Jon Mendel hears Clare Short call for fresh thinking and more trouble-making.
 The feminist thinker Judith Butler argues that trouble is unavoidable, and that the important thing is to decide what kind of trouble to get into, and to cause. I recently heard Clare Short speak at the 2003 conference of the British International Studies Association (BISA), and her speech reminded me of how important trouble can be.
Short has certainly been in, and caused, enough trouble herself during her political career. It's good to see that, with her recent disclosures about Government spying at the UN, Short is continuing to make trouble. Her speech made me think about the ways academics and activists can create new types of political trouble. Beginning by noting that “we are living in ’interesting times,' in the very full sense of that Chinese curse, she went on to give a perceptive view of the United Nations. She argued that, in the Cold War, a bureaucratic UN was very useful. As a means of slowing things down, it stopped the Cold War going hot. Now we need a UN that can move rather faster.
Unfortunately, instead of faster, more responsive thinking, Short diagnoses ’mind lag' problems in most of the world's governments. Unable to cope with changes to international politics since the Cold War, our governments have had to find new enemies to replace the Soviets. More optimistically, Short suggests that “the people are ahead of the elite with an “intuitive understanding of how the era has changed. She believes Britain has became a social democratic country that is “well to the left of its government. Drawing on her experience of international development, Short thinks “we are the first generation in human history that has the capacity to remove abject poverty from the human condition.
Recent events have helped to confirm Short's claim that politicians are suffering from ’mind lag.' The Government is currently trying to defend its failure to inform the British public that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were ’only' battlefield as opposed to long-range weapons, arguing that the distinction between the two is not relevant, and that they therefore did not think to ask the intelligence services which type of weapons Iraq possessed. In an interview with the BBC, Margaret Beckett stated that with weapons systems “what matters is what they can do, not how they're delivered.
When ministers come out with comments like this, it seems that the government is indeed lagging behind academic thinking about the speed of politics and war today. Writers like James Der Derian and Paul Virilio emphasise the central importance of the velocity and movement of weapons systems today. A warhead on a cruise missile that can travel great distances with near-pinpoint accuracy, even if it is ’only' a conventional warhead, is a very different weapon from one which can travel under a mile, even if it counts as a WMD. For example, anthrax stocks buried in a remote part of the desert, or a nerve gas shell, are clearly less of an immediate threat to Britain than a high-tech, high-speed, long range conventional missile.
I was especially interested to hear what Short had to say about the 'war on terror' because her decision to leave the Blair government had always seemed frankly bizarre: it appeared that, having supported a war that had no UN authority, Short finally resigned because the UN wasn't sufficiently involved in the aftermath. I am not sure whether her position was misrepresented at the time or whether she has since moved to a more refined stance, but these days her argument is much more sophisticated.
She claims that the war in Iraq was wrong, even though overthrowing Saddam was a worthwhile goal, and even though a policy of ’containment' through sanctions would also have been brutal. She believes that the military action in Iraq has been seriously mishandled due to a lack of planning for the post-Saddam administration, and a lack of international involvement. A better chance of peace would have come by pushing for progress along the Middle East ’roadmap' and then working to find a more international approach to Saddam's regime.
The question Short raises is this: what techniques might be effective for engaging with international politics today? There is a great deal of important political research being carried out today and much high quality work is taking place: as Short acknowledges, what we need today is “people who are thinking, and writing, and struggling. But the challenge is always to make academic research relevant to practical politics today. How can those of us working in academia and the non-governmental sector have a real impact on the business of practical politics, both in government and in civil society?
I would argue that we academics should take advantage of opportunities that academic work gives us to trouble today's political discourses - and to cause trouble for politicians such as Short. Those of us engaging in political activism should also take advantage of the opportunities we have to cause trouble in politics today, and to challenge the ’mind lag' problems experienced by politicians like Beckett. If, as Short argues, we are living “in a new era of risk and opportunity, then this new era might just allow us to create all kinds of trouble in politics today.
Jon Mendel
|
