With the destruction of Gaza by Israel under way and the humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian territories worsening day by day, a recurrent question is raised in mainstream media, TV shows and many academic circles: Is Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks on October 7 proportionate or not? Some say it is. Others say only partially. Others say it isn’t. But the point is that the question itself is a trap. Any serious debate about the current escalation of violence cannot start from October 2023. To overlook the historical context is a violation of the truth: it pushes to one side the state of oppression that Israel has imposed on Palestine at a growing pace in the past decades, and it washes away the responsibilities of Europe in the root causes of the conflict and occupation.
Western governments and institutions have overwhelmingly shown support for Israel in its explicit attempt at annihilating Palestinians. “This is civilization against barbarity. This is good against bad”, claimed Israel’s Ambassador to Berlin, Ron Prosor. “We are fighting against human animals”, said Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. As the mainstream narrative goes, what is taking place is a broader battle of civilizations between “the only democracy in the Middle East” (as Israel has often been labelled by politicians and journalists) and authoritarianism (Hamas and, by extension, all Palestinians). Good vs evil. The civilized vs the uncivilized.
“You are either with us, or you are with the terrorist”, said George Bush in 2001, when the US was launching the War on Terror, which led to two catastrophic decades of human loss (hundreds of thousands of dead), devastation and destabilization. Us and them. The civilized vs the uncivilized. Yet if we really want to indulge in the depressing mantra of a battle of civilizations, we should recognize that the terms of reference are different from how they first appear to the Western intelligentsia. With current events in Palestine and Israel in mind, if we compare the speeches of Joe Biden or von der Leyen, with that of the king of Jordan at the Cairo Peace Summit, the conclusion would be that the American and the German don’t make a good impression (to use an euphemism). Indeed, I’d challenge anyone in saying on what “side” reason, justice and humanity lie in that comparison.
The decline of values, ability and courage in Western political leadership, coupled with their arrogance and double standards, is a perfect symbol of our empty times, in which social media threads determine the relevance of social issues, and a significant portion of academia is complicit with power or anesthetized and irrelevant. As I write this blog post, a turmoil was generated among some research institutes in Norway for the decision of a group of researchers to publish a Statement on the Situation in Palestine, now available on Public Anthropologist blog and taken down from the website where it was originally published.
Over the past decades, we have seen wars conducted in the name of democracy, countries bombed in the name of human rights and regimes intermittently supported or fought depending on economic interests. In the US as well as in Europe freedom of expression has been dismantled, inequalities have increased and societal cohesion has eroded.
Polarizing discourses are used to generate clicks in ways that misrepresent reality. You raise questions about the opportunity to keep sending weapons to Ukraine? Then you are pro-Putin. You maintain that it is necessary to establish a dialogue with the Taliban? Then you support violations of human rights. Journalism is compromised or controlled. Dissidence is often mocked or even cancelled. Social problems tend to be oversimplified. Nuances are often unwelcomed in political debates. And so, horrors like the devastation imposed on Palestinians go on as Europe complicitly watches. Pro-Palestinians protests are banned. Voices outside the mainstream are silenced. European governments are far from being innocent in the protraction of this humanitarian tragedy. Once again, as with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or the bombing of Libya in 2011 (to mention only two relatively recent examples), the current events will remain in the history books as a terrifying injustice.
It may be appropriate to recall how in 1993 the historian Howard Zinn introduced the essay “Terrorism over Tripoli”:
“In April of 1986, a bomb exploded in a discotheque in West Berlin, killing two people, one an American soldier. It was unquestionably an act of terrorism. Libya’s tyrannical leader, Muammar Khadafi, had a record of involvement in terrorism, although in this case there seemed to be no clear evidence of who was responsible. Nevertheless, President Reagan ordered that bombers be sent over Libya’s capital of Tripoli, killing perhaps a hundred people, almost all civilians. I wrote this piece, which could not find publication in the press, to argue against the principle of retaliation. I am always furious at the killing of innocent people for some political cause, but I wanted to broaden the definition of terrorism to include governments, which are guilty of terrorism far more often, and on an infinitely larger scale, than bands of revolutionaries or nationalists.”
The essay ends with these words:
“Let us hope that, even if this generation, its politicians, its reporters, its flag-wavers and fanatics, cannot change its ways, the children of the next generation will know better, having observed our stupidity. Perhaps they will understand that the violence running wild in the world cannot be stopped by more violence, that someone must say: we refuse to retaliate, the cycle of terrorism stops here.”
Unfortunately, we cannot say that lessons have been learned. Quite the opposite, as the situation in Gaza blatantly reveals.
Noam Chomsky once praised Zinn’s work (endorsement for Howard Zinn on History) in the following terms: “Howard’s life and work are a persistent reminder that our own subjective judgments of the likelihood of success in engaging human problems are of little interest, to ourselves or others. What matters is to take part, as best we can, in the small actions of unknown people that can stave off disaster and bring about a better world, to honor them for their achievement, to do what we can to ensure that these achievements are understood and carried forward.”
As Palestine burns, many scholars are still reluctant to speak out, established academic institutions avoid making a public stand, unverified information is used as communication tactics, investigative journalism is invisible. Along with Palestinians, truth dies. There are times when we need to create the space for the courage of historical truths to emerge. This is one of those times.
This text first appeared on AllegraLab and it is republished here with the permission of the author.
Antonio De Lauri is is Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway. He works on issues related to law, justice, war and humanitarianism. He is the founding editor and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Public Anthropologist and the Series Editor of Berghahn Books Humanitarianism and Security.
Cite as: De Lauri, Antonio 2023 “The Courage of Historical Truths” Focaalblog 30 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/30/antonio-de-lauri-the-courage-of-historical-truths/
Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission on Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology – IUAES, in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, and FocaalBlog, organized a conference on the 26-27 May, 2022, in Budapest, addressing the escalating crises of global capitalism.
