Michael Ignatieff: The crisis of liberal constitutionalism - 1

According to the 'civilised' west, democracy is the best form of political governance and capitalism is the best form economic governance.

Together, democracy and capitalism are supposed to ensure that the will of the people is reflected in the election of governments. The will of the people is also reflected in the economic policies that such democratically elected governments pursue to ensure economic growth and prosperity.

That is the theory. In practice, of course, that isn’t how either democracy or capitalism have ever worked.

Late capitalism is a term that has been frequently used to describe the economic inequities that capitalism has succeeded in creating in societies that have an abiding faith both in democracy and capitalism.

Two recent films expose the ills of both democracy and capitalism.

Officials Secrets (2019) exposes the hypocrisy of democratic consensus in the way the United States of America and the United Kingdom – both pillars of liberal democracy – lied, concealed facts and generally took the world for a ride to justify the second invasion of Iraq (2003).

Based on the 2017 Panama Papers expose, Laundromat (2019) dwells into the nefarious operations of the offshore tax havens that give a legal avenue to the rich to avoid (not evade) taxes. The film is a glimpse into the murky world of offshore holdings, hidden financial dealings of fraudsters, drug traffickers, billionaires, celebrities.

All of these worthies were connected to Mosscak Fonseca, a Panama law firm with offices in more than 35 locations globally, and one of the world’s top creators of shell companies – the corporate structures used to hide ownership of assets.

Western democracies have a great deal to explain for their falsification and outright fabrication of facts (about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) to wage a war on Saddam Hussein that resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths (check this: Iraq Body Count).

Western capitalism thrives on economic neo-colonialism, and questions are being raised about its efficacy now only because rampant automation is causing widespread job losses in western democracies.

I frequently remember Winston Churchill when I'm bemused by western hypocrisy. Churchill, responsible for the genocide of Bengalis in 1943, had famously said, “History will judge me kindly, because I intend to write it myself.” 

Western democracies, and especially their leaders, often get away with murder and worse because they determine the contemporary narrative of the world that becomes tomorrow’s history.

Therefore, while we roundly (and justifiably) condemn the likes of Slobodan Milošević, we are unwilling to judge Bush Jr or Blair by the same exacting standards.

Similarly, no institutional efforts are being made anywhere to rein in the untrammeled run that technocracy has over global economics that is resulting in unimaginable income inequities everywhere in the world.

The world’s richest 1 percent, those with more than $1 million, own 45 percent of the world’s wealth. Adults with less than $10,000 in wealth make up 64 percent of the world’s population but hold less than 2 percent of global wealth. The world’s wealthiest individuals, those owning over $100,000 in assets, total less than 10 percent of the global population but own 84 percent of global wealth.

In his lecture earlier this week at the Munk Centre, Michael Ignatieff (Democracy versus Democracy: The crisis of liberal constitutionalism) spoke about the failure of liberal democracies to deliver on fundamental promises. 

He spoke both the trust deficit (bordering on resentment) that masses living in democracies have developed in democratic institutions, and the economic subjugation of the vast majority of the global population.

Ignatieff spoke about the challenge that populist democracy is posing to liberal democracies with specific reference to North America and Europe. 

The distinction between populism and liberalism is populism defines democracy as rule of we the people, which is basically majoritarianism, whereas liberal democracy tries to create a nuanced framework for democratic institutions to engage in interplay of of checks and balances. 

Liberal democracy, Ignatieff explained, “Is a system built for conflict, for disagreement. The whole point of this system is that politicians resent the power of the judges. The judges push you back to defend the empire of law from the empire of politics, the media sits there and drives the politicians crazy and I have the scars to prove it. And this conflictual system is the very essence of any system that has any chance of protecting our liberties, as individuals. And the legitimacy of this system is conditional and performative at any moment in democratic life.”

According to Ignatieff, conflict is at the heart of liberal democracies. “We may sit around a table over dinner and think this is not going well. We’re at loggerheads. We’re fighting with each other. The Parliament is standing up to the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister is riding roughshod over Parliament. The media are driving everybody crazy. The judges are interfering too much. We will take sides in these institutional conflicts that are built into the heart of democracy and at any given moment we will think this system is losing its legitimacy, the conflict level that we are having to live through here is just too high for our health. And our democracy is at risk.”  

People who experience the strengths of liberal democracy such as freedom of choice often despair at its inherent conflict, Ignatieff said, and then emphasized that a liberal democracy is, in fact, a “conflictual system constantly in tension, constantly in crisis. And that it seems to me is both its glory in its strength and its resilience.”

