
the EVAW law- since the law has become a symbol of the end of impunity and a
tool of advocacy.

From this perspective, the insistence by Fauzia Kofi that the EVAW law
needed parliamentary approval to be secure was a high risk gamble, and the
whole attempt to equip the law with parliamentary approval so superfluous that
it could only be explained by Kofi’s personal interest in taking the credit for
the law.  But even if Kofi is a very
ambitious woman whose bid for the presidency partly via international fame cultivates the clichéd image of the quintessential Afghan woman lone heroine,
her argument that parliamentary approval would strengthen the EVAW law should
not be categorically dismissed, even if in this case, it was hastily and poorly
executed.

One would do well to be alert to the possibility that the willingness of
many women activists to dispense with democratic procedures are not merely an
ends-justifies-the-means pragmatism of the moment, but something that also
hints at a more enduring disinterest in broad-based politics. Grassroots or
party-based politics never had strong support in Afghanistan, and the
preference that many woman activists have displayed for executive favor over
the parliamentary route reinforces the top down manner in which  change has often been conceived. Although it
remains something of a taboo topic, there are strong ethnic overtones to this
issue, with old guard Pashtun elites particularly hostile towards more
democratic impulses.

But as international leverage and resources diminish, there seems to be
no way around a more nationally- orientated political strategy for women
activists. On a positive note, new possibilities might emerge as the international
withdrawal could create a more level political field; the former jihadis will
have neither the anger against foreign troops to play up nor the off the books
resources flowing to armed strongmen to build their political platform. What
we saw on the 18th of May was the curious power of a small number of
MPs to hold an entire nation hostage simply by declaring something to be
against Sharia. If sustainable progress is to be made, that power will have to
be curtailed. Otherwise, women will face the same obstacles again and again,
next time perhaps in the shape of a president.

Read more articles on 50.50 exploring strategies to end violence against women

Sideboxes

The latest, and perhaps most disturbing
development in post-war Sri Lanka’s ethnic relations is the recent rise of a
Buddhist activist group, Bodu Bala
Sena (BBS-Buddhist power force), driven against Sri Lankan Muslims, the
island’s third ethnic minority. BBS explains its mission as strengthening the
Buddhist faith in the island, providing spiritual leadership and saving Sinhala
Buddhism from external threats. A more vicious strategy has emerged however with
Muslims as the prime target, a perceived threat to the Sinhala Buddhist community’s
ethno-religious majority.

BBS has succeeded in propagating a number of
myths of Islamic infringement on Sinhalese Buddhists and launched campaigns
against Muslim communities, including attempts to prevent halal certifications
to businesses for food items produced in Sri Lanka. However, BBS activism has
surpassed mere political propaganda and has also becoming increasingly violent.
On 28 March 2013, a BBS mob attacked the warehouse of Fashion Bug, a Muslim-owned department store chain situated in the
outskirts of Colombo. BBS is alleged to have called for attacks on people shopping at Muslim-owned
businesses, and
maintains what can be described as a far-right wing, majoritarian and
fundamentalist posture, which stands in complete discord with the very
fundamentals of the Buddhist faith they purport to defend. BBS activism increasingly
shares much in common with anti-Muslim activism in predominantly
Buddhist Burma, which has also taken a highly violent turn. While there is no
explicit evidence of connections between the Burmese and Sri Lankan agitations,
one cannot ignore commonalities between the two situations.

But while BBS is a relatively new phenomenon
in Sri Lanka’s troubled sphere of ethnic politics, their ideology is by no
means a novelty. 2015 will mark the centenary of what one scholar describes as
Ceylon’s Kristallnacht, a series of Sinhala-Muslim riots that have also
been described as a pogrom. The 1915 Sinhala-Muslim riots initially arose from
a very local matter – a controversy over the passage of a Buddhist perahera
(religious procession) past a mosque in the township of Gampola in central Sri
Lanka. A legal battle fought by the custodians of the Buddhist temple in
question ended with a court ruling that left many a Buddhist disheartened.
Months later in mid-1915, a collision took place in Kandy – Sri Lanka’s second
city and a centre of Buddhist worship – during yet another Buddhist procession,
and rioting soon spread to the Kandy’s vicinity and to other parts of Ceylon,
including Colombo. The rioters in Colombo were not only composed of an unruly
mob but also of blue-collar workers in Ceylon Government Railways, who were
keen to attack the trade monopoly held by Coast Moors – a community of traders
who would travel extensively between Ceylon and India – who ran many local
businesses in the city.

The Colonial Government responded by
declaring Martial Law. Interpreting Sinhala-Muslim agitation as an
anti-colonial uprising, the riots were violently suppressed. This helped
further ferment Sinhala nationalism in the post-1915 years. In post-1915
Ceylon, anti-minority disturbances primarily targeted the Tamils, Sri Lanka’s
largest ethnic minority. Riots occurred most notably in 1958 when the Solomon
Bandaranaike government sought to strike a deal with the Federal Party of
Ceylon, the most prominent exponent of Tamil nationalism at the time, to
address some of the Tamils’ political demands, including the official
recognition of the Tamil language. The most violent anti-Tamil pogrom of the
20th century was indeed that of July 1983 (known as Black July), a ruthless
populist response to Tamil secessionist militant activity in northern Sri
Lanka, not unendorsed by Sinhala nationalist elements within the government in
Colombo. 

Though the threat of Tamil secessionism seemingly
ceased with the controversial 2007-2009 military operation and the resulting
decimation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eealm, post-bellum Sinhala
nationalism has begun to rekindle anti-Muslim sentiments – a crude irony as we
approach the centenary of the 1915 riots. In contrast with 1915 though, BBS-led
activism is better organized, and is reportedly financed by the secret
budgetary allocations of the Ministry of Defence, according to journalists in
exile. The Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, presidential sibling and
highest authority in control of Sri Lanka’s armed forces, personally inaugurated a newly built BBS-led Buddhist Leadership Academy
in Galle, Southern Sri Lanka, on 9 March 2013. At its inception, BBS was also a recipient of Norwegian funding. BBS is currently engaged in international
outreach efforts, with its leaders touring the United States.

Despite debates on the veracity of reports
regarding funding and links to the government of Sri Lanka, a cursory glance at
BBS activism suffices to demonstrate that BBS is an influential, considerably
well-funded and well-connected organisation. Its role in driving a wedge
between the majority and a not insignificant minority is a dangerous phenomenon
with potentially adverse consequences for the island nation’s troubled ethnic
relations. An online petition, signed by many Sri Lankans who value interethnic
and interreligious coexistence, calls upon the President of Sri Lanka to take
steps to avoid interreligious violence. However, this is supremely optimistic as
BBS clearly receives the endorsement of the ruling family, in the absence of
which it would never have been in a position to launch such staunch verbal and
physical attacks, steal the limelight and position itself at the forefront of
political activism. 

Though tensions between a Buddhist majority
and a Muslim minority are not new, the BBS phenomenon reflects a broader problem
in present-day Sri Lanka – an alarming shortage of critical and constructive
public debate on issues of national concern. Increasingly, steps are been taken
to reduce the younger generation’s inclination to question the establishment
through growing militarisation, through compulsory military training for university
entrants and public servants in the
education sector. Calls for communal harmony and good governance, often raised
by a critically minded, educated and well-travelled urban minority, do not
trickle down to the masses of the citizenry. This reality has facilitated the
continuation of a highly clientelist, oligarchic mode of governance with
unmistakably chauvinistic and dictatorial undertones.