Since 1989, processes of neoliberal globalization, financialization, the erosion of welfare states, and the decline of ‘the standard labor contract’, have produced deepening inequalities and hierarchies, long time hidden under the mantra of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Privatization, gentrification, dispossession, devaluation, and displacement have increased in a multitude of settings despite intermittent mass mobilizations, which were often seen as ‘middle class’. The undermining of democratic possibilities has reinforced the super-exploitation of diverse groups in many places. Globalization, technological speed up and the platformization of labor-markets are threatening ‘middle class’ jobs’ in North and South. Deepening exploitation of labor is increasingly intersected with aggressive rent taking by monopoly sections of capital and states. Issues of nationalism, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, sometimes interwoven with waves of migration, have resurfaced, in tandem with the resulting authoritarianism. Accelerating climate change is being addressed in pro-capitalist ways, likely leading to further inequalities, displacements, and challenges to survival. Global imperial rivalries are intensifying and generating new cold wars and ‘global wars’, increasingly of a purportedly ‘civilizational nature’, like the Ukrainian calamity that is playing itself out on the EU border.
The late Immanuel Wallerstein predicted that politics in this ‘decisive era of the world-system’ will be ever more volatile as inescapable choices must be made about democratic or authoritarian solutions. Most of our problems are well known and anticipated, but narrow ideas about ‘proven causation’ and ‘concluding evidence’ paralyze any decision making on behalf of established interests, while national publics are being fed lies and deceptions, both by the technocrats and the ‘authoritarians’ and right-wing populists. Crisis moments are steadily dealt with ‘unprepared’ and in fire-fighting mode. Left wing grassroots movements are specialized on small scale practical utopias but large-scale breakthroughs for the Left seem out of reach.
If this describes roughly where we are now, what can we expect next? Can we responsibly extrapolate and speculate? What sort of a global capitalism might we be inhabiting in thirty years from now? What can we discover as its likely core tendencies, elements, and relations? What modes of resistance are people experimenting with? What are the visions and opportunities to build a more equal and just society? Where is the new counter politics, where are the new counter movements?
Roundtable on War
Taras Fedirko (University of St Andrews) Militarized civil society and the economy of war in Ukraine
Volodymyr Arthiuk (University of Oxford) The expected war: scales of conflict around Ukraine from February 2014 to February 2022
Denys Gorbach (Sciences Po) Identitarian landscapes in Ukraine before and during the war
Volodymyr Ischenko (Free University Berlin) Madman’s war? Ideology, hegemony crisis, and the dynamics of depoliticization in Russians’ support for the invasion of Ukraine
– moderated by Don Kalb (University of Bergen)
Roundtable on Migration
Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center) Migration turn and the crisis of capitalism.,
Noémi Katona (Centre for Social Science, Hungarian Academy of Sciences/Helyzet) The division of reproductive labor in global capitalism: the case of migrant care workers in Europe,
Béla Soltész (Eötvös Loránd University), “The wanted, the unwanted and the invisible. Interpreting distinctions and selectivity of Hungarian migration policy”
Nina Glick Schiller (Manchester University), Has Migration Studies Lost Its Subject? Migration Studies, Global Disorders, and Shared Precarities
– moderated by Diana Szántó (Artemisszio Foundation/Polanyi Center)
Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ I
Luisa Steur (University of Amsterdam) Cuba Update
Marc Morell (University of Bergen) On transformative movements in neither authoritarian nor egalitarian but flawed paths. A Maltese illustration
Attila Antal (Eötvös Loránd University) Illiberalism as Emergency Governance
Gábor Scheiring (Bocconi University) The national-populist mutation of neoliberalism in East-Central Europe
– moderated by Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center)
Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ II
Florin Poenaru (University of Bucharest) Tanks, tankies and think-tanks. Anthropological vignettes from the Romanian garrison
Jeff Maskovsky (The City University of New York) Not Yet Fascist: The Journey from Neoliberalism to Corporate Authoritarianism of the United States
Ágnes Gagyi (University of Gothenburg) Bridge position and regime fixes: semi-peripheral contexts to “illiberalism” in Hungary
Bruno de Conti (University of Campinas) Bolsonaro: the economic agenda behind the smoke screen
– moderated by Dorottya Mendly (Corvinus University)
Roundtable on Our Futures
David Harvey (The City University of New York)
Michael Burawoy (UC Berkely)
Ida Susser (The City University of New York)
Don Kalb (University of Bergen)
– moderated by Mary Taylor (The City University of New York)
Cite as: Focaalblog. 2022. “New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism.” Focaalblog, 5 July. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/07/05/don-kalb-new-times-confronting-the-escalating-crises-of-global-capitalism/
Although historically and geographically diverse, but sharing religious cultural roots, contemporary Sri Lanka and Thailand are both characterised by authoritarianism. This parallel cannot be explained as simply due to both countries being Theravāda polities. Nevertheless, dominant politics in both countries express elements of conservative ethno-Buddhism, within the cultural markers of national identity and contested political discourse. The political economy of political Buddhism in both countries can best be apprehended as genealogical problems in the context of an emergent new space, which heralds the inexorable logic of the future foretold: new hegemonic, populist/ultra-nationalist forms of governance, influenced by Chinese capital investment.