Continued below

Michael Ignatieff: The crisis of liberal constitutionalism - 2

Continued from the post above

Citing the Brexit imbroglio, Ignatieff said, at present, liberal democracy in Britain is at its best. 

“A democracy is there to prevent a society polarizing into enemies and keeping everybody in a debate in which they’re merely adversaries. In the unwritten constitution of a democracy, there are no enemies, only adversaries, and thus far, despite the polarization in Britain, despite some of the bitterness, this it seems to me is exemplary example of democracy. Not at its worst, but actually at its best. That’s an unpopular thought. If I said that in a lecture in London, I might be laughed out of the house, but I’m sticking with it. If you like democracy, you have to like its rough and tumble.”

Talking about the Trump impeachment, Ignatieff again emphasized that the liberal democratic system has ensured that when the President of the United States stepped out of line, system has ensured that the whistle blower has the constitutional protection to perform his / her duty.

He said, “It illuminated with clarity what a liberal democracy actually is, as an institutional system.”

The President has a phone call with foreign leader and the President says something which violates his constitutional oath. “What is interesting is that they (those who think that Trump erred) then have recourse through protected legislation to blow the whistle. They’re guaranteed confidentiality. They’re guaranteed access to the Congress of the United States. The liberal institutional system worked. It protected devoted civil servants, public servants, gave them the right to go to the President of the United States and say he just crossed the line in a phone call. If the president is impeached, it will be because liberal democratic institutions did what they are supposed to do.”

Ignatieff said democracy would be in crisis if Trump was impeached but would refuse to step down.

He emphasized that, “If you love liberal democracies stop getting alarmed every time it has institutional conflict, because that is the essence of a functioning liberal democracy.”

Ignatieff turned his focus on the crisis in democracy with regard to the increasingly fraught relationship between liberal democracy and liberal professions. 

Liberal professions are academics, lawyers, doctors, journalists, and professional politicians. There is a deep association between these liberal professions and liberal democracy. These liberal professions run liberal democracy.

The lawyers and the judges run the legal system. The doctors run another pillar of a liberal democracy, which is public health care. Journalists run that entire thing called the free media, which is constitutive of liberal democracy. And academics train democratic citizens but crucially, they credential the entire elite that runs a liberal democracy.

“And one of the things that the populist challenge is making me anxious about is the erosion of trust in the population at large at the status privilege and authority of the liberal professions that keep liberal democracy going. And there is deep resentment towards the credential inequality that the liberal professions have benefited from,” he said.

The liberal professions in general, need to think about inequality. Thomas Piketty’s data on income inequality is revealing – liberal professions have done extraordinarily well from the new inequality that began to emerge from the 1970s onward. 

He said that a definite linkage exists (but has rarely been acknowledged) between inequality, the erosion of status, and the erosion of trust towards liberal professions, and declining faith and confidence in liberal democracy itself.

He said, “If you believe as I do that one of the glories of a liberal democracy is a thing called the rule of law; but at present you go to many communities across Canada and you ask, what is the rule of law mean to you? People are likely to respond by saying: It means I have no access to justice. The lawyers are too expensive. The judges won't listen. And my chances of ending up in the slammer pretty good. There is a an enormous gulf between the high minded way in which in a university we think about the rule of law, and the much crueler reality of what the rule of law looks like in an ordinary Magistrates Court or criminal law court.”

Ignatieff explained that the legitimacy of liberal democracy is performative. It’s won or lost every day in our courtrooms. It’s won or lost every day when a lawyer says, ‘You can’t afford my fees’. It’s won or lost every day when our legal aid systems don't work, it's won or lost every day in which an Aboriginal comes out thinking I can't get a fair shake and this goddamn system.

“These are the pressures on the performative legitimacy of liberal democracy that we ought to take seriously. They relate to the eroding trust that the general public has in credentialed liberal professions. And I think that has a knock-on effect in terms of the faith that people have in liberal democracy. It’s one of the reasons why people say I don't want liberal democracy. What I want is to be ruled by ‘We the People’,” he said.

Ignatieff concluded with an impassioned plea: 

“I want the doors to be open, so everybody can be put through the rigorous, relentless training that makes great universities great. I don't want to compromise any of that. But we got to make sure the doors are open. We got to make sure that everybody can get the kind of chance that my father Mike, and I got through being in these places. And I think we want as teachers to be constantly thinking about the professional ethics that we teach in the liberal professionals. If you’re in a liberal profession, you have obligations, their fiduciary obligations, their obligations of competence, their obligations of good advice, their obligations of academic excellence, but they’re also obligations of service and if we lose that we may pay a price in terms of the legitimacy of liberal democracy itself that we can barely see.”