Sideboxes

In 2006, then-Secretary General of the
United Nations, Kofi Annan, said:  “The
world is starting to grasp that there is no policy more effective in promoting
development, health and education than the empowerment of women and girls. And
I would venture that no policy is more important in preventing conflict, or in
achieving reconciliation after a conflict has ended.” 

The social fabric of a group is woven, in
the first place, by the efforts of women. 
Women make day-to-day living possible for men, women, and children,
weaving the strands by growing and processing food, obtaining water and fuel,
managing clothing and cleaning, performing reproduction, lactation, and
childcare, nursing others through infirmities and old age, sharing information
and coordinating efforts with other women in their families and communities,
storing emergency provisions, being the primary investors in the human capital
of the family’s children, and so forth. 
What women do is the foundation of human security in every society.  When women are made vulnerable, when women’s
concerns are ignored, when women’s voices have no place in societal
decision-making, the fabric of the society begins to fray in a very real way.  And once society has experienced war, the
surest way to rebuild society is to protect and empower those who will re-weave
the torn social fabric if given half a chance to do so: the women.

Too often, however, women’s weaving is
considered a given in national planning, especially after a conflict.  Re-establishing a politico-military order,
which is a male-gendered activity, will often trump other important types of
stabilization, which may be female-gendered. 
No funds for a social services budget? 
No worries; women will pick up the slack, and take care of the children,
ill, and elderly.  Women’s caring labor
for others is assumed to be both inexhaustible and free, like the air we
breathe.  Furthermore, we assume this
caring labor will not be affected if women are oppressed by social customs.  Even under the worst of abusive conditions,
we assume women will still provide their free caring labor and keep the society
running from day to day.  And because we
assume women will provide this caring labor no matter how they are treated, we
assume it is unnecessary to listen to their concerns and their insights.  Important decisions can be made without
their input.

One of the most poignant reflections I
have heard is that of Donald Steinberg, former US Ambassador to Angola.  He said, “Addressing an audience of African
scholars on the Lusaka Protocol in late 1994, I was asked about the role of
women in its negotiating and implementation. I responded that there was not a
single provision in the agreement that discriminated against women. “The
agreement is gender-neutral,” I proclaimed, somewhat proudly. President
Clinton then named me as US ambassador to Angola and a member of the
Luanda-based Joint Commission charged with implementing the peace accords. It
took me only a few weeks after my arrival in Luanda to realize that a peace
agreement that is “gender-neutral” is, by definition, discriminatory
against women and thus far less likely to be successful. The exclusion of women
and gender considerations from the peace process proved to be a key factor
in our inability to implement the Lusaka Protocol and in Angola’s return to
conflict in late 1998 . . . This contributed to the return to another three
years of fighting that ended only with Savimbi’s death in 2001.”

Here are some lessons I have learned from
my twenty years as an academic studying the relationship between “sex and world peace”

War does not stop in a nation when the
men have stopped killing each other and are safe in their own homes and
communities.  The war only stops when
women are also safe in their own homes and communities.  This means monitoring, tracking, recording,
publishing, and addressing the gender-based violence that attended the war and
that typically attends demobilization. 
Demobilization can sometimes lead to a new round of violence for women,
and prevention of this unintended consequence must be addressed.  This focus must include attention to the
trafficking of women in conflict and post-conflict situations, which must be a
high priority for programmatic intervention. 

The peace process cannot be “men with
guns forgiving other men with guns for crimes committed against women.”  The crimes committed against women and their
children cannot be brushed under the carpet or deemed as lesser offenses.  Female officials should help lead any
efforts such as peace and reconciliation tribunals.  Furthermore, reparations rather than merely symbolic justice
should be pursued on behalf of female survivors.

The physical geography of a woman’s life
must be considered in programmatic intervention.  For example, one must design refugee camps with women’s
vulnerability to sexual assault and kidnapping in mind.  When pursuing de-mining, for example, the
priorities should not just be the places men typically go, such as the
roadways, but also the places women typically go, such as the fields.  Security checkpoints can be used to corral
and harm females.  Women fearful of rape
find it is more difficult to feed their children because now economically
important areas are danger zones. 
Feminist geographers have pioneered concepts that could help guide these
efforts to reconfigure spaces to be safer for women.

Reproductive health care and girls’
education must be considered to be equally as vital parts of national
infrastructure—to be reconstructed immediately post-conflict—as the provision
of electricity or banking services. 
Benchmarks of a functioning society must include benchmarks for women’s
physical and economic security, as well as their educational advancement.  Security for girls going to school must also
be a priority.

Security forces often prey upon
women.  Women must be part of the
reconstructed national security forces and police, to mitigate the
too-frequently encountered culture of male impunity with regards to
gender-based violence and oppression. 
Furthermore, women should occupy senior positions as well as
on-the-ground positions in the security and police forces.  Laws against trafficking, prostitution,
child marriage, child debt peonage, and other predatory practices that flourish
in post-conflict settings, must be enacted and enforced.

In reconstructing the rule of law, the
critical importance of family and personal status law in affecting the lives of
women must not be overlooked.  These
laws must be configured in accordance with CEDAW principles.  Specifically, these include laws on property
rights, land rights, inheritance rights, equal access to credit for women, and
other personal status factors that may impinge on a women’s ability to provide
economic security for her children.

Women who were kidnapped or coerced into
serving rebel groups must be counted as persons in need
of demobilization assistance and support.

Women’s unpaid caring labor must be
included in the figures for gross domestic product, which will allow donors and
national economists to model the effects of proposed laws and regulations on
the ability of women to weave a strong social fabric for their nation.  Economic policy advisors should all receive
training in gender analysis.  In
addition, emphasis on providing economic opportunities for women to have
livelihoods should be mainstreamed in donor aid programming.  No employment program should create jobs for
only one sex: neither sex should receive more than 60% of job opportunities
created.

Any barriers that women experience in
accessing radio broadcasts or cell phone services should be a priority for
programmatic intervention.  Radio
broadcasts should include programming that, at a minimum, advises women of
their legal rights and avenues for redress when those rights have been
violated.  Field studies have shown that
women may not even be aware of their rights, especially those living in rural
areas, and may experience difficulties traveling to reach government offices or
courts.  Cell phones augment the ability
of women to create a network of women who can stand together against abuse when
the public square is less accessible to women.

In Angola, Steinberg says the motto for
women became, “Nothing about us without us.” 
This reflects an important guiding principle: women must be involved in
all programs not only as beneficiaries, but as planners and implementers.  Neither gender should have less than 40%
representation in all societal endeavors to rebuild after conflict, whether
that be peace talks, reconstruction organizations, or the reconstitution of the
national government itself. 
Capacity-building programs for women to not only participate in these
activities, but participate effectively, should be undertaken.

Peace on earth will never be realized
until there is peace between men and women.  It is time that societies,
governments, and international organizations began to act on that premise.

Valerie Hudson is speaking at the Nobel Women’s Initiative conference  Moving
Beyond Militarism and War: Women-Driven Solutions for a Nonviolent World  May 28-31, Belfast, Ireland.  Read 50.50’s full
coverage of the conference  

 Read more articles on
50.50 from earlier Nobel Women’s Initiative conferences

Sideboxes

A wise comment made by Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired from the United States supreme court in 2006, has a certain relevance to Washington’s dilemma over its attitude to Nicolás Maduro, the new president of Venezuela. The former judge, speaking to the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, had been asked about the court’s role in the notorious controversy in 2000 when the result of the presidential election depended on the result in Florida.

