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NZ: Debates on politics and culture


NZ No. 39 is mostly devoted to civil society, new and old political and
social movements, and state-society relations. The immediate context for
these debates is provided by the Russian president's recent all-out
criticism of NGOs, seen by many as prompting a new crackdown on organized
civic activity, and by the abolition of most non-monetary social benefits in
Russia as of 1 January 2005.

The Liberal Heritage presents an article by German political scientist Claus
Leggewie on Trans-national movements and the question of democracy. Leggewie
analyses the different challenges to traditional notions of democratic
representation and legitimacy posed by the emergence of supra-national
decision-making bodies on the one hand, and NGOs and social movements on the
other hand. In order to overcome the new legitimacy gap, Leggewie proposes
to turn over some political decisions to bodies that would be answerable to
trans-national sectoral constituencies rather than traditional territorial
entities such as nation-states. Beside our usual editorial introduction,
this section also features three comments on Leggewie by Russian authors.
Sergei Lukashevsky, director of the Demos human rights think tank, argues
that in the Russian context, most NGO's activities are sufficiently
legitimated by international agreements that Russia has ratified,
notwithstanding recent campaigns by a number of Russian intellectuals to
discredit the very notion of human rights and general human values. However,
Lukashevsky concedes that Russian NGOs need to articulate their causes
better than they have so far, and find new channels of communication with
society at large. Political scientist Boris Mezhuev thinks that implementing
Leggewie's proposals for democratizing trans-national politics would create
more problems than it could solve. According to Mezhuev, the reason why West
European intellectuals such as Leggewie are turning away from more
traditional political models such as egalitarian federalist subsidiarity is
that they are looking for ways to protect European influence in the face of
the US model of nation-building and the Asian demographic challenge. Valery
Tishkov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Ethnology
and Anthropology and former nationalities minister, proposes an Anthropology
of NGOs in which he casts a critical glance on the very notions of
"movement" and "non-governmental organization". Using mainly examples from
ethnopolitics and so-called national movements, Tishkov argues that
"movements" are often ex post rationalizations of the pronouncements of
isolated intellectuals, while NGOs are sometimes created in order to pursue
government aims by other means, and especially as vehicles of a Western
quasi-colonialism that is potentially harmful to existing modes of civic
organization prevalent in non-Western countries.

In Morals and Mores, Alexei Tokarev looks at the media as part of civil
society. Based on his recent experience as organizer of a contest where TV
programmes from all over the country were evaluated for grammatical
correctness as well as "resonance" with viewers, he shares a number of
observations on Russian media's problems with interactivity. Tokarev argues
that the linguistic poverty of most Russian TV programmes is partly due to
the fact that they decline to engage in a real dialogue with society,
preferring to treat viewers as passive recipients of their message.

The Culture of Politics section features a short article by Jordanian
sociologist Fares Breizat entitled What Counts as Terrorism? The View on the
Arab Street, which we publish in Russian translation in order to introduce a
public debate on terrorism sponsored by the OpenDemocracy web site.
Alexei Levinson's Sociological Notes introduce our next topic. Levinson
reports new opinion poll data that documents the rise of xenophobia in
Russia, and argues that those who encourage the new search for internal and
external enemies for the sake of the consolidation of society will find that
they will harvest only fear and apathy, but not the energy required for any
kind of national mobilization.