The Thai and Burmese generals are cooperating to ensure democracy and liberty are crushed in both countries. This unholy alliance goes back to the days when current General Min Aung Hlaing, chair of Myanmar’s ruling junta, regarded Thailand’s ultra-royalist now-deceased undemocratic General Prem Tinsulanonda as his adopted father and inspiration. Prem, as Chief Privy Councillor, was always close to the Thai palace and the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Their combined strategy was to use the military to restrict freedom and human rights, while appearing democratic. Military coups, along with violence, have been repeatedly carried out. Thailand has had some thirty coup attempts since 1912. Nicholas Farrelly notes, “Thailand’s 19 modern military coups and attempted coups distinguish its elite political culture from those of other so-called ‘coup-prone’ states. Since a bloodless military coup in 1932 [apparently] ended Thailand’s absolute monarchy, Thailand has failed to consolidate a democratic culture among its elites that would make coups inconceivable. Instead, episodic military interventionism – supported by persistent military influence in politics – is now part of a distinctive Thai coup culture that has been reproduced over many decades.” The 1932 military coup to overthrow the absolute monarchy never actually obliterated monarchical absolutism; it only masked the autocratic authority held by the military-monarchy alliance (Taylor 2021) behind limited parliamentary democracy (with senators handpicked and political leaders sanctioned by the palace). The current situation in Thailand can be referred to as “neo-absolutism” (Streckfuss 2014). This arrangement has endured under a façade of democracy maintained by mass propaganda and military control over the judiciary, apparatuses of state, and commerce.
In Sri Lanka, certain coup dynamics are not discernible given that the Rajapaksas and the armed forces are at one. Tellingly, Sri Lanka’s British-inspired constitutional traditions show an ability to withstand and counter the worst excesses of Sinhalese authoritarianism. But the militarisation of both the civil administration and public life continues. The consequence is the on-going strangulation of civic space, a dynamic we also discern in Thailand.
In the pre-European and colonial history of Sri Lanka and Thailand, there were Buddhist missions between Kandy and Siam. Indeed, the Kandyan Sangha was repurified by a mission that saw the Thai monk Upali Thera carry out upasampada for a small group of Sinhalese monks. So came into being the Siyam Nikaya in Kandy. Other missions followed. But from the late nineteenth century urban Theravāda Buddhism in both Sri Lanka and Thailand underwent modernisation and a concomitant fashioning of a thoroughly individualist ethic wholly consistent with the logic of capital. The ideological conservatism that characterises the urban Sangha in both Sri Lanka and Thailand is thus a consequence of this modernisation, or what Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988) characterised as “Protestantisation.”
Image 1: Sri Lankan Theravāda Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala Apadanaya (1864 – 1933) (source: Wikimedia Commons)
Here we look at the varied consequences of Buddhist modernism in Sri Lanka and Thailand
in two shared registers: First, marginalisation, ethno-chauvinism, and ethnic
palingenetic ultranationalism (Roger Griffin’s term) with its re-interpretations of a
conservative Buddhist ideology; and, second, an alliance between political elites
(i.e. Sinhalese senior public servants, military leaders, and a Sinhalese
political class, and, in Thailand, a monarchical regime with serving officer
corps) and a Westernised bourgeoisie, which sustains an ethno-historical prism
of nationalism, hierarchy and order. The more recent intervention of Chinese
capital has impacted these domestic social, political, and economic
arrangements, while creating neo-colonial regional dependencies.
When the Burmese Generals launched a coup in February 2021 there was speculation in Sri Lanka the Sinhalese leadership of the Sri Lankan armed forces would do something similar. The objective would have been to ostensibly bolster the Rajapaksas cultural-constitutional state project – one inspired by the Chinese Communist Party’s mediation of Han culture. Influenced by Beijing, the Rajapaksas and the new Sinhalese elites have rejected the constitutional frame of the nation-state (originating in the colonial-bureaucratic reforms of the 1830s) in favour of that of the civilisation-state. This is reflected in a desire to align the Sri Lankan state with a modernist reading of pre-colonial Sinhalese Buddhist history. The Burmese generals have pursued a similar strategy. That said, Sri Lanka, for all its ethno-religious extremism, has maintained the outward form of constitutional government. Myanmar, by contrast, left the Commonwealth after independence and, following the military coup of 1962, General Ne Win declared that parliamentary democracy was alien to Myanmar’s Buddhist history (Aung-Thwin and Aung-Thwin 2013, 27). The Myanmar military, like much of Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese nationalist elites, simply misrepresented its own past. However, what these countries share is a process of either voluntary or enforced Sinification, which will have disastrous consequences for the region. This will lead to consequences such as an increased debt burden with China, the destruction of home-grown industries, and the assault on both individuals and civil society who oppose Beijing’s clients.
Modalities of violence in the periphery
The Rajapaksas
came to power in 2019-20 with one stated objective: to restore good governance
(in light of the shambles of the previous Sirisena/Wickremesinghe government). In
this context, “good government” aligned with an ethno-nationalist ideology. The
Rajapaksas came to power promising security for the majority Buddhist
community, even if that entailed increased insecurity for non-Sinhalese
communities, particularly in the minority-dominated hinterland. Indeed, the
minor reforms of the Sirisena/Wickremesinghe period, such as reducing militarisation
in the northeast, were swiftly reversed. Since coming to power, the Rajapaksas
have spent much energy focusing on the margins of the nation-state,
specifically the hinterland of the northeast where ethno-religious minorities
are the majority.
Margins are
defined as sites far from the centres of state sovereignty in which states have
weak jurisdiction and political control and are unable to ensure implementation
of their programmes and policies. To the extent that both the Sri Lankan and
Thai states have sought to exercise control over their political and geographical
margin, their respective practices have been over-determined. By this we mean
that the state’s response to contradictory/antagonistic forces is reduced to a
singularity – the monopoly of state violence. That is to say, violence that is both
structural and “symbolic” (Žižek 2008) is necessary to mask the contradictions
emanating from the margins and the multiplicity of meanings that the margins
generate. Rather than confront the contradictions of the multi-ethnic/religious
peripheries imaginatively, the state resorts to the singularity of structural
violence.