O’Connor recalled that the court "took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue…Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’” She went on: “Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision..it turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the supreme court added to the problem at the end of the day” (see “”http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-04-27/news/ct-met-sandra-day-oconnor-edit-board-20130427_1_o-connor-bush-v-high-court">O’Connor question’s court’s decision to take on Bush v. Gore", Chicago Tribune, 27 April 2013). 

Now, Washington – this time in the form of the Barack Obama administration – is being called on to take a stance on another close presidential election, the one in Venezuela held on 14 April, six weeks after the death of Hugo Chávez on 5 March. In the vote, Chávez’s nominated successor Nicolás Maduro defeated the opposition candidate Henrique Capriles by a tight margin of 1.6%. This contested result in an extremely polarised country faces the United States with an important choice: is it willing to recognise the legitimacy of the result (and thus join all Latin America), or is it still inclined to fuel Venezuela’s volatility and instability?

The answer is poised. Washington may follow its cold-war pattern and choose among  some combination of hardline containment, political rollback, and attempted regime change. But all these options would be bad – for Venezuelans, for Latin Americans, and even for the US’s long-term interests in both Venezuela and the region.

Washington has a number of other potential initiatives at its disposal. It could engage in some kind of symbolic sanction in response to the absence of an overall vote recount. It could adopt a policy of soft pressure and growing encirclement of Venezuela, while waiting for an extended and uncontrolled crisis. Or it could call openly for a sort of “Venezuelan spring” to be led by Capriles.

None of these three options is realistic, however. Each would exacerbate the country’s internal turmoil, perhaps even provoking a civil war in Venezuela with likely spillover effects in Latin America. The chavista side would depict the domestic opposition to Maduro even more strongly as puppets of Washington; and this would make even harder the creation of a legitimate challenge to Venezuela’s so-called “21st century socialist revolution”.

A sound strategy

The only reasonable policy for all the parties involved – in Venezuela, in the region and the United States – is to develop a US-Latin American collaborative strategy oriented towards a peaceful transition in Venezuela. This should be designed to aid and not assail the country. It may involve the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina. All have key interests in Venezuela, albeit with different intensity and scope; but these could be managed positively, for neither Washington nor Latin America needs a source of disorder, polarisation, and fragmentation in the Americas. A sound strategy of this kind can be implemented if dogmatism and parochialism are sidelined.

The key to a successful political evolution in Venezuela is to avoid extremism; stimulate bargaining among different, key domestic actors; help achieve effective and verifiable compromises; contribute to democratic strengthening; and avoid calls on the military to “do something”. Much of this can be embodied in a mixture of incentives and restraints, planned over a lengthy period of time.

To a large extent this reasonable strategy depends on Washington and the recognition that real consultation with Latin America is not only feasible but also urgently necessary.

Over six decades ago, on 29 March 1950, George F Kennan – then counselor of the US secretary of of state, Dean Acheson – sent a long memorandum to his boss. Near the end of the document, Kennan asserted: “It is important for us to keep before ourselves and the Latin American peoples at all times the reality of the thesis that we are a great power; that we are by and large much less in need of them than they are in need of us; that we are entirely prepared to leave to themselves those who evince no particular desire for the form of collaboration that we have to offer, that the danger of a failure to exhaust the possibilities of our mutual relationship is always greater to them than to us; that we can afford to wait, patiently and good naturedly; and that we are more concerned to be respected than to be liked or understood”.

This type of argument and approach was congruent with the US’s actual hegemony with regard to the region at the beginning of the cold war. Its underlying logic as a mode of thinking (and acting) is today obsolete. Inter-American relations now demand a fresh course. How Washington handles President Maduro’s election will reveal either a newfound maturity or the persistence of hegemonic presumption vis-á-vis Latin America.

Sideboxes

In May 2009 as the armed conflict between the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the government of Sri Lanka came to
a harrowing end, Sri Lanka’s genocidal offensive against the Tamil population
of the North-East reached a peak. Four years on, as the Tamil nation –
scattered worldwide through decades of oppression and armed conflict –
remembers the massacre that took place, the prospect of a stable and secure
future remains bleak. Sri Lanka has long proven itself both incapable and
unwilling to deliver accountability and justice to the Tamil people, yet the
international community too has failed to instigate a credible process towards
it. But most of all, the systematic destruction of the Tamil identity
continues, unchecked.  

It is increasingly evident that the mantra of granting
Sri Lanka time, space, economic support and international engagement is not
leading to a process of accountability, reconciliation or peace for the Tamils.
Torture, disappearance, rape and murder prevail; the economic and political
fabric of Tamil society is repressed. What the Sri Lankan government celebrated
as the defeat of one of the world’s largest ‘terrorist’ organisations has not
brought security to the Tamil nation.

The true extent of the destruction that took place in
2009 remains unknown. UN estimates of the numbers of Tamil civilians killed
range from 40,000
to over 70,000
(notwithstanding the 146,679 unaccounted for). A panel of UN experts, citing
‘credible allegations’ of war crimes and crimes against humanity on both sides,
concluded that the vast majority of Tamil deaths were caused by government
shelling. The panel accused government forces of ordering Tamil civilians into
designated ‘no-fire zones’ only to shell the areas with heavy artillery, as
well as intentionally
targeting hospitals. Those Tamils who survived found themselves pressed
into government territory and detained in militarised camps for months
afterwards. UN experts stated they were deliberately and systematically
deprived of humanitarian aid, food and sanitation in these camps through the
government’s intentional deflation of numbers.

Beyond the constraints of
the outdated Genocide Convention and the burden of proof of ‘genocidal intent’,
to Tamils, there is no doubt that the terror unleashed upon them was genocide.
The Tamil use of the term is not hyperbole; it is instead a bold stand of the
Tamil nation not to shy away from expressing its self-understanding of its own
lived experiences. Crucially, only the term genocide encapsulates the
sociological and political treatment of the Tamil nation by the Sri Lankan
state over the past 60 years. 

Continuum of genocide

History makes clear that atrocities on this scale do
not occur in isolation. The massacre of Tamils in 2009 came as the predictable
zenith of 60 years of escalating oppression and persecution of the Tamil nation
by successive governments. Previous measures such as the Citizenship Act,
Sinhala Only Act, standardisation in education and the new republican
constitution of 1978 were calculated to undermine the Tamil nation’s place in
the island and consolidate Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony. Open attacks on the
nation were unleashed – the crucible of Tamil history and literature as the
Jaffna library was burnt, peaceful Tamil protests were violently crushed and
thousands of Tamils were murdered in state sponsored pogroms. It was from this
backdrop that the Tamil call for independence in 1976 and armed Tamil
resistance advocating secession emerged.

Equally, the mass slaughtering of tens of thousands of
Tamil civilians by the ethnically pure Sinhala military in 2009, could not have
taken place without the collusion of the Sinhala majority: the competitive
chauvinism of the Sinhala polity, active endorsement by large swathes of the
media, complicity of the judiciary and the silent apathy of wider Sinhala
society.

Whilst the absence of armed conflict has halted overt
slaughter, the Sri Lankan state has escalated the dismantling of the Tamil
identity in the North-East, deconstructing the very basis of the Tamil
assertion of nationhood, homeland and the right to self-determination. Through
the appropriation of privately owned Tamil land using dubious ‘legal’ measures
and wholesale militarised seizure, the state-sponsored resettlement of Sinhala
families and the establishment of militarised ‘high security zones’, the ethnic
demography of the North-East is effectively being re-engineered. Sinhala
resettlement was later used as justification for a string of other measures
including changing place names from Tamil to Sinhalese and erecting Buddhist
stupas while Tamil places of worship such as temples and churches remain
destroyed.