Topic 1 deals with The Left and Nationalism. Our authors, most of whom share
left-wing views of some sort, report on the debates about nationalism among
the Left in different countries, and analyse the lure of anti-Semitic,
xenophobic and other nationalistic ideas to leftists of various persuasions.
Ute Weinmann and Vlad Tupikin discuss The Left and Nationalism in Russia,
concluding that virtually all Russian organizations generally considered
leftist are actually crypto- (or not so crypto-) nationalists. The main
explanation advanced by Weinmann and Tupikin is that the Soviet Union was an
aggressively imperialistic rather than socialist state, and so xenophobic,
anti-Western and nationalist-expansionist ideas became ready rallying points
for the newly forming anti-Yeltsin opposition movement in the early 1990s
which has continued to spawn new offshoots, especially through the
left-right synthesis embodied in the National Bolshevik Party. Foreign
Policy editor Mark Strauss discusses Antiglobalism's Jewish Problem,
analyzing the reasons for the pervasiveness of anti-Semitic rhetoric among
many anti-globalisation protesters worldwide. Washington/DC-based historian
Joshua Humphreys reports on The Agonizing of the American Left over such
questions as patriotism, religious values, and foreign interventionism in
the aftermath of the recent presidential election, and reviews responses by
authors and activists from within the Democratic Party and the radical Left.
Finally, Daniel Kulla offers his perspective on left-wing debates about
national identity, Germany's new status as a great power, and attitudes to
Israel and the Jews. In particular, Kulla discusses the so-called
"anti-German" strand of radical leftist thought (Redemptive Schisms: On
Recent Tendencies Among the German Radical Left).

Yevgeny Saburov's Humane Economics column is devoted to the ways in which
the literary canon taught at school shapes pupils' attitudes to life and
introduces them to economic principles. He argues that studying early 20th
century modernist literature would be a good antidote to the patronizing
effect of the heroic 19th century classics.

Topic 2 offers a fresh look at the Russian or Soviet tradition of
paternalism. Yelena Bogdanova demonstrates that Soviet official discourse
about state-citizen relations, rather than acknowledging people's rights to
social or legal protection, was permeated by the notion of zabota, meaning
care or concern. This term could equally be applied to people, things, and
processes, creating hierarchies and forcing people to "care for" everyone
but themselves (The Soviet Tradition of Legal Protection, or Expecting
Care). Lev Levinson debunks The Myth of Paternalism: he contends that Soviet
citizens did not expect gratuitous welfare but rightly believed they had a
claim to state benefits in return for their labour. Levinson argues that
while the Soviet state did not live up to its obligations, the Russian
Federation has also made a mockery of the social guarantees enshrined in its
constitution.

The Politics of Culture rubric deals with the recent Russian blockbuster,
Night Watch. Cinema critic Dmitry Komm and historian Nikolai Mitrokhin
discuss the social significance of the film's success. Komm argues that
contemporary Russian mass cinema is striving to produce a unifying national
myth with neo-pagan aspects that bears an uncanny resemblance to the
symbolism of Nazi Germany. Mitrokhin interprets the movie as an allegory of
Russian politics, and especially of the career of Anatoly Chubais, a
once-radical reformer who now prefers talk about imperialism to concern for
democracy.

Topic 3 looks at two examples of officially endorsed music in the 1970s and
80s. Yan Levchenko writes about pop rock bands who benefited from the
regime's cautious concessions to young people's thirst for rock music,
though the fame of underground rockers eclipsed theirs by the late 80s (The
Roar of the Cosmodrome in the Communication Channel). Nikita Braginsky
traces The Path of Power: The Rise and Fall of the Great Children's Choir.
Through a "biography" of the USSR's main official children's choir,
Braginsky illuminates many aspects of Soviet politics and society in the
Brezhnev era, such as the rejuvenation of the Lenin cult, encouraged to
counterbalance the aging of the political leadership.
Our New Institutions section presents the Youth Centre for Human Rights,
devoted to combating ignorance about human rights among teachers and school
children.

After a particularly detailed Journals Review covering periodicals in
political and social studies, we publish an exchange between two experts on
Russian Orthodoxy, Anastasia Mitrofanova and Nikolai Mitrokhin, about the
latter's critical review of the former's book, included in our previous
issue.

The New Books section features a detailed survey of the recent international
literature on Russian civil society by Belfast-based social scientist Diana
Schmidt, as well as reviews of books on topics ranging from the history of
Russian liberalism to Islam in contemporary Dagestan.