In Thailand, the
state’s periphery is defined along ethno-religious terms and in terms of the
form that Buddhism and Buddhist practice takes, especially in the far north and
northeast where charismatic monks have dominated public religious life since
the nineteenth century. The political economy of space shows how the centre and
periphery are contested domains of power. The Thai (and previously Siamese)
state since the early twentieth century has, for example, pursued a policy of
cultural assimilation directed at the ethnic Lao of northeast Thailand and the
ethnic northern Thai (Khon Mueang) – a classic instance of symbolic violence.
This echoes processes in Sri Lanka’s northeast borderlands that led those with
hybrid ethno-religious sensibilities to increasingly identify as Sinhalese
Buddhists. Such is the legacy of urban Protestant Buddhism and its ossifying
logic with respect to identity, as H.L Seneviratne (1999, pp 105-120) documents
in his monumental work on the processes of rationalisation in Sinhalese
Buddhism initiated by the Theosophists in late nineteenth century Ceylon.
Religious
nationalism and ethno-culturalism
In Seneviratne’s
trenchant critique, the modernising
turn in Ceylon associated with Dharmapala led to a form of political Buddhism
that was culturally monistic; the Rajapaksas, the Sinhalese bureaucracy, and
the military are merely completing the policy agenda of political Buddhism
initially framed by the Vidyalankara in the first half of the twentieth century. Like all nationalist
projects it will succeed and fail simultaneously; the more it succeeds, the
more it will fail, for it will have to continually reinvent it’s other. Contemporary Sinhalese nationalism since
the demise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) shows flexibility in selecting
its target – Muslims and Tamils, but also liberal-left Sinhalese, women’s
rights activists, and wider civil society. Given this intimidating scenario, an
exodus of educated middle-class Sri Lankans is likely (note the proliferation
of private English tuition on the island simply for the purpose of aiding migration
overseas).
In the meantime, the Rajapaksas are putting their wider mission into practice, focusing on transforming what remains of the resistant margins of the island’s northeast. The Covid-19 pandemic has amplified the institutional weaknesses of the Sinhalese state, allowing for the renewal of Sinhalese nationalism and other forms of populism, although a resurgent Tamil populism remains elusive at this time. Wang observed in April 2021 that Covid-19 “had underscored how fragmented Sri Lanka’s domestic supply chains were, leading to inefficiencies throughout the logistics sector.” The impact was devastating on farmers trying to get their produce to markets and urban centres. However, in one domain the logistics of the state are very effective: the intensification of the Sinhalese state’s commitment to fashioning a homogenous vision of Sinhalese Buddhist cultural forms. N.Q. Dias in the 1960s first envisioned a policy designed to physically encompass the Tamils in the Jaffna peninsula, the Vannī, and the east. His plan initially was to be executed by the then Jaffna Government Agent (GA), the late Neville Jayaweera, whose task was to enforce the Official Language Act in Jaffna and assist Dias in developing a series of measures for dealing with an anticipated Tamil uprising against the impact of a discriminatory policy agenda pursued by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. To contain this future Tamil revolt, Dias staked his nationalist credentials by unfolding a plan to construct army camps encircling the Northern Province.
Jumping forward to 2021, the Rajapaksas are Dias
reincarnated. In the Eastern Province the Rajapaksa brothers (President Gothabaya
Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa) have set about the task of
completing the homogenization of the east in a Sinhalese Buddhist image.
Ironically, homogenization is what the LTTE sought in the east when they were
in the ascendency; more recently, Wahabi influenced Muslims in the east have
exhibited similar objectives. The Sinhalese Buddhist ethno-nationalists who have
organized around the Rajapaksas may well succeed. To the task of making the dhammadīpa
whole in the Sinhalese nationalist imaginary, the new President appointed
an all-male and all Sinhalese Buddhist Presidential
Task Force for Archaeological Heritage Management in the Eastern Province.
The task force’s objective is to “build a Secure Country, Disciplined, Virtuous
and Lawful society” (Groundviews 2021). It is hard to imagine how a body that
is only comprised of retired and serving senior military and police chiefs could
achieve this, other than in the most specious way imaginable – one that serves
to further the Sinhalese nationalist dream of wholesale spatial reorganisation
in the east (in which the Tamils and Muslims are reduced to permanent
second-class status) in the name of a highly fetishized Buddhism. The secondary
purpose of this mission is to embed the long-term dominance of the Rajapaksas,
their kin networks, and their allies in the capitalist class and the military.
Thailand
protests and the monarchy issue
In Thailand, protests against the monarchy-military alliance continue. Many observers thought the student-led protests and international support would bring the authoritarian leadership in Thailand to its knees and the monarch to the negotiating table. In this, they were mistaken. The response has instead been increased repression. The current student-led protests (with an increasingly broad social base) have a genealogy that stretches back to the red shirt protests of 2009-2010. Many of these students were too young to know the violence and injustices committed on protestors in 2010 but seem well informed through alternative free media and their well-informed seniors. Ironically, during the 2010 violence against protestors, the international and domestic media were reluctant to talk about the legitimacy of red shirt claims, or to expose the atrocities committed by ultra-royalists and the military on the streets in Bangkok. The persecution since that time has not stopped. Ann Norman of the Thai Alliance for Human Rights has compiled reports of the state sanctioned assassination of red shirt democracy activists and the plight of those individuals forced to flee to neighbouring countries since the 2010 crackdown. In contrast, we have seen in the past year live coverage of student-led protests beamed across the world in real time and witnessed increasing police brutality – especially a violent militarised faction trained under the auspices of the king, known as Ratchawallop Police Retainers, King’s Guards 904.
