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SOCIOLOGY - POLITICS

25 kwiecień 2008

The factor of time

In examining what is now developing we see that the American neoimperial vision is still a kind of territorial vision. It binds together various territorial units (and ones having quite different political systems), under the control of a center that defines the whole’s boundary conditions and executes the functioning of rules. This model can also embrace a “pseudo-modern regime” of the kind that will likely arise in Iraq – and generally can combine various traditional regimes and differing types of democracy – says Professor Jadwiga Staniszkis, Warsaw University.


Professor JADWIGA STANISZKIS


University of Warsaw



Krzysztof Jasiecki: How would you depict the European Union’s current relations with the United States and South-East Asia?


JADWIGA STANISZKIS: We’re presently observing the steady emergence of regional, “neoimperial” structures that evince a suprastate and non-state character. These structures are taking on clear shape in three major global versions, namely, those of the United States, the European Union, and China. The model Europe offers, plainly seen in the draft constitution, entails a continuation of what I define as the “metaphysics of the state” that arose between the XIV and XVII century. It began with the nominalism of William Ockham, during whose time theology and European philosophy confronted Aristotle and rejected Platonism.


Importantly, what occurred then was the demise of the feeling of certainty that had earlier existed. This gave rise to the appearance of a new model, one declaring that the states which were then emerging from Europe’s empires represented first and foremost an intellectual challenge, and not only ruling structures. Within the context of a process Ockham called suppositio – ‘substitution’, for our purposes – what was at issue here was the search for legal solutions, ideas, and institutions that would maximally approach reality and thereby enable control through the execution of form. This approach was later to be defined as the process of rationalization, and was to provide the stage for the vision of the rule of law. In the XVII century Locke brought this conception to its flowering in his “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, in which he demonstrated that the free individual, through the act of decision-making on the free market, is capable of conjoining formal rationality (here, the rules of the market’s functioning together with their material results) with substantial rationality. This is the tradition that shaped modern Europe: the rule of law and the free market. But globalization compels us to change our thinking about this model.


We can no longer harbor the hope that a form will be found at the state level that will prove able to apprehend and control reality. Nor is there any longer a market where the individual may discover unequivocal rules of the game and thereby achieve, via his or her decisions, material results. This is why what we are witnessing today in Europe is the coalescence of a vision of suprastate proceduralization as the new decision-making mechanism, and wherein communitarianism is introduced by procedures in and of themselves – and well below the state-level. States remain, but they must reconstruct themselves, alter their function in favor of public administration, and fundamentally transform their internal structures. This strikes as a continuation of the earlier model based on the “dictatorship” or fiat, as I prefer, of form on a completely new and different scale, one that is desubjectified, severed from territories, and depoliticized.


The US federal model, in turn, has functioned altogether differently; hence the American vision of neoempire looms unique. For in the US there was no absolutization of form. All was treated as stemming from the contract. To a much greater degree than in Europe, America still retains the feature of self-organizing society and continues to treat control primarily as the supervision of boundary conditions. So, it’s a conjoining of control and extensive ranges of self-organization. Huntington once called this American vision “premodern”, as it does not incorporate the fruit of the French and German Enlightenments, both of which sought a uniform logic for the state: the French a political logic – the Germans a legal one. America held steadfast to pragmatism and the Scottish Enlightenment, which it to say, to empiricism, which postulates all as an instrumentarium and brooks no absolutization of form.


In examining what is now developing we see that the American neoimperial vision is still a kind of territorial vision. It binds together various territorial units (and ones having quite different political systems), under the control of a center that defines the whole’s boundary conditions and executes the functioning of rules. This model can also embrace a “pseudo-modern regime” of the kind that will likely arise in Iraq – and generally can combine various traditional regimes and differing types of democracy.


Last but not least is the Chinese model. China is currently molding its state along the lines of traditional imperial logic. What I mean here is that China is treating its particular provinces as divergent space-times, as realms found at diverging developmental levels. China is now attempting via institutions to construct a model of ‘internal colonization’, that is, a model that utilizes the differing potentials of the provinces for the developmental advantage of the whole. This represents a type of thinking wherein ‘units’ of the whole are not, as in the American case, territories – nor are they tantamount to uniform procedure, as in the European model. What is critical is the differentiation of procedures in a time-perspective, in consideration of the factor of time. And here again we see a continuity in Chinese thinking about power.


Against this broad background, postcommunist Central Europe and Russia – these being regions that remained outside the evolution that Western Europe passed through – are seen to be anchored either in Platonism (i.e., Orthodox civilization), or in Thomism, as is the case with Central Europe, where we have pretended that Platonism and Aristotelianism can be conjoined. In these countries a crisp solution for the metaphysics of the state never came about – nor did a crisp, liberal solution for the free market ever occur. This helps to explain why we are unable to understand what is now happening in Europe, why we fail to grasp this portentous moment when something is drawing to a close and the need has arisen to devise a new construct. This also explains the nature of the present controversies in Poland over the new EU constitution just tabled: they represent the centuries-long effect of our divergent thought-development. It’s not that we’re poor or that we’re lagging behind or whatever. It’s that we have simply not passed through certain intellectual experiences.