Indian elections 2019

'No contest': Gandhi versus Modi 

Observations on the forthcoming elections in India and a report on a panel discussion on elections and another one on atrocities against Muslims and Dalits in India

The forthcoming Indian elections are dominating the mind space globally. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi will return to for another five years up to 2024. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party may not get the absolute majority it got in 2014 but the coalition of disparate and often disputatious political parties under the umbrella of National Democratic Alliance will form the next government.

Although the Hindutva brigade will hail the narrow victory as the continuing supremacy of their beloved leader over the Indian masses, in reality it would be no more than a repeat of the two-term tenure of the United Progressive Alliance government from 2004 to 2013.  And, the phrase that Dr. Manmohan Singh, India's former Prime Minister, coined, “coalition dharma” will return to be the guiding principle for Indian democracy.

If coalition politics returns, will it affect Narendra Modi’s chances of returning as the Prime Minister? It doesn’t seem likely though it would be an entirely welcome development were it to actually materialise. But with the BJP losing its absolute majority, there would be hopefully some modification in the manner in which India has been governed during the last five years. A possible scenario that shouldn't entirely be ruled out is the joining of forces between the Congress and the other opposition parties who have formed the Mahagathbandhan.

For all his promises of less government and more governance, the Modi era so far has been nothing more than crony capitalism, the tag of ‘Suit boot ki Sarkar’ is justified even though Modi acolytes are at pains to defend all of his actions and not subject any of the claims to scrutiny.

In addition, of course, the Modi government has turned out to be blatantly anti minority – with ceaseless lynching of Muslims and Dalits for killing and consuming cow. The unapologetic, unabashed and virulent hatred that is spewed by the Hindutva proponents against their perceived enemies is both unprecedented and frightening. Opponents of this brand of extremism are always called anti-national, and pro-Pakistani.

Their representatives in the diaspora are eager to hunt down all opponents of the Modi regime and silence them by gravely emphasizing that criticizing Modi tantamounts to tarnishing the image of India in foreign lands.

Two recent programs in Toronto dissected the upcoming elections and the rapidly changing socioeconomic and political dynamics in contemporary India. The first was in March at Toronto’s Munk Centre where Ramesh Thakur, academic and a peacenik, along with Haroon Siddiqui, one of North America’s finest journalists, got together to discuss the Indian elections. Their session’s title 'An Infuriating, Loveable Democracy' was a clear indication of the even-handed, non-judgemental assessment the participants would accord to the Indian elections and the sociopolitical situation.

The second was at Noor Cultural Centre where academic and Dalit activist Chinnaiah Jangam and academic and human rights activist Sanobar Umar participated in a discussion on Dalit and Muslim Persecution in India: History and Current Politics. This discussion – expectedly – turned out to be controversial because right-wing Hindu extremists swarmed the venue and tried their best to prevent a healthy debate.

Here’s a brief report on the Munk Centre event.

Thakur had some interesting observations about India’s economic rise, such as:

What happens in India in the next 10 years will have a strong impact on Canada than what the Canadian government does. Intergenerational improvement in the standard of living that western societies are accustomed to is not going to be possible purely on the growth rates of western economies; these economies will have to depend upon the consumption patterns in the developing, emerging economies, especially India.

Incremental reforms and even moderate growth of 6 to 8 % will add up to a transformative impact on India, Asia, and the world. India is the world’s fastest growing economy; the present dominance in global economy will be taken over by India. 20 million people are added to the workforce every year and therefore economic growth is vital for India.

He felt that while there are many things working for India, it will have to continue taking proactive decisions to sustain the transformation of its society because, paradoxically, India also has the largest percentage of poor, hungry, sick, homeless, illiterate, underweight, stunted, raped, exposed to pollution.

Thakur said Indian society is multiethnic, multireligious, democratic; and federalism and secularism are inherent to the Indian nationhood. If you take away even one of the above, you will destroy India.

On this aspect, he was critical of Modi’s record with the minorities, and especially with the Muslims of India. Thakur unequivocally said that after the first lynching incident, Modi should have gone to the family and should have declared that India is for everyone; had he done that, it would have effectively prevented the recurrence of the lynching incident that continued unabated

Referring to the Balakot incident, Thakur said, this was the first example in history where two nuclear armed countries have had a dog fight. He cautioned that even a limited regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan will have global winter for a decade and globally, 2 billion people will die. And for the first time, the US has sided with India.

He concluded with an observation that democratic institutions in India are resilient, proactive and agile. It was an observation that is not supported by any recent evidence. Increasingly, too, the cliché (which Thakur also repeated) that Indian people are secular doesn’t stand to scrutiny.