The student-led protestors have made three demands of the ruling regime: sack the junta’s self-appointed Prime Minister, Prayut Chan-Ocha; establish a new democratic constitution; and reform the monarchy into a more accountable and transparent institution under the constitution. The fear at present is the increasing evidence of monarchical absolutism under the current king. The latter demand does not imply “toppling” the monarchy (lom-jao), though semantics make little difference to die-hard ultra-royalists concerned that democratic reforms would weaken their patronage networks. Meanwhile, the junta has been using propaganda to encourage fascistic followers wearing yellow shirts to take to the streets. This rise of the New Right is seen not only in Thailand, but also in Sri Lanka, India, and elsewhere (Taylor 2021; Bello 2019). In Thailand, these developments are dangerous as we have seen in the past when pro-democracy groups took their grievances to the streets, only to have agents provocateurs and reactionaries mobilised to generate violence. This is the endgame in an authoritarian state-sanctioned ruse.
The transmission of
knowledge these days is largely through social media and social networking or
messaging apps. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued
statements on the regime’s attempt to shut down conventional media
broadcasting, other than the royalist-military media (i.e, the Manager [Phuujadkaan],
Daily News, Bangkok Post and the Nation). But international NGOs have little
influence in Thailand.
If the regime does not
listen to the people, who does it listen to, other than the mostly
Bavarian-resident monarch? Publicly, the Royal Household in Bangkok has
maintained that the King’s public appearances during the year were cancelled
owing to the third wave of Covid-19, which Thailand has not yet
(at the time of writing) managed to get under control. As in Sri Lanka, the pandemic
has become a cover for further curtailing civil liberties and targeting those
engaged in democratic participation.
Regarding Thailand’s Covid-19 vaccine roll out, for the first year of the pandemic this was nothing short of a farce – the privileged pharmaceutical facility owned by the Thai king, Siam Bioscience, was supposed to manufacture the Astra Zeneca vaccine, but this proved to be a flop. As well, the country is now heavily dependent on China’s Sinovac/Sinopharm (not internationally peer-reviewed and showing low effectiveness), produced under a lucrative contract between a royalist-favoured company owned by the Charoen Pokphand Group (CP) and the Chinese Government. Officially, 36% of the Thai population have been fully vaccinated, though this could be an overstatement. Meanwhile, those people who want a credible vaccine (where supplies are available) must buy their own.
Thailand’s shifting
political economy mirrors developments in other Theravāda Buddhist
majority states. Myanmar and Sri Lanka are exemplary of military-corporate
states that have become heavily indebted (both financially and politically) to
the Chinese state. The military in Thailand could also use a Covid-19 resurgence to further embed
the dominant role of Beijing and mainland Chinese commercial interests in the
Thai state, especially given that only Beijing has the financial capacity to
distribute development largesse. The latter is a real possibility in Sri Lanka
as Covid-19 community transmission
increases and the most likely means to counter such resurgence is China’s vast
currency reserves, the Sinopharm vaccine, and the patron-client dynamics
emerging between dominant elements of Sinhalese capital in Sri Lanka and the
corporate Chinese state. The corporate-military-royalist Thai state ought to see the dangers of
lopsided development, trade, and commercial relations if they continue to cede
economic sovereignty to China.
Political Buddhism and a third space
In Thailand,
the country’s propaganda machinery has been at full steam to create further
divisions in society, mocking the student-led protests as anti-monarchy and
anti-statist. This could lead to violence, making military intervention appear
necessary and justified, leading to another coup. In the sense of Henri
Lefebvre’s “politics of space”, the royalist Thai state and its compliant
capitalists and public sector servants are directed to ‘‘pulverise’’ democratic
space into a manageable, calculable, and abstract grid and prevent diverse
social forces from creating, defending, or extending contested spaces of social
reproduction and autonomy.
In Sri Lanka, the struggle over the constitutional anchoring/grounding of space has been reclaimed by Sinhalese Buddhist ethno-nationalists who in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa have found a willing ally in the task of fashioning a Chinese inspired “civilisation state” (see Collins and O’Brien 2019, pp 36-49), a state model which aligns the future evolution of the Sri Lankan state with a modernist reading of pre-colonial Sinhalese Buddhist historiography. Similarly, Thailand also has groups that have coalesced under the umbrella of the “Buddhism Protection Centre of Thailand” (sun phitak phraphuttasasana haeng prathet thai), advocating for a relatively ossified form of Thai Buddhist state, which intertwines the cultural identity of the Thai-Buddhist community with the identity of the Thai state (see Katewadee Kulabkaew 2019).
In Thailand, we may see the creation of a radical
“third space” (Soja 1996) as a consequence of the 2020-2021 student-led
protests. In following Soja’s reading of Lefebvre, the “third space” is defined
as “an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human
life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the
new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of
spatiality–historicality–sociality” (ibid. p.57). This has involved some
radical Buddhist monks, though not many compared to revolutionary Myanmar, as
the Thai Sangha is highly regulated at all levels by monastic and lay
conservatives and centre-state elites under the monarchy. There is little autonomy
for Thailand’s Supreme Sangha Council as directives now come directly down from
the king. If a radical “third space” opens up in Thailand it will be a turning
point from a “feudal-like” (sakdina) (see Reynolds 2018, pp 149-170) social order
towards greater democracy. Sri Lankan progressives can only dream of a future
in which a civil-society-generated “third space” may emerge and re-energise the
task of re-territorialising the ethno-Sinhalese state in an authentically
pluralist direction.
As Thai society and culture changes, the need for a new democratic constitution to replace the current 2017 military-drafted constitution, has become an imperative. The 2017 constitution is a partisan “cultural constitution” that allows for the capture of (absolute) state power by a monarchy-military (“deep state”) alliance. Its logic and structure are being emulated by Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka as President Rajapakse harnesses a modernist reconstruction of Buddhist historiography to fashion himself as a monarchical president channelling the energy of an absolutist and righteous (dhammikorajadhamma) cakkavatti.