Which of these three approaches is the most feasible or viable – which of them has the greatest chance of gaining a pre-eminent place in the world? Will they co-exist with each other?


We now face new challenges, and there are enormous potentials to be achieved in successfully squaring off with the problems that are surfacing in connection with the network character not only of economies, but of whole societies and systems of government as well. Globalization creates networks that not only have divergent interests, but above all are guided by differing standards of rationality – even within the framework of a single economic rationality, as they are oriented toward another scale and/or have a differing logic. These dependencies are plainly visible between the financial and production markets. For financial markets, risk is what produces profit. Risk for production markets, in turn, is destructive, for it reduces the field of vision, i.e., the time-horizon for decision-making. The point here is that modern economic and social systems are first and foremost horizontal sets of networks and manifest differing standards of rationality. That is why thinking in categories of space-time and relativizing the meaning of solutions in accord with developmental stage (i.e., appraising the meaning of a solution from the perspective of a given subject’s “historical time”), would seem the optimal way for securing developmental opportunities within global conditions.


In the present phase it seems to me that the Asian solutions are culturally the best prepared for meeting the challenges of globalization. But for those parts of the world “real” signifies something other than what it does for us. In our culture, Western culture, “real” are identities, elements. They are “real” in the etiological sense, that is, in that they have causative force. In Asian culture “real” are relations and time – that which creates force fields able to become a cause determining the direction of development. It would seem that an approach adopted from Asian ontology will have to be introduced and will have to mollify the essentialist approach of Western civilization. This is feasible because Western philosophy rejected the realness of relations not until the XV century, in the late medieval period. What is of exigency is a departure from an insistence on mere elements and a return to what lies in between, to what generates forces. These traditions definitively parted ways during the Enlightenment. Ironically, those countries or regions of the world that passed through this Western vision of rationalization and its construction of a uniform, hierarchical logic (most notably France and Germany) are managing relatively poorly with globalization. For globalization undermines and corrodes their uniformity of logic. The United States, not having undergone a French or German Enlightenment, is in a different situation. As is China – which never accepted such premises at all. China always built upon a reticular structure, one with divergent levels and networks within societies and economies. And the Chinese learned how to exploit that diversity.


If that’s the case, then of the three models you’ve outlined, we may conclude that the EU’s is the least suitable, that it has the poorest capability of marshalling processes…


Not necessarily, for if the EU in pressing on with its proceduralization nonetheless confines it to a minimally necessary level, and if it leaves individual societies room for self-organization and carries out thorough-going economic liberalization, then a “third-place” scenario can be avoided. The present struggle between EU officials and politicians is expressed in the fact that officials have managed to regulate ever more spheres in their bid to appropriate them from the domain of politicians. Europe is becoming over-regulated and inefficient.


Doesn’t EU expansion intensify that proceduralization? There have been very pronounced fears that those states at a lower level of institutional development will have big problems even with structural funds. The outcome of those fears is that the EU is now introducing additional procedures, ones that didn’t exist when the EU was confined to Western Europe. Thus, the EU as a whole is becoming even more proceduralized and less dynamic.


Yes. It would seem that things will start working only once the EU liberalizes and limits redistribution, leaving room for the dynamics that stem from the experience of individual countries and their proper developmental phase. If the EU becomes such an over-regulated bureaucracy in regard to controlling redistribution, then together with the proceduralization we have stressed the Union will become ossified and no one will be able to stand it. However, said proceduralization might also rely upon the coercive force of procedures themselves to impart decision-making below the state-level with a community mindfulness – this is what was postulated in the version of the draft constitution that preceded the deformation of the last compromise. Indeed, that earlier draft provided that national interests could be defended only in formulating objectives not through politics and traditional political subjects (including states), but through innovative proposals for solutions for the whole, directly in administrative contacts. That is, within thrusts of community policy where our strong suits play best.


This entails a conception of forcing a sense of community via procedures. This was the novum that was later watered-down and weakened by the compromise that ‘gilt the lily’. Such a proceduralization is something quite different than the over-regulation resultant from redistribution, quite different than what is referred to as EU solidarity. It would seem that for Poland the greatest improvement would be in removing the corset of those regulations, ones that go too far in strapping institutions with red-tape. The other improvement would be to forego redistribution. These involve sums that are none too large. However, the maintenance of the many instances of proceduralization is advisable only in the realm of compelling a community perspective.