Haroon Siddiqui in his brief presentation said that in the early 20th century, the common global refrain was that India and China won’t make it big because they had a large population. It is only now that economists have realised that large population is good and acts as a buffer against economic depression.

India will need to grow at 7 to 8 % if Modi will have to fulfil his promise of 10 lakh jobs a year. He said the Indian election involve large sums and during the last general elections $5billion had been spent. Add to this is the utter lack of transparency of the system.

Siddiqui said that the Pulwama incident had given rise to nationalism among Indians. Indians are angry and united against constant attacks carried out by terrorist organisations based in Pakistan. But there is a growing fear that nationalism will turn into jingoism.

The presentations by Thakur and Siddiqui were followed by a lengthy Q&A where members of the audience asked pertinent and pointed questions. I refrained from asking a question during the Q&A, but on the way out, I briefly detained Thakur and asked him how he would explain the Supreme Court’s decision to release Babu Bajrangi, the prime accused in the 2002 Gujarat riots in the context of his assertion that the Supreme Court was proactive and agile. Thakur didn’t respond.

Continued in the post below...

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

The book and the author 

Last year, Pankaj Mishra and Nail Ferguson quarrelled on the pages of London Review of Books over Mishra’s review of Fergusson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n21/pankaj-mishra/watch-this-man). 

It was a fascinating debate that didn’t end conclusively.

Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against theWest and the Remaking of Asia is a response to Ferguson’s book, and was one of the books shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber prize this year.

Eventually Canadian Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Riseof the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else won the prize. 

Freeland is the digital editor at Thomson Reuters. She has worked at the Financial Times both in New York and in London and has been the deputy editor of The Globe and Mail.  Freeland has reported for The Financial Times, The Economist, and The Washington Post.

Brian Stewart, eminent journalist interviewed Freeland at a packed Munk Centre on April 15.

Thoughtfully, the organizers had made arrangements for a webcast of the interview at an adjacent venue to accommodate the overflow of participants.

Freeland’s book is a pithy commentary of the battle between democracy and plutocracy. It’s about the rising band of the world’s superrich who are steadily taking over the world, leaving everyone behind.

In her book, Freeland says, “Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who haven’t succeeded quite so spectacularly. They tend to believe in the institutions that permit social mobility, but are less enthusiastic about the economic redistribution—i.e., taxes—it takes to pay for those institutions. Perhaps most strikingly, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.”

The prize was presented by Patricia Rubin, Chair, Lionel Gelber Prize Board, Professor Janice Gross Stein, Director, Munk School of Global Affairs and Susan Glasser, Editor in Chief, Foreign Policy.

Besides Freeland’s and Mishra’s books, the other books on the shortlist were:

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum 

The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics by Paul Bracken 

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng

Lionel Gelber Prize is awarded to “the world's best non-fiction book in English (or English translation) that seeks to deepen public debate on significant global issues. The Economist has described the Lionel Gelber Prize as 'the world's most important award for non-fiction.' It is worth $15,000.”

Images from Google.

Parallel histories

A couple of weeks ago, I attended an interesting talk by Nonica Datta (Visiting Professor at the Centre for South Asian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs; Associate Professor of History, University of Delhi) at the Munk Centre.

Datta’s lecture Crafting a Parallel History of India's Partition was based on her book Violence, Martyrdom and Partition: A Daughter’s Testimony published last year.

It is story of a daughter Subhashini and her father Bhagatji developed based on the daughter's oral testimonies. During the course of the interviews, Subhashini (1914-2003) was the head of an Arya Samaj institution for women's education in Haryana.

The book is an attempt at recording histories of the non-elites -- people whose lives were irreversibly changed by the trauma of Partition. The study of the subalterns in the post-colonial South Asian context has taken many forms with equally interesting results, especially in the context of Partition, this approach has acquired considerable significance, acceptance and respectability, with many interesting results.

As Datta succinctly summarised: “Subhashini is absent from history, but history is not absent from her.” She read from the book and discussed several nuances of recording the memories of her subject. 

Datta spoke of the challenges of having to deal with “memory, narrative and event,” and “memory being more than an event,” and the “difficulty of finding an academic language to combine memory and history.”

Perhaps the toughest challenge she may have faced was to keep her ideology in check as she embarked on a journey of discovery with her subject who had a strong opposing worldview.

Datta said she adopted an approach more suited to fiction writing than academic writing to capture the nuances of the narrative and to move away from familiar and easy categorisations and notions of the victim and the victimiser.