In Thailand’s militarised constitution, the “juristocracy” (Mérieau 2014) prospers on misuses and abuses of what is termed “judicial review”. A constitution is supposedly a mechanism for the organisation, distribution, and regulation of power. However, as a foundational law of the state, a constitution’s origins are always extra-legal, and yet it simultaneously constructs a normative framework for the organisation of the state and its institutions. Thailand’s 2017 constitution is so flawed that it should never have been validated by the Constitutional Court of Thailand (Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang 2017). In a democratic society, given broad social and cultural changes, a constitution will always need constant revisions at historical periods to reflect the concerns and cultural values of its citizens, as constitutional legitimacy depends on its cultural anchoring. But it ought not to be anchored in a highly fetishized conservative-elite Buddhist historiography. This historiography needs to be opened up to new possibilities that render it imaginable to think anew about the nature of the social and the political in Thailand and Sri Lanka. In both countries, but in Thailand in particular, it appears that the ruling political regimes and their state apparatuses hear, given the volume of the protests, but do not listen (Thai: phuak’khao dai’yin tae phuak khao mai-fang).
Roshan de
Silva-Wijeyeratne is Senior Lecturer in Law at Liverpool
Hope University.
James Taylor is
Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Adelaide, South Australia and
affiliate at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University.
References
Aung-Thwin,
Michael and Maitrii Aung-Thwin. 2013, A History of Myanmar since Ancient
Times: Traditions and Transformations, second edition. London: Reaktion
Books.
Bello, Walden.
2019. Counter-Revolution: The global rise of the far right. Halifax:
Fernwood Publishing.
Collins, Neil and
David O’Brien. 2019. The politics of everyday China Guidance for the
Uninitiated. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Gombrich, Richard
and Gananath Obeyesekere. 1988. Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in
Sri Lanka. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Groundviews. 2021.
“Shaping a Single Narrative, courtesy the Clergy and Task Forces,” 11 July. https://groundviews.org/2021/11/07/shaping-a-single-narrative-courtesy-the-clergy-and-task-forces/
Reynolds, Craig.
2018. “Feudalism in The Thai Past,” in Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face
of Thai Feudalism Today. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Streckfuss, David.
2014. “Freedom and Silencing under the Neo-Absolutist Monarchy Regime in
Thailand, 2006–2011,” in Pavin Chachavalpongpun ed., Good Coup Gone Bad:
Thailand’s Political Development since Thaksin’s Downfall. Singapore:
ISEAS.
Seneviratne, H L.
1999. The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Soja, Edward. 1996.
Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Taylor, Jim. 2021.
“Thailand’s new right, social cleansing and the continuing military-monarchy
entente.” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 6(3): 253-273.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways
Reflections. London: Profile Books.
Cite as: de Silva-Wijeyeratne, Roshan and James Taylor. 2021. “State and crisis in Sri Lanka and Thailand: Hearing but not listening in the Theravāda Buddhist world.” FocaalBlog, 20 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/20/roshan-de-silva-wijeyeratne-and-james-taylor-state-and-crisis-in-sri-lanka-and-thailand-hearing-but-not-listening-in-the-theravada-buddhist-world/
For the first time since El Salvador’s mid-20th century military dictatorship, a single political party dominates both the legislative and executive branches of the government, and by all accounts aims to control the judiciary soon as well. The Nuevas Ideas or “New Ideas” party, the political vehicle of populist president Nayib Bukele, recently used its new supermajority in the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly to unconstitutionally expel five supreme court judges. It will soon replace them with new appointees, presumably picked by Bukele, in a move that social movement activists are denouncing as a “technical coup.”
Unlike the military dictatorships that dominated
El Salvador up until its bloody civil war, however, Bukele’s government is
nominally democratic. Bukele was elected president in 2018 and will serve a
five-year term, after which he is supposed to leave office for good.
Legislative and municipal elections in El Salvador delivered his party, branded
distinctively with a bold “N” the stands for both “Nuevas Ideas” and
“Nayib”, a resounding majority.
The elections marginalized both the centre-left FMLN, former communist guerrillas, and the traditional right ARENA, anti-communists organized by former military junta members. Bukele claimed to have “turned the page” on the postwar two-party system that characterized El Salvador’s political reality following the 1992 Peace Accords. Bukele has repeatedly claimed that he is “neither left nor right” and described both sides of the country’s bloody civil war as equally criminal, despite evidence to the contrary.
Yet in spite of a nominal democratic mandate (problematized by mass abstentionism in recent Salvadoran elections) and a post-ideological veneer, Bukele has much in common with other right-wing authoritarians in the region, such as Jair Bolsanaro – whose son and advisor tweeted supportively of the sacking of the supreme court. The instrumentalization of legislative proceedings to consolidate power also bears similarity to the tactic of lawfare used in Brazil and elsewhere by the Latin American far right. Bukele’s tendency to both issue government decrees and launch harassment campaigns against his perceived enemies via twitter has also prompted comparisons to Donald Trump.
Bukele has political power, and all signs suggest that the repressive elements of the state stand behind him – in some cases, literally, as when he stormed the legislature last year, attempting to force the assembly to approve his Territorial Control Plan and secretive US$109 million loan to upgrade the country’s police armaments. Yet in the name of security and order, he needs to consolidate more.
Speaking in the aftermath of the move to overturn the judiciary, a participant told me, “This is a strategy that could be regionalized.” The move is consistent with the strategy of “autogolpe” or “self-coup” used by other civilian governments with close military ties to kneecap and paralyze opposition, often in the name of rooting out designated enemies. Turkish president and fellow right-wing populist Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have attempted a similar strategy in 2016, and if Eduardo Bolsanaro’s comments are any indication, there is potentially appetite for it in Brazil.