It is not chance that the recent accelerated land grabs
come as the government, succumbing to international pressure, announced a
provincial council election in the North. Though the elections serve no purpose – the provincial council system
cannot provide any solutions to the immediate problems of the Tamil people nor
form a basis through which a political solution can be explored – the
government is actively working to ensure that the Tamil nation is denied
control of even a vacuous body like the Provincial Council. The
government’s introduction of a carefully vetted pool of ‘rehabilitated’ Tamil
electoral candidates, its active endorsement of paramilitary parties and
increasing attacks against members of the Tamil nationalist polity and press,
strikes at the very heart of Tamil political power – forcibly dissipating its
voter base and installing fear within the electorate.

Alongside the dismantling of Tamil society and polity,
the deliberate suppression of the North-East economy ensures that the character
of the Tamil people as a nation, with a sustainable homeland, is meticulously
erased. Sri Lanka’s rhetoric
of ‘development’ belies the state-sponsored transfer of farming lands to
Sinhala farmers, curtailment of Tamil fishing opportunities and the military’s
encroachment on an array of employment sectors including transportation,
housing development and tourism.

Need for accountability

Crimes of this magnitude necessitate accountability
and justice. Since 2009, the Tamil calls for an independent, international
investigation, as the only means to this end, have been unanimous and
unwavering. From Tamil political representatives such as the Tamil National Alliance
and the Tamil National People’s Front, to Tamil civil society groups in the
North-East and the diaspora, there is a resounding consensus: Sri Lanka must
not be left to investigate itself. In over 60 years there has been no historic
precedent of Sri Lanka delivering justice to Tamils for crimes committed by the
state or its stooges. Emboldened by this endemic impunity, it has instead
habitually stalled, producing a litany of failed reconciliation initiatives and
rejecting external suggestions of improvement. Against a backdrop of
intimidation, white-van abductions, and assassinations, it routinely silences
anyone attempting to unearth the truth.

From the outset, Sri Lanka responded to credible
allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity with outlandish
assertions: ‘zero-civilian casualties’ and a ‘humanitarian rescue operation’.
Its rejection of international calls to investigate both sides was followed by
histrionic accusations of neo-colonialists and terrorist proxies levelled
against advocates of an international investigation. Sri Lanka’s eventual
response to pressure, the internal Lessons Learnt Reconciliation Commission
(LLRC), in line with its predecessors, resolutely fails to credibly address
accountability or justice. From its stated objectives (including to “clear the
good name of the army”) and formation, to the context of militarisation and
intimidation in which it took place, the LLRC has proved the opposite of a
credible, independent inquiry.

That it was appointed by the President to investigate
crimes that he, as Commander in Chief of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces and his
brother as Defence Secretary, were primarily implicated in, underscores its
inconsequence. Crucially, this lack of will reverberates outside the ruling
government, into the wider Sinhala polity and Sri Lanka’s influential Buddhist
clergy, as well as the judiciary and press. Given this, the international
community’s continued calls for Sri Lanka to investigate itself reveal a
dismaying lack of commitment to deliver justice to Tamils.

In the context of an ethnic conflict, a collective
sense of closure is vital for any prospect of reconciliation and lasting
stability to resolve deep-rooted feelings of anger, resentment and mistrust. In
the case of Sri Lanka, closure could not be further away. Four years on, Tamils
continue to find themselves at the mercy of those who celebrate the pinnacle of
their torment as a ‘victory’, and are actively destroying the very fabric of
the Tamil identity. Anything short of an international inquiry – be it ‘truth
and reconciliation’ commissions or political settlements in exchange for
blanket amnesties – will not only continue to grant impunity and embolden an
already brutal regime, but will fuel simmering resentment, and pave the way for
yet more intractable conflict on the island. The suggestion that Tamils must
trust in the future good will and reformed ways of today’s perpetrators and
their assenters – who, as numerical superiors within a unitary state, will
always remain democratically unchallengeable – is repulsive.

On a global level, the international community’s
abysmal failure to uphold its own much-touted adage of ‘never again’
in 2009, has already inspired the macabre propagation of the ‘Sri Lankan
model of counter-terrorism’. The continued failure to deliver justice for
crimes such as genocide will inspire tomorrow’s perpetrators worldwide.  

Enduring contradiction

The marking of May 18th embodies the
enduring contradiction at the crux of the island’s ethnic conflict. Amidst
heavy restrictions on Tamils in the North-East to exercise their right to
memory, the Tamil nation comes together to remember the nadir of the genocide
it has faced and that which it continues to face; the Sri Lankan state
meanwhile marks its greatest victory. The images of death and suffering that
form the collective Tamil memory of 2009 are irreconcilable with the images of
triumphant soldiers parading their ‘success’ and a jubilant Sinhala nation
waving the Sri Lankan flag.

Images of Tamil suffering and the expression of
collective agony, though not in itself celebrated, have failed to provoke the
collective conscience of the Sinhala nation. When Tamils took to the streets in
their hundreds of thousands, to protest day and night against events unfolding,
the Sinhala nation applauded the military’s progress. What the Tamil nation
mourned as the crushing of resistance against oppression was embraced by the
Sinhala nation as the restoration of the natural state of Sinhala Buddhist rule
across the entirety of the island.

Four years on, the contrast is no less profound.
Running directly counter to Sri Lanka’s determination to reject an international
inquiry, is the Tamil campaign for it. As rallies that took place this May 18th
and Tamil attempts at legal action against travelling Sri Lankan military
officials reveal, the passing of time has only strengthened the Tamil demand
for accountability and justice. Assertions that the quest for justice is being
pursued only by the ‘disconnected and radicalised’ diaspora, whilst the Tamils
in the North-East only desire ‘development’, are evidently false. Instead, as
recent prosecutions of aging Nazi criminals illustrate, the gnawing ache of
injustice felt by those who faced persecution does not diminish with time. It
cannot be reconciled with truth alone, and it will not be pacified by economic
prosperity. Rather, only everyday security and normalcy can form the foundation
on which the quest for justice can be launched. As the Tamil nation takes stock
this May 18th, acutely mindful of the on-going structural genocide,
the need for justice and accountability is reinforced – and so too the Tamil
nation’s resolve to pursue it.

Sideboxes

The streets of Pamplona, Spain. Flickr/Paul D’Ambra. Some rights reserved.

There is a
tendency when discussing ‘things European’ to speak almost exclusively in vertical
terms, as if the question of Europe was all about the formal institutions – the
parliament, the Commission etc. – the agreements amongst member states, or even
the relationship between the citizens and the institutions. This tendency is
particularly strong in the United Kingdom, where ‘the European question’ is
indeed being boiled down to a simple ‘in or out?’ dimension. But the trend is
present in all European countries and is in part the inevitable consequence of
the European Union being very young and continuously under construction. We
could also say that it is the consequence, in some ways, of the idea of Europe itself being captured by
the European Union and its institutions in their present form. 

As essential as
the ‘vertical’ questions about Europe are, there are also a set of arguably
more important questions which could be called ‘horizontal’ : how do Europeans
relate to one another, as individuals and as groups? How do they treat each
other? How do they express solidarity or conflict? How do they do things
together? Refocusing on these questions seems to me an important part of
constructing a
Europe from below. 

