Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (1932) has been hugely influential on the left as well as the right of political debate despite the fact that its author joined the Nazi Party shortly after its publication. David explores the origins of Schmitt’s ideas in the debates about the Weimar Republic and examines his critique of liberal democracy. He asks what Schmitt’s distinction between friend and enemy has to teach us about democratic politics today.
14 April 2021
History Of Ideas — Talking Politics: Luxemburg on Revolution
Rosa Luxemburg wrote ‘The Russian Revolution’ (1918) from a jail cell in Germany. In it she described how the Bolshevik revolution was going to change the world but also explained how and why it was already going badly wrong. David explores the origins of Luxemburg’s insights, from her experiences in Poland to her love/hate relationship with Lenin. Plus he tells the story of her terrible end.
BBC4 Analysis: The Fine Art of Decision Making
Margaret Heffernan explores the fine art of decision making in times of uncertainty. We make decisions all the time which affect our personal lives, but what about the decisions which affect the lives of many others? How do you decide, when the well being of a nation or the success of a company are at stake, but the path is unclear because the risks cannot be quantified? A desire for more data, the temptation to procrastinate, a reluctance to admit mistakes and the outsourcing of decisions to machines can all lead to bad decision making, so what processes and practices, leadership qualities and attitudes of mind can serve as the best guides? Senior politicians, public servants, business people and academics share their insights based on past failures as well as successes, and suggest ways of better decision making in an increasingly uncertain world.
CityLab: Copenhagen’s New Artificial Island Hits Rough Seas
This March, the Danish Parliament starts deliberating on a massive engineering project: the construction of a new artificial island called Lynetteholm. If approved, a 1.1 square mile (2.8 square kilometer) land mass will emerge from the harbor waters just north of Copenhagen’s city center; by 2050, it could be built-up with enough homes to house 35,000 people. [...]
On February 22, officials in the Swedish county of Skåne, connected to Copenhagen by the Øresund Bridge, said that they opposed the project because it risked altering ocean currents. “The Øresund is a narrow sound with a very fine environmental balance in its waters, and we need to keep it healthy,” Kristian Wennberg, head of Skåne County’s water services, told CityLab. “There is risk of contamination, and of a reduction of water flow into the straits. The Baltic Sea is already not in the best state and we don’t want the slightest modification.” [...]
Other critics point to a flaw in the model itself. When the city’s first metro line opened in 2007, it exceeded its initial budget by over three times and attracted fewer riders than initially predicted. This left By og Havn saddled with higher-than-expected debts, and thus under ever more pressure to develop its sites for maximum profit. While By og Havn has clarified that its finances are indeed sound and sustainable, the need to keep the financial ball rolling does put pressure on them to find (or create) new land to develop. [...]
Lynetteholm’s environmental impact study failed to allay these fears, critics say, because it looks only at the island’s immediate construction in isolation, without also assessing the potential effects of future harbor tunnel construction, metro expansion and the transferral of water treatment works currently occupying part of the island’s site. So while the tunnel and metro are cited as key reasons for the island’s construction, there is as yet no material to assess their impact. An editorial in the Danish engineering publication Ingeniøren said that preliminary studies for the harbor tunnel and beltway aren’t prepared yet. Danish politicians are eager to fast-track the project, the editorial alleges, because alternative development schemes might “appear less fancy and magnificent in the legacy of former mayors and prime ministers.”
Nautilus Magazine: Do We Have Free Will? Maybe It Doesn't Matter
This isn’t an idle theoretical or academic question—beliefs about free will, Genschow says, seem to affect many “societally relevant” behaviors, like cheating. They also lie at the foundation of our criminal justice system, helping to justify retributive forms of punishment (the idea that people deserve to be locked up, for example, for committing certain crimes) as opposed to rehabilitative ones (confining and reforming people until they can safely re-enter society). Some philosophers, like Saul Smilansky, have argued that if we were to give up on free will, the consequences would be catastrophic. [...]
This gist of the meta-analysis from Genschow and his colleagues suggests that free will’s proponents and detractors may be putting too much store in what people believe. The belief, or disbelief, doesn’t seem to affect individual behavior in any way we might care about. Manipulating people’s ideas about free will, at least in experimental conditions, has only a small and temporary effect. In other words, a persuasive anti-free will essay (the most effective method found) doesn’t change people’s core beliefs about free will—it only puts them in a temporary, slight anti-free will mindset. (Most people naturally believe in free will, so most of the manipulations studied try to reduce belief in it, though it can work both ways). There is no evidence that this induced change in free will beliefs has any effect on morality, such as antisocial behavior, cheating, conformity, or willingness to punish. There is also no definitive evidence against such effects. So for now, it appears that people’s beliefs in free will don’t really matter. [...]
The way these two thinkers have talked passed each other reminds us that it’s hard to change people’s beliefs about free will. So, it can feel like a relief to realize, at least according to Genschow’s meta-analysis, that even when you can change people’s beliefs, it seems to make no moral difference anyway.
Social Europe: Dealing with the right-wing populist challenge
The 2018 Swedish election was a watershed. The incumbent left-wing government, led by the Social Democrats (SAP) in alliance with the Green party (MP) and supported by the left-socialists (V), won one more seat than the alliance of the traditional parties of the right—conservative Moderates (M), Liberals (L), Centre party (C) and Christian Democrats (KD)—but fell far short of a majority. The largest parties of the left and right, the SAP and M, had terrible elections, with the former receiving less than 30 per cent of the vote, its lowest vote share since 1911, and the latter less than 20 per cent. [...]
Scholars generally find that convergence between mainstream parties is associated with the rise of radical parties, because it waters down the profile of the former and gives voters looking for alternatives nowhere to turn. This dynamic is particularly pronounced when mainstream parties converge on positions far from that of a significant number of voters. This, of course, is precisely what happened in Sweden and elsewhere. [...]
By 2018 the failure of the dismissive strategy in Sweden was evident. After the election the conservative and Christian-democrat parties began openly shifting towards what might be called an ‘accommodative’ strategy, indicating they would consider co-operating with the SD to make possible the formation of a right-wing government in 2022. Perhaps more surprising, the Liberal party—which has a more ‘centrist’ profile than the M and KD and took, as noted above, the unprecedented step of breaking with its traditional allies after the 2018 election precisely to shut the SD out of power—recently voted to shift course too. Can an accommodative strategy succeed? [...]
Undercutting support for these parties over the long-term requires, accordingly, diminishing the salience of immigration. Over the past years in-migration in Sweden and other European countries has dropped but concerns about labour-market inclusion, integration, crime and ‘terrorism’ remain. Dealing forthrightly and effectively with these concerns would diminish their importance or salience to voters, enabling them to turn their attention to issues on which the SD, as with other populist parties, lack distinctive positions.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)