Bonapartism, Bukeleism
Bukele’s personalist leadership, claims to be post-ideological, and appeals to an abstract Salvadoran people, all reflect what Italian communist Antonio Gramsci called “caesarism,” or what Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, called Bonapartism. Like these historical regimes, Bukele’s rise was precipitated by a crisis. El Salvador is a microcosm of the global economic, ecological, health, political and social crises that have prompted a meteoric rise of right-wing populism around the world.
Gramsci called these conditions, which can precipitate reaction or revolution, organic crises. Organic crises usually lead to a rejection of established political parties, economic policies, and value systems. Such crises are transnational in their origins but also intimately local. El Salvador’s domestic crisis reflects global and regional trends of collapsing party systems, increased securitization, and growing disaffection with globalization and accumulation-by-dispossession. Using the framework of an organic crisis, my research situates the rise of right-wing populism in Central America within the global rise of populism.
For populism experts in the liberal tradition, like Cas Mudde and Cristobal Kaltwasser, populism signals a degeneration of the health of liberal democracy and liberal institutions. Populism’s emphasis on majoritarianism leaves little room for liberal pluralism and reduces politics to a Schmittian dichotomy of “friends” and “enemies.” On the other hand, following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, some on the Left see the rise of populism as a positive, calling for socialists to seize the “populist moment” to rally “the people” to a left-populism.
Both these perspectives focus on the ideological anatomy of populism, tracing its political reasoning and descriptive effects. This is insufficient to explain Bukele. On the one hand, if we rely on liberal accounts of populism, we end up reproducing simplistic narratives of democratic backslide and the Latin caudillo. On the other hand, Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive analysis fails to make a link between the “superstructural” language of nation, sovereignty, order, and belonging that we find in right-wing populism, and the world of production, finance, and recessions.
El Salvador’s organic crisis
Bukele and his party, Nuevas Ideas, emerged out of the 2011 indignados protests, named after the Spanish mobilizations of the same name. While initially buoying the left, middle-class Salvadoran indignadosquickly became disillusioned by the FMLN. Bukele, an ex-FMLNista himself, in many ways capitalizes on the unfulfilled anti-corruption demands of the indignados. His response in office to this crisis, though punitive, also reflects this popular disillusionment with the postwar Salvadoran political system.
Out-migration has for the past three decades acted as a kind of release valve for social pressures in Central America, pushing peasants and workers dispossessed by capitalist development north towards the United States and buoying Central American economies with billions in remittances. But as William Robinson points out, mounting ecological, social, and economic dispossession, combined with slumping economic growth and rising foreign debt (even before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has only made the slump worse), and a labour market unable to absorb the remaining dispossessed population, have pushed the region towards implosion.
Organic crises lay bare fundamental contradictions in the system that the ruling classes are unable to resolve, provoking resorts to open force. Central American countries, aided by the United States through the Alliance for Prosperity and Regional Security Initiative, have responded to simmering unrest and growing social movements with escalating violence and repression. Military and police aid nominally supports anti-gang efforts and the regularization of immigration—favourite talking points of Bukele.
While in neighbouring Guatemala this stewing crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has escalated into anti-systemic protests, Bukele has kept a lid on the pot through a mix of emergency welfare provisions and increasing militarization. Bukele’s mixing of highly-publicized social supports and punitive populism is again a consistent Bonapartist strategy of weathering the interregnum by attempting to simultaneously reconcile and repress social conflict.
Image 1: Bukele receives the baton of command from the Armed Forces of El Salvador at an official event. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Crisis, protection, and sovereignty
Even as they are assailed by COVID-19 deaths, right-wing populists in Latin America are rebounding, signaling a potential future for right-wing populism in the ‘post-COVID’ world. Sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo recently argued that post-COVID politics will be defined by the theme of ‘protection’ – from epidemics, from climate change, from crime and instability. Don Kalb has argued on this blog that current protection measures are facilitating the formation of a new ‘techno-capital’ post-COVID regime of accumulation with new kinds of contestations.
Bukele’s El Salvador foreshadows a possible post-COVID political environment dominated by right-wing populism. Like his preceding controversial actions, Bukele’s autogolpe is being justified with a mix of militaristic and pseudo-religious language—demonizing his enemies and framing the fight against corruption and organized crime in terms of literal warfare to secure the sovereignty of the country.
Throughout the Global South, pandemic measures that prioritize repression over healthcare and bolster existing over-policing have led to the peripheralization of neighbourhoods and the stripping of meaningful citizenship from villainized populations. In the context of widespread dispossession in El Salvador, the state’s longstanding mano duro approach to crime, and now Bukele’s autogolpe, these measures signal an even more repressive kind of capital accumulation coming out of the COVID crisis.
Bukele also benefits from a demoralized left that has strained relationships with its base and social movements. El Salvador is thus also a cautionary tale when it comes to simplistic calls for a left alternative – be it to reclaim populism or reclaim the politics of protection. The marginalization of the leftist FMLN is not for lack of trying to appropriate populist or protectionist language – the outgoing FMLN government of Salvador Sanchez Ceren also attempted to combine punitive anti-crime legislation with progressive social programs, as well as symbolic gestures like refusing to take up residence in the presidential palace, converting it into a public venue.
The late Ralph Sprenkels and Hillary Goodfriend have both pointed out that the FMLN’s collapse was not due to being inadequately populist, but rather due to frayed internal organization, clientelism and corruption, and a strategy in power that prioritized pragmatism over a transformational program. Enthusiasm for left-populism or left-protectionism should thus be tempered by a serious diagnosis of the organizations, from grassroots to party leaderships, that are supposed to carry a left alternative to power.