Re-founding Europe 

We know that
formal institutions and elected leaders have a great influence in determining
the way people relate to one another: if leaders from the north propagate the
idea that people in the south of Europe are lazy, for example, or that a
‘moral’ fault has been committed in the south that needs to be ‘punished’ by
austerity, and indeed if the policies of the European Union become based on
this kind of premise, then it is of course more likely that people in the north
of Europe will think this way of people in the south, and that social relations
will change in this direction. But the attitudes and behaviours of people are
thankfully not only determined by leaders or institutions, and the changes in
public attitudes induced by public policies are not unidirectional.

Without speaking
of civil disobedience, there are alternative forms of social organisation which
can be promoted and effectively resist the logic of both the market and current
institutions. Many recent examples are well known, from people’s supermarkets
to Bitcoin to occupied
theatres. In the context of the present crisis, many of the most discussed of these
initiatives are understandably focused on economic alternatives.

There are not many
examples of such initiatives on a European scale, or with Europe as a focus,
even if they have been emerging, notably with regard to solidarity with migrant
populations. Such initiatives would have a tough task: they would challenge not
only dominant opinion, but also institutional logics as profound as the
ordering of our societies according to the model of the nation state. But they
would also have to take into account the increasingly ‘transnational’ dimension
of our lives, social relations and outlooks, which now largely go beyond anything
that could be circumscribed by one national polity. Such initiatives would not
necessarily be making political demands directed towards formal institutions of
democracy, but rather enact new ways
of being European. The creation of such initiatives seems to me essential for
the development of an alternative Europe.

Another Europe – where from?

Historically, the
left in Europe has been built through initiatives such as cooperatives, working
men’s clubs, and trade unions. These are some of the ways that the values of
solidarity, for example, have been anchored, protected and promoted in our
social fabric. If we want to build a European left, it is naïve to think it can
or will be done by conquering power in the institutions. It will be done
through a decade-long process of creating alternative social institutions.
Holding power in the institutions may be a desirable thing to facilitate this
social process – but it should be power in the long-term service of the people,
and not the other way around. 

As Bo
Stråth and many others have argued, the reinforcing and the politicisation of the European
Parliament are essential components of creating a functioning European public
sphere which allows for the feedback between the representatives and the represented
to function correctly.

At the moment we
have a situation where the national public spheres in Europe reinforce national
divergence and competition through a well-established feedback loop between
national public opinion and national leaders, which is rushing us towards forms
of nationalist populism. A European Parliament which found its place in the
institutional system of Europe would interrupt this national feedback loop by
introducing a European perspective focused on the European common good. But a
functioning European Parliament in this sense cannot be created by fiat. Nor
can genuinely trans-European political parties, which would incarnate competing
visions of the European common good, be created by the elites or by recomposing
national political parties into ‘groups’ at the European level: the creation of
political parties will be based on and emerge from the structuration of
people’s movements in European society, through social initiatives. Forgetting
this anchoring in the fabric of society – it seems to me – is part of what many
people are getting at when they say that political parties seem increasingly
disconnected from everyday life and seem only to represent professionalised
politicians or hidden interests. The current ‘European’ political groupings seem only to
accentuate this feeling.

It is also
possible to resist dominant logics in everyday actions as simple as the way we
interact in social settings with others, behaviour that we accept and behaviour
that we condemn, the jokes we repeat or refuse to laugh at… All of this is well
known and quite obvious to many of us from other experiences: more or less
successful battles have been won by progressive forces to change social
behaviours when it comes to gender relations, for example, or race relations.

This dimension of
creating Europe, creating Europe also
through the manners of its people, is almost totally absent from public debate.
It is there, arguably, that we are potentially strongest, for a significant
part of the population of Europe is already outraged, indignant indeed, by social injustice, corruption, lack of media freedom, contravening of
fundamental rights and so on in Europe. We need to have the courage to say that it is in the name of Europe that we find the current political and social
situation unacceptable. Then we may be a step away from saying that in the name of Europe the current form of
the European Union is unacceptable.

The dimension of
manners, the dimension of ‘civilisation’ as we might call it following Norbert
Elias, is arguably absent from the public debate in Europe because of the
pervasiveness of the dogma that the European institutions were created by the
elites, often in spite of the people.

In a sense, this
is true – after all, the founding fathers of the European Union worked to
create the coal and steel community often against popular sentiment after the
Second World War, which was still highly recriminatory regarding former
enemies. The problem with this dogma, however, is that
its repetition and internalisation reinforces the
‘vertical’ nature of the European Union and totally disregards undercurrents in
European society – in the manners and customs of the way people relate to one
another in Europe – that made such a project socially possible, even in the
aftermath of the greatest catastrophe of European civilisation. If we ignore
this legacy of customs and manners of humanism in Europe, then the only societal enabler which makes the European Union seem viable as a project since 1945 is
the promise of (ever greater) wealth. Regardless of whether such an
objective is good, in the current context of crisis and provincialisation
of Europe, it is not convincing.

A post-European Europe

A part of the left
is highly reluctant to do or promote anything ‘in the name of Europe’ or to
have recourse or reference to Europe’s cultural, literary and humanist past
because the name of ‘Europe’ itself is tainted with colonialism. The appearance
of forms of neo-colonialism in countries experiencing austerity programs in
Europe at the moment reinforces this narrative. The narrative and the critical
approach are both justified and to be taken extremely seriously. But on their
own they are insufficient to produce a form of political subjectivity which is constructive as well as oppositional. The constructive side of these thoughts is
for us in Europe, I believe, inescapably European: and if it is not, our
promises of progress will always relate to elsewhere, whilst in our own
backyards social justice is abrogated. 

On the table of
the philosopher Jan Patocka at the time of his death in 1977 was a text called ‘Europe
and Post-Europe. The Post-European epoch and its spiritual problems’ (not
published in English) in which he outlines a post-European philosophy for
Europe, which is based on taking full responsibility for the harm and crimes
caused by Europeans and European inventions. Leaving aside the spiritual
aspects of Patocka’s thought, there is much to be gained in taking seriously
the idea that Europe is inescapably European and linked with Europe’s
historical and cultural past. 

Europe will be
constituted as it continuously exceeds itself, going beyond its horrors and its
failings. As such it is a humble project, which cannot be too dogmatic in its
opinions, cannot be overly sure of itself or closed to debate and contention.
It is tied to a process of cultivation and education which must constantly
guard against the risk of becoming domination. In the context of the European
crisis, Europe has tried to make itself too rigid and closed as a cloak for its
perceived weakness as an institutional system, thereby ignoring its real strengths (which
are in its people, their intellectual, emotional, social and cultural skills). ‘Re-foundation’ might be too strong a word for the Europe-after-Europe if it is
meant to be too decisive or final, and it also risks suggesting that an
alternative Europe is not already with us: maybe it would be better to talk of
the need to provoke an ongoing European awakening. 

Sideboxes

British Treasury ministers like to talk about “cracking
down” on tax avoidance and evasion. And Chancellor Osborne is currently claiming
credit for pressing fellow EU members to sign up to improved
information exchange. Just how seriously should these claims be taken?  Who is advising Osborne, and whose interests
do those advisers serve?  Can we be
confident that our taxes are designed and collected on a politically impartial
basis?

Up until ten years ago the Boards of the Inland
Revenue and Customs and Excise departments were based in their own imposing
buildings, reflecting the Boards’ legal separation from the Treasury.  They managed the administration of the taxes
and the development of tax policy at one remove from the Treasury, under an
arrangement that worked well through most of the twentieth century.  Merged into one department by chancellor
Gordon Brown, the new HM Revenue and Customs doesn’t now have a headquarters of
its own.  What used to be the front
entrance to HM Treasury in Parliament
Street now carries HMRC’s nameplate. Around the
back on Horse Guards Road is the new Treasury entrance, created in 2003-04 in a
PFI-funded refurbishment of the building – an irony so exquisite as to outdo
any political satire.