Which is to say, the most functional of those mechanisms…


Indeed. The EU’s economic liberalization is urgent, as is foregoing all possible redistribution, for the reason that these measures would increase the equality of opportunities. After all, we are already treated unfairly by redistribution, such that it would be better to sweep it aside altogether and for everyone and then introduce a proceduralization based upon imparting and/or compelling a broad, community-wide perspective on endeavors in a given field (the environment, industrial policy, education, etc.). That we formulate a vision for resolving a given problem with the whole EU in mind. And that we defend it while seeking to make our local advantages optimally serve that vision.


A word on the matter of the EU’s borders. The conception we are speaking about predicates that there are certain shared values, a certain canon that is jointly determined and upheld. At the same time, however, EU membership for the Balkan countries, for Turkey, Ukraine, etc. is being discussed. And so the question arises as to how the entrance of those countries will impact the EU. For instance, Turkey’s membership will bring about a geopolitical shifting of the EU to the Near East. Does such a scenario not compel new ways of thinking, new preferred options?


Turkey’s admission would deeply strengthen stability in the Near East. As would the admission of Israel – only that Israel is a client of the United States and bases its security and economic development on the US.


The US continues to support Turkish membership in the EU, but says nothing about Israel…


That’s because for the time being Israel does not want EU membership, even though such would bring stability to the region. Israel today presents a huge scale of unresolved problems, ones that stem from having a territory too small to allow even the mere feeling of belonging to a greater whole. Turkey, on the other hand, has always wanted to be a part of Europe – despite the fact that Turkish interests were always more successfully pursued not when the country advanced or tried to advance toward Europe, but when Turkey looked eastward. Turkey could probably gain more there. But the Turks’ longing to be in Europe strikes me as a strong – albeit somewhat unctuous – argument. Particularly in combination with a geopolitical argument sufficient enough to include them in Europe. The foreignness or exotic difference of Turkey and of Eastern Europe will serve Europe well. I wouldn’t be afraid of it.


But where to locate the EU’s new member-countries from Central Europe? In our part of Europe public discourse is focused on completely different issues. Seldom is a global, international, or pan-European perspective aired. Won’t this “local” way of thinking simply reproduce our peripheralness and sideline us from participation in the global game?


Sadly, that’s absolutely true. And it’s an irony all the greater in that the dynamics of our postcommunism is largely determined by the forced harmonization with solutions taken from a higher developmental phase, a matter which encumbered us in the accumulation of domestic capital.


You refer to this phenomenon as “institutional asymmetry”…


Also as “structural violence”. On the other hand, it’s a matter of misapprehension. This lack of correspondence between our institutions and our developmental level is connected with our misunderstanding of the current expiration of the state in Western Europe. Ours is the juncture in history when the model has exhausted itself, the model that was erected between XIV-century nominalism and the XVII-century liberalism of Locke. In Central and Eastern Europe we never treated the state in that manner, that is, as an intellectual challenge and a realm for the exercise of formal and/or substantial rationality. For us things always boiled down to kto kogo – ‘who’s givin’ it to whom’ – and naked power. But those experiences simply do not dovetail with contemporary Western European experience – and we fail to appreciate that. For us what is currently happening in the EU, notably the controversy over the constitution, simply amounts to the desire of two countries to dominate us. We don’t understand that what is really at issue is the quest for something utterly new. It might all devolve into nationalisms, inasmuch as the loosening of the structure of states interferes with the subject identity of societies. Again, one escape from that might be a return to nationalisms. But the basic issues before Europe concern entirely different processes than we during our EU début perceive and which we interpret as the dictates of nationalisms. This signifies closing ourselves up, overestimating politics, and misunderstanding its proceduralization – for we were forever outside any and all structures of the rule of law, perhaps with the brief exception of interwar Poland. Today we in Poland have entered into a situation in which – for a range of reasons – we cannot build a state based on the rule of law. This is why we tend to treat everything involved with the EU as an effort to subjugate us, as political maneuvering. And yet the European Union – both civilizationally and institutionally – is a highly innovative idea of a completely new type, representing an entirely new quality. Even “Osservatore Romano” in its editorials on the compromise on Europe’s draft constitution lamented the fact that the determinations did not go further, that they were not more radical.


“Osservatore Romano” – that’s a distinctive institutional location…


The Vatican understands the scale. And of course, the state is something that has its own lifecycle, its rise – and its demise.


And though we here see the scale that has emerged from our post-soviet goulash, we defend our local logic unaware that it represents a model from the past, a model rapidly becoming obsolete.


Precisely. A new quality is emerging, we are here in this region, and so we ought to be pleased and help in building this new quality. Notwithstanding that, nations remain and a new way must be found for defending national interest in Europe’s new construction. Parenthetically, the Church in the XIV century was critical of the emergence of the state – and in the name of universal values.


Thank you for speaking with DECISION MAKER.


Translated by Philip Earl Steele

W wydaniu 3, September 2004 również

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