link to photoGarton Ash, of the London Guardian is saying to the G-8 groups of nations - its time to talk, not isolate. But will they listen?
-----
Crusading is not the answer, but nor is pulling up the drawbridge
In a threatening world, the west needs to pursue liberal patriotism at home and liberal internationalism abroad
by Timothy Garton AshThe Guardian- London
July 3, 2008
Next week, a bunch of political leaders will sit around a table at the G8 summit in Toyako, Japan, contemplating the state of the world. I hope to be sitting on a beach on the island of Ischia, ignoring the state of the world. But before I take a break from these weekly columns, for a summer that will be devoted mainly to book-writing, let's step back and inspect the world we're in. I don't know how it seems to you, but it doesn't look good to me...
...the prospect seems to me more gloomy than 10 or 20 years ago. Presumably, it looks brighter to a communist leader in Beijing, a drug-lord in Afghanistan or an oligarch in Moscow. So much depends on where you sit and what you want. I want my children to live at least as freely as I have, in a free country, and I want as many people as possible in other countries to be as free as they can be. That requires not just traditional civil and political liberties but also some basic conditions of personal, legal and economic security, and life-chances based on education and equal opportunity. Unlike some classical liberals, I don't think the very poor can be free.
...We shouldn't pull up the drawbridge and stop immigration, but we must manage it. However, those who are going to live here must be citizens, not mere denizens. The legal, accepted immigrant should have the same rights, duties and life-chances as any descendant of Norman the Conqueror or Aethelred the Unready.
Because in our increasingly mixed societies we can no longer rely on unspoken understandings, we must spell out more clearly what those rights and duties are. What are the non-negotiable minimums of freedom, what areas are the subject of legitimate negotiation, and what is purely a matter of individual conscience? This is a conversation we need to have openly, between all of us, not as a diktat either of the elites to the masses or of the majority to the minority. (This is the subject I'll be working on over the summer.)
Yet what we do within the frontiers of one country will never be enough. There are no self-sufficient national castles any more. So liberal internationalism abroad is a necessary complement of liberal patriotism at home. Liberal internationalism does not mean marching into other people's countries and telling the locals what's good for them down the barrel of a gun. It means developing a set of norms and rules by which most states will abide, preferably made explicit in international law and sustained by international organisations. It posits some basic rights that belong to every human being on this planet, whatever her or his "culture", circumstances or rulers. It aims to strike a balance between the universal and the particular. It seeks to build peace between nations on these foundations.
To the charge that this is merely the neo-colonial export of western ways under the guise of universal values, we liberal internationalists reply as follows. First, there's a great deal that all human societies do actually, empirically, have in common. Second, values like freedom, toleration, reciprocity and answerable government are to be found in the literatures, philosophies and histories of non-western countries, be it Akbar's India, the Annalects of Confucius or the Charter of Medina. Third, even if these values did not become institutionalised there as much as they did in the modern west, they have taken institutional root in the most unexpected places over the past few decades. Fourth, even where they haven't taken root yet, people often like the feel and sound of these things when exposed to them. In short, there's no reason to despair of what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the human enterprise of creating global universal values.
As at home, so abroad, we need a conversation - not a dictation. That seems to me especially important in the non-western democracies, and with people of open mind in closed societies. The world wide web is an amazing resource for this purpose, but we're only beginning to work out how to use it. So I look forward to resuming this conversation with you at the end of August, when Barack Obama gives his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Denver.
for link to complete Guardian article click here
No comments:
Post a Comment