These developments reflect the emasculation of the
revenue departments, at all levels. The
Revenue’s service to smaller taxpayers is lamentable. And government now lacks
any demonstrably impartial advisory function for tax policy, following what Richard
Brooks calls “the corporate capture of tax lawmaking”, a subject that has
increasingly troubled the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).  It is this that is at the heart of Brook’s
latest book, The
Great Tax Robbery.

So comprehensively has big money and its advisers
captured tax policy development and implementation that HMRC’s Board is now
chaired by the former ‘head of tax practice’ (big-money “tax-planning”) at
KPMG, one of the “big four” accountancy firms. These accountants are not the
docile reclusives of legend, but vigorous lobbyists in their own tax-planning
cause, with
ready access to the very top.  Revenue
officials, for their part, have traditionally been extremely self-effacing. Yet
HMRC’s most enduring public face over the past decade has been that of Dave
Hartnett.

Ostensibly the Revenue’s top tax inspector, Hartnett is better known
as chief spokesman for the “Getting Closer to Business” initiative, as the
sealer of controversial deals, and as the UK’s “most wined and dined civil
servant”; a situation without precedent in history of taxes in the UK. Hartnett’s
deals with Vodaphone and Goldman Sachs have drawn endless adverse
comparison with the increasingly shabby treatment of less influential taxpayers.
In these straitened times a rational government might have been expected to
look to boost its tax compliance effort. One study puts the current account
deficit at up to £175bn and the tax gap at £120bn. Yet Revenue staff numbers were
cut from 104,000 in 2004/05 to 67, 000 in 2011, with the promise of a further
10,000 “efficiency savings” by 2015 regardless of the consequential loss of
tax and of diminished accessibility for smaller taxpayers.

But the subversion and emasculation of the Revenue, is
just one part of Brooks’ story. Formerly a senior investigator in the Inland
Revenue’s (now defunct) International Division, latterly Private Eye’s leading
writer on tax, Brooks gives us a virtual compendium of tax games, bookended by
important statements about tax and its social function in the UK and abroad. Among
this compendium is the fragmentation of businesses (by payment via tax-haven
associates, for stock in trade or use of trade marks), and debt financing of
trading operations. Thus, as the public
is becoming increasingly aware, “branded” operations, such as Starbucks in the UK and SABMiller’s in Ghana, declare negligible local
profits and pay little or no local profits tax. 
Outdated international tax conventions allow multinationals to strip
profits away from the point of delivery, often through the Netherlands, Luxembourg
or Switzerland,
to be deposited in remoter tax havens. These activities, facilitated by the
tax-planning fraternity, both deplete the public revenue and simultaneously
undermine the competitive position of local business and talent, who don’t have
the scale to exploit these “tax planning opportunities”.

Did you realize that Arsenal’s first all-overseas team
of 2005 was cheaper to assemble and run than any local squad of equal ability,
because of our 19th century tax domicile rules? Or that this
distortion continues to affect both football and the wider financial scene,
whether it involves banking, hedge funds or private equity? (Not to mention the
associated inflation of house prices in London
and southern England.)
Brooks also maps and explains the complex interplay of differential tax
treatment of inserted intermediary companies (fellow group members, resident in
countries with double taxation treaties with the UK): and cross-border interest
flows, giving rise to tax deductions for interest paid in the UK, attracting no
tax charge for interest received, beyond a token “turn” of a fraction of one
per cent for the Luxembourg Fiscal authorities. The opportunities for
international “tax arbitrage” appear endless under current conventions as
determined by the OECD and the EU . But public awareness of this has been
growing thanks partly to the protests of development charities and of UK Uncut. The
minimal tax contributions made by Google and Amazon
have attracted particular attention. Amazon, relying on a business structure
involving a headquarters in Luxembourg
and computer servers in Ireland
recently paid £3.2m corporation tax on sales of £320m or £4.2bn, depending on
who you believe.

What is less well understood is how our domestic
tax-base has been whittled away by endless concessions over the tax rates
payable, on the profits of private equity and also the overseas subsidiaries of
UK
multinationals. In the name of “modernization” of tax law we have become a tax
haven, where the profits of overseas operations are exempted while the costs of
financing them are tax-deductible. The rationale for this, according to the
Treasury, is to achieve “a better fit with the way [multinationals] structure
their commercial operations…”.  Thus, as
Brooks puts it, anti-avoidance laws had to be relaxed in order to… accommodate
companies’ tax avoidance schemes.

He also reveals how the PFI (Private Finance
Initiative) explosion of capital expenditure under Gordon Brown combined
desperately poor value for public money with wholesale avoidance of tax on the
commercial profits of the providers. Additionally, it provided a huge “in” to
the Treasury for the “big four” tax scheme designers (KPMG, Deloittes, E&Y
and PwC) and their legal associates. All this to keep the capital costs of
schools and hospitals off the government’s balance sheet. The British state
fiscally eating itself, in Brooks’ words, to facilitate Brown’s claim to be
sticking by his “golden rules”.  And this
is just a sample of the extraordinary abuses exposed by Brooks.

Without saying so directly, Brooks is plainly an
advocate of the postwar mixed economy, un-persuaded by the relentless
pro-big-money, anti-tax rhetoric of recent decades. He cites the extreme imbalance
in the resources and publicity devoted to relatively trivial benefit fraud, compared
with huge losses to tax fraud and avoidance. Questioning another favourite of
the low tax lobby, he examines  OECD data
on the lack of evidence that low tax rates necessarily promote growth. And on
the Coalition’s audacious break up of the NHS, Brooks looks at the evidence
reported by the British Medical Journal that in terms of reducing mortality,
the NHS is one of the world’s most cost-effective systems, while the US
health system is one of the least. 

His prescription for restoring some order is relatively
modest. Unlike fellow-campaigner, Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK, he
seems to doubt that unitary taxation (or country by country apportionment of  world income/profits by reference to local
turnover, staff, capital investment etc) is a political possibility, not
withstanding that the EU is now proposing it. He suggests more modest changes,
mainly in relation to transparency, on the basis that avoiders and evaders hate
publicity. Brooks wants tougher disclosure obligations on taxpayers,  a moderation of EU fundamental freedom rules
where they produce perverse tax results, for tax havens to be forced to provide
information on their activities. He wants abolition of the current asymmetries
in multinationals’ tax treatment and abolition of non-domicile status, introduction
of a basic minimum tax rule, and an end to the one-way-bet treatment of tax
avoidance schemes, where the aspiring avoider risks nothing more than his fees,
regardless of the artificiality of scheme in question.

Brooks’ final plea is for a restoration of the
appropriate distance between the Revenue and major taxpayers and a rebuilding
of HMRC’s greatly depleted capacity, not least of its specialist units. While
Dave Hartnett was addressing conferences on “Managing Tax Optimization
Expectations”, and making controversial “bespoke” deals with avoiders and tax
havens, Brooks’ former colleagues were telling him “We used to have a priority
to collect tax, now we have a priority to have a good relationship”.

