One good result from the Kosovo war: it is destroying the
liberal-democratic traditions, built up in the last 50 years in western
Europe. The abusive mail on this (European Sociology) list is nothing,
compared to the wave of hate, which poured onto the Internet in the
first weeks of the war. But then that is nothing, compared to the
crusader rhetoric of Tony Blair and Rudolf Scharping: they have bombs.
I can not stress this enough: the political culture of western Europe
has chnaged dramatically in the last weeks. Before his election Tony
Blair spoke of his ideal: the 19th-century liberal polity of Gladstone,
where issues are settled by reasoned argument. Today, Blair speaks of
"just war" and "a war for values". He prefers to be photographed with
his troops in the field. His ministers defend the killing of
journalists.
European political culture is approaching that of the late 1930's, the
time of the Spanish Civil War. One of the great post-modernist cliches
was, that Europe had no more ideological certainties. That has been
proved definitively wrong: the 'ideological crusade' is back in Europe,
with a vengeance. Of course this is not an overnight change: it is a
shift which has been building up in the last 20 years, driven partly by
the return to normative political philosophy. But the central historical
assessment is this: not increasing civilisation, but nuclear standoff,
created the liberal-democratic values of the last two generations, with
their emphasis on tolerance and pluralism. Now the Cold War has ended,
the result is not de-ideologisation, but a return to absolute truth
claims for liberal values (democracy, human rights).
So: out goes tolerance, reason, argument, debate, conversation. In comes
the laser-guided bomb, sacred values, and killing for The Cause.
Inevitably, academic life and especially sociology will be
re-ideologised. In any case west European sociology is already an
Atlanticised discipline. Opponents of the Atlantic Alliance and the free
market, were a minority already. But it is no longer possible to claim
that "we are all practicioners of a single discipline" if you want your
supposed colleagues bombed. I don't know if there was anything
appraoching modern academic sociology, in Spain in the 1930's. But I can
not imagine supporters of Franco and the Republc meeting during the
Civil War, to hold neutral academic conferences.
The fact is, that the extreme value differences exclude a single
Sociology altogether. Atlantic Free-Market Sociology and its opposites
might as well be on different planets. The recent conference announcemnt
was typical: in effect inviting some people to discuss how they should
be bombed. (I would guess that the organiser has not spoken with an
opponent of the Atlantic Alliance for at least 10 years). Even in the
Bosnia war it was still possible to pretend that academics had common
commitments, for instance a common opposition to nationalist ideologies.
But that pretence is not possible in a Europe, where opposition to the
NATO and/or free market, is equated with Nazism. All common ground is
(fortunately) gone. Will liberal sociologists, who find it legitimate to
kill journalists for not carrying CNN bulletins, tolerate research on
inequalities in free market economies? From their point of view this
"helps the enemy", so why allow it?
I agree with them. I just have different values, and a different list of
sociologists to lock up. Ten years ago, using force to implement your
values was an idea talked about in secret, by the IRA and the ETA. Now
it is once again the mainstream of political thought in western Europe:
a gift from Tony Blair to those (like myself) who despise the liberal
tradition of consensus, argument and debate.
--
Paul Treanor
http://www.diagonal.demon.nl/nato.html
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