This, surely, is the first priority for parliament.  Absent an impartial and adequately resourced
fiscal authority, staffed by public servants trained and incentivised to do a
professional job (as once they were) the details of the tax code are almost
academic. Hartnett has now quit the department following multiple run-ins with
the Public Accounts Committee over alleged “sweetheart deals” he made with big
business. Brooks identifies these as having created precedents deeply adverse
to the public revenue and the public interest. 
But very serious questions remain over the ethics of tax avoidance and
the appropriate posture of parliament.

In a recent BBC 4 profile of Margaret Hodge, Chair of
the PAC, the editor of the Taxation magazine complained that members of his
tax-practitioner profession were being “traduced” by her comments about the
tax-planners. Yet the political class at large has been reluctant to confront
the fact that the designers and promoters of tax avoidance schemes not only
help extract value from the public purse without contributing anything to the
real economy, but they also facilitate the smothering, by big money, of small
business and local enterprise. Brooks doesn’t quite develop this, and discuss
why more political voices have not been raised in protest. The anti-competitive,
anti-local effects of big-business tax avoidance, combined with the Hartnett
phenomenon and the growing dysfunctionality of the Revenue, should be issues of
primary political concern. At the most superficial level, for instance, HMRC’s
website has not carried a proper organization chart for the best part of a
decade, and its telephone response times are quite dreadful.) Perhaps a new,
joint parliamentary fiscal committee would be helpful.

It would also have been good to have Brooks’ assessment
of the impact if interest costs generally were to cease to be a deductible, and
if unitary taxation were introduced by the EU/G8/OECD. These two measures alone
would surely transform the landscape overnight, and they don’t look much more
aspirational or optimistic than some of Brooks’ own proposals. But The Great Tax Robbery remains a brilliant and important expose, regardless. As
public interest is further sparked by the PAC’s dogged examination of HMRC’s
failure to keep a serious grip on any part of its remit, Brooks’ book will
serve as the handbook of choice for interested observers, wishing to understand
just what big money and its advisers have been up to.

(Chris Hill is a pseudonym)

  ’Democracy
substitutes election by the incompetent

many for
appointment by the corrupt few’

—G.B.
Shaw, Man and Superman

In
2012-13 the Russian government initiated serious reform of the institutional
system that had come into being during the
consolidation of electoral authoritarianism between 2004 and 2011. There were
two reasons for this reform.

On
the one hand, the wave of mass protests in Moscow and other cities at the end
of 2011 came as a severe shock to the Kremlin. On 22 December 2011, in his last
address
to Russia’s Federal Assembly, outgoing president Dmitry Medvedev felt it
necessary to outline these reforms, an obvious reaction to the protests, intended
to calm the situation. So the reform package included limited elements of
political liberalisation.

Pictured here with Boris Yeltsin, Mintimer Shaimiyev of Tatarstan was the first regional leader to sign a bilateral treaty with Moscow in 1994. While Boris Yeltsin offered the regions to take ‘as much sovereignty as you can swallow’, Vladimir Putin has sought to recentralise power, replacing the system of direct elections for regional governors with presidential appointment in 2004. Photo (cc) RIA Novosti archive/Dmitryi Donskoy 

On
the other hand, the events of December 2011 were a strong signal that the
political system had not kept up with expectations; it had failed and this was
what triggered the protests. From the very beginning, the priority was to
reform the system, maximizing its potential as the basis for the long term
health of the regime. Indeed this idea of reform, a kind of authoritarian
adjustment, had become central to government thinking as early as the late
spring and summer of 2011.

A return to
gubernatorial elections

In
2004 the system of direct elections for regional governors was replaced by
their appointment from the centre, i.e. by the president. Officially, three
candidates’ names would be put before regional parliaments for approval but,
given that a failure to rubber stamp the president’s own choice could mean the dissolution
of an assembly, together with the absolute local control exercised by
governors, and the domination of the president’s ‘United Russia’ party in all
these bodies, the results of these ‘elections’ would clearly be a foregone
conclusion.

‘Of all the
anti-democratic measures taken between 2005 and 2011, it was the abolition of
these elections that aroused the greatest disapproval among the general public.’

The
new system immediately came under strong criticism from both liberal elements
in Russia itself and observers elsewhere, many of whom considered it the key
element of a clear swing towards authoritarianism in Russian politics. Interestingly
enough, a return to direct gubernatorial elections was not one of the protest
movement’s main demands in 2011, probably because its leaders were more focused
on national issues.

At
the same time, the Kremlin had every reason to expect that a return to the
direct election of regional administrative chiefs would be seen by many
Russians as a step towards political liberalisation. Indeed, of all the
anti-democratic measures taken between 2005 and 2011, it was the abolition of
these elections that aroused the greatest disapproval among the general public,
and confidence in the appointed governors had fallen steadily. A poll conducted
by the FOM market research company in June
2011 showed that only 21% of the population supported the new system, with 40%
against it (and 38% ‘don’t knows’). So a reversion to elections looked as
though it might boost the regime’s popularity.

The rationale and
strategies behind authoritarian adjustment

One
of the main reasons behind the abolition of gubernatorial elections in 2004 was
the influence of governors on the results of national parliamentary elections.
As key political players at regional level, they exercise a good deal of
control over political life in their area in general, and the work of regional
and local election commissions in particular. The extent of this control had
become clear during the 1999-2000 parliamentary elections. Governors who were
appointed, rather than elected, were naturally much more dependent on Moscow,
and so had greater incentive to ensure a decisive victory for ‘United Russia’
in regional assembly elections. Basically, if the ruling party didn’t win a
majority in your region, you were out.

The
December 2011 elections revealed, however, that
governors were losing their ability to guarantee a win for ‘United Russia’ at
the more important, national level. In the first place, appointed governors
enjoyed less authority in their regions than their elected predecessors. In a
FOM poll in January 2011, 39% of respondents said they trusted their governors,
but 36% said they didn’t (25% didn’t know), which reflected a considerable loss
of confidence in regional heads.

‘One of the main
reasons behind the abolition of gubernatorial elections in 2004 was the
influence of governors on the results of national parliamentary elections.’

In
the second place, many appointed governors had no experience of organising
elections where there would be a large turnout. The turnout for local and
regional assembly elections is generally low, so with a bit of mobilisation of
voters and some plain old rigging it’s not difficult to guarantee a ‘United
Russia’ victory. But this is not true for more important elections, and in a
regional context it is elections for governor that are the most important. 

In
other words, it seemed as though the appearance on the regional political scene
of more trustworthy figures with more electoral experience could turn out to be
a key element of the authoritarian adjustment of the system, and so the
reinstatement of direct elections made the political agenda.  

The legislative
process

The
idea of reinstating gubernatorial elections was first mentioned by Vladimir
Putin at a press conference on 15 December 2011. The outline of the proposed
new system was as follows: firstly, the ‘electability’ of governors would be
conditional on a so-called ‘presidential filter’, i.e. the right of the
president to approve, or not, the eligibility of a given candidate. And
secondly, only parties represented in regional assemblies would have the right
to nominate candidates.

In
his final address to parliament a week later, Dmitry Medvedev referred to gubernatorial
elections only briefly; evidently the main parameters of reform had already
been decided by his about-to-be successor as president, Vladimir Putin. But the
final version of the law passed on 2 May 2012 contained very significant
changes (it should also be said that the law was passed and implemented with
great rapidity). The definitive version had lost the clause giving regional
party machines the sole right to nominate candidates and, although the
‘presidential filter’ concept remained, it was couched in very vague terms.
Instead of the president having the right to veto candidates, and therefore to
more or less control election results, the law set up a ‘municipal filter’, an
idea first mooted at a meeting with politicians held by Dmitry Medvedev on 5
April 2012. Anyone wishing to register as a candidate for a gubernatorial
election would have to collect a number of signatures from a specific number of
members in a specific number of regional and/or municipal assemblies. But,
given the nature of such bodies’ work and the almost total control exercised by
governors over them, it was obvious that the main function of this ‘municipal
filter’ was to exclude candidates not approved by the powers that be, whether
party nominees or independents (and the law gave the regions the power to
decide whether or not to allow independents to stand).

‘Elect the worthy!’, advises a Soviet propapanda poster. Will the return of regional governor elections increase local accountabiliy and trust, or will the president’s veto over candidates mean no change, and ensure governors remain sycophantically loyal to the Kremlin? Photo: sovietartmuseum.com 

Then,
in December 2012, Vladimir Putin proposed giving each region the right to
decide how its head should be chosen, so that elections could once again be
replaced by a different selection process, and this change passed into law on 2
April 2013. The alternative process involves parties represented in the Duma or
regional assemblies each putting forward up to three candidates, out of which
the president chooses a short list of three, one of whom is then selected by a
simple majority vote in the relevant regional assembly. So far two regions,
Dagestan and Ingushetia, have chosen this option.

On
14 October 2012 the new legislation was tested in five Russian regions: Amur,
Belgorod, Bryansk, Novgorod and Ryazan. Although the main rules governing these
elections were fixed at national level, the regions had considerable autonomy
over the details, and it is worth noting that none of these elections had
provision for self-nominated independent candidates. Altogether 32 candidates
were nominated in the five regions, of whom 22 were registered and 17 actually
balloted. The most common reason for candidates being refused registration was
fairly predictable – their inability to pass through the ‘municipal filter’.
Either they couldn’t collect enough signatures, or the signatures they
collected turned out to be fake. [In some regions some candidates discussed in
the media as serious contenders didn’t in fact stand for election, and in
Ryazan one candidate withdrew after registration.]

‘The ‘big three’
forces in regional politics – incumbent governors, ‘United Russia’ and the
Kremlin – all play an important role in gubernatorial elections, and it is only
if they were to fall out among themselves that an incumbent might lose an
election.’

 In
every region the election was won by the incumbent, and by a large majority,
with their share of the vote ranging from 64% in Ryazan to 78% in Belgorod. As
many analysts had predicted, the ‘municipal filter’ precluded the nomination of
any strong ‘alternative’ candidates, so any ostensible rivalry for the vote was
a sham. Even in those cases where the incumbent could not rely on either
popularity with the voters or the support of the regional ruling group, the
outcome of the election was decided by administrative machinations and/or backroom
deals in which the Kremlin played an active role. This is of course no
surprise, given that candidates, from whatever party, needed the signatures of
local ‘United Russia’ assembly members. So the most one can say about last
autumn’s elections is that at best they allowed voters to choose between
candidates pre-selected by the regime, out of whom only one – the current
governor – was usually in any way convincing. 

Problems and
challenges for the democratic movement

The
‘big three’ forces in regional politics – incumbent governors, ‘United Russia’
and the Kremlin – all play an important role in gubernatorial elections, and it
is only if they were to fall out among themselves that an incumbent might lose
an election. This didn’t happen in October, although it could in the future. It
is, however, clear that the system precludes the candidature of any opposition
politician. Elections, in other words, don’t give the democratic movement any
change of gaining power in the regions. It is feasible that candidates with
known liberal views (nominated, say, by Mikhail Prokhorov’s ‘Civic
Platform’) might
in the future be able to register to stand for governor. But the very fact of
registration will mean that they have passed the loyalty test and are
acceptable to whoever is the top player of the local ‘big three’, either as
potential winners or – and this is more likely – as token figures who are bound
to lose. We should be wary about supporting such a candidate; we shouldn’t link
the democratic movement’s reputation with politicians of this kind. Given the
restricted range of candidates, in most cases the most acceptable option would
be to vote for any candidate other than the official one (normally the incumbent
governor).

‘It is feasible that
candidates with known liberal views (nominated, say, by Mikhail Prokhorov’s ‘Civic
Platform’) might in the future be able to
register to stand for governor. But the very fact of registration will mean
that they have passed the loyalty test…’

However,
although these events can’t strictly be regarded as elections, they do provide
greater opportunities for political campaigning in the regions and create an
important platform for mobilising voters and raising political awareness. So the
democratic movement would want to see them continue, even in this watered-down
form. We have to oppose any attempts to abolish them under the April 2013 law,
which effectively reinstates the previous system of appointments.

A
campaign for the democratisation of the law on gubernatorial elections, at both
national and regional level, could provide an important focus for the
democratic opposition and critically minded experts. In a regional context it
is essential to reduce the ‘municipal filter’ element of the law and provide
for the possibility of self-nomination for candidates.          

In a forthcoming article, Grigorii Golosov will examine changes to the political party system

Sideboxes

Ask
what factors are preventing women in Britain from possessing the same life
chances as men and you’ll get a myriad responses. Workplace discrimination,
covert and overt. The increasingly prohibitive cost of childcare. Pay
disparity. Few would argue that the defining barriers are an inability to
deliver a winning after dinner speech, toast or deftly network at a drinks
reception.

But
that’s exactly what a number of prestigious girls’ private schools across the
country are
embracing. “Even if you have five A* grades at A-level,” Charlotte Vere,
the director of the Girls Schools Association fronting the initiative, said,
“unless you can make toasts and after-dinner speeches you are not going to go
far.” Pupils at fee paying schools across the country will be invited to staged
drinks parties and formal dinners, where they’ll be coached on “effective
networking” and other intricacies of etiquette on the dinner party circuit.
This PR friendly modern reinvention of the debutante ball, whilst masquerading
as a confidence-building exercise, hammers home the point that this is the
exact world the girls are expected and expecting to enter.

The
focus on gender equality amongst the British elite provides easy headlines, but
what is its actual impact? As Alison Wolf points out in her recent book, The XX Factor, women’s place in society
and the world of work has begun to level out at the very top of the labour
market, but for the remaining 80% of women, it’s another story.

Again
and again, we have seen how quotas of women in elite and prohibitively
competitive professions will not open the floodgates. Take two examples: Marissa
Mayer, on becoming CEO of Yahoo, scrapped telecommuting, after working from
home towards the end of her pregnancy, rather than protect a flexible working
arrangement that could benefit employees with caring responsibilities. Maria
Miller, the Minister for Women, is happy to spin
the news that more women are out of work now than any time since 1988, and
that unemployment has risen for women while falling for men, while
participating in a government that is disastrous for women.

It
is poor women who are bearing
the brunt of the cuts meted out by Maria Miller and her colleagues, as
austerity policies widen
the gulf between the richest and poorest. Hikes in unemployment, attacks on
labour rights, and the failure of the private sector to create the jobs the
government promised would materialise to offset the assault on the public
sector have all led to a vastly more precarious workforce at the lower end of
the market, with women bearing the brunt of the slump. Yet very little space is
given to the barriers to social mobility facing women outside of the professional
classes. Given the media hype around whether women
can “have it all”, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that women without
these opportunities exist.  

Training
privately educated girls in networking and dressing it up as positive action is
symbolic of a wider trend. This has far more to do with cementing the children
of the rich’s place in the elite than overcoming barriers, or righting wrongs.
An exercise that bolsters a sense of entitlement, while masquerading as a great
feminist endeavor, is as hollow as it seems. Meanwhile, as austerity bites, the
proportion of women in the UK finding their prospects diminishing grows apace.

Sideboxes