Social struggles persist outside the FMLN, however. Bukele’s hostile attacks on public sector employees have prompted strikes, and at the time of writing, protests against the autogolpe, hunger movements and other mobilizations are beginning to make cracks in what Bukele insists is his popular mandate. Whether Bukele’s right-wing populism will totter like it has in neighbouring Guatemala or whether his autogolpe will consolidate a new authoritarian state remains an open question, one worthy of attention for anthropologists interested in the new contours and contestations of the present moment.
Abram Lutes is a graduate researcher at the Carleton University Institute of Political Economy in Ottawa, Canada. His research interests include Gramscian theory, world-systems theory, social movements, and populism. At the time of writing, he is conducting digital fieldwork on El Salvador and Guatemala.
Antonini, Francesca. 2020. The Concepts
of Bonapartism and Caesarism from Marx to Gramsci. Caesarism and
Bonapartism in Gramsci. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004441828_002.
Gusterson, Hugh. 2017. “From Brexit to
Trump: Anthropology and the Rise of Nationalist Populism.” American
Ethnologist 44 (2): 209–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12469.
Rey-Araujo, Pedro. 2019. “Grounding
Populism upon Political Economy: Organic Crises in Social Structures of
Accumulation Theory.” Science & Society 83 (January): 10–36. https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2019.83.1.10.
Rodrik, Dani. 2018. “Populism and the
Economics of Globalization.” Journal of International Business Policy 1
(1–2): 12–33. https://doi.org/10.1057/s42214-018-0001-4.
Torrez, Clara
Guardado, and Ellen Moodie. 2020. “La Línea, Los Indignados, and the
Post-Postwar Generation in El Salvador.” The
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
25 (4): 590–609. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12498.
Cite as: Lutes, Abram. 2021. “Anatomy of an Autogolpe: On the consolidation of Nayib Bukele’s power in El Salvador.” FocaalBlog, 26 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/05/26/abram-lutes-anatomy-of-an-autogolpe-on-the-consolidation-of-nayib-bukeles-power-in-el-salvador/
On February 22nd police forces
entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating
many students, arresting
31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including teaching staff.
Students had taken over the administration building of the University, protesting
against a new bill on “Admission in higher
education, protection of academic freedom, and upgrading of the academic
environment,” according to which a university police force will be introduced.
The police were called by the university’s rector, who did not attempt any
dialogue with the students, as was the case in similar situations until then.
The newly introduced Law 4777/2021 seems to represent a turning point in Greek political life indicative of a more general shift towards neoliberal authoritarianism during the pandemic. Τhe Covid-19 crisis found Greece severely weakened by ten years of harsh austerity, political upheavals, hopes and disillusionments, and with a right-wing government in power. The latter saw the pandemic as an opportunity to promote its neoliberal agenda and to break down the social contract established in the country after the end of military rule in 1974. The social contract comprised both the solidification of democratic institutions and of the rule of law, and the promotion of a mixed economy of growth through some redistribution, favoring the expansion of the middle-classes.
Contrary to the general orientation of the EU, which recognized the necessity of state services to face the pandemic and thus abandoned strict budgetary discipline, the government of Nea Democratia (ND) pushed all the neoliberal “reforms” that governments implementing the bailout memoranda had not managed (or did not intend) to pass during the last decade. The ND government refused to increase the budget for the national healthcare and education system, public transport, and other relevant services. It also refused substantial financial support to those affected by the lockdowns (small and medium enterprises and their employees), with the exception of big private corporations. Moreover, with citizens locked in their homes, and with the Parliament working under non-regular conditions, the government has been passing a series of laws that initiate long-term structural reforms that will abolish remaining social and labor rights, remove environmental protection in favor of corporate business, promote privatizations of public assets, and attack the public character of education.
Following some global trends, the government has thus opted for a governance model that promotes growing inequalities, shrinking of democratic processes, rule through repression, and absolute media control. Actually, the only sectors heavily subsidized over the past year have been the mass media and the police. In the Greek context, however, there is one more important factor at play. The electoral success of the radical Left twice in 2015, as a result of huge discontent over the years of financial crisis, was a big shock for the Greek Right, which now seems intent to prevent another SYRIZA victory by treating the major opposition party not only as a political adversary but as an enemy whose electoral prospects must be eliminated.
In the
context of the breakdown of the post-1974 consensus and intense political
antagonism, universities are being used as a spearhead by the Greek Right. This
consensus brought about the massive development and democratization of higher
education. Universities increased in number, expanded their departments, and
received growing numbers of students. They have also been the loci of critical thinking, contestation,
political mobilization and emancipation for many young people, as well as a space
where the Left often has an intellectual and moral supremacy. It thus comes as no
surprise that they are being attacked first.
The Neoliberalization of Higher
Education and Law 4777/2021
The efforts to alter the public, free, and open
character of Greek universities go back to the 2000s (Angelidou 2017,
Gefou-Madianou 2000), when both conservative and social democratic governments made
several attempts to waive the financial responsibilities of the state towards
universities in order to create a market of lucrative educational services for
private investors. In this way, an attempt was made in 2006 to abolish Article
16 of the Constitution, according to which “Higher Education is provided exclusively by public
institutions with full self-administration, which are under the supervision of the State”. Such efforts were successfully resisted by intense
mobilizations of students and teaching staff. These struggles have substantially
delayed, in comparison to other European countries, the implementation of neoliberal policies in
higher education over the past two
decades: in Greece there are still no tuition fees (with the exception of most Masters’
degrees), university administration remains in the hands of elected
representatives, and there is a limited number of private colleges, which lack
the prestige of public universities.
However, when Nea Dimokratia came
to power in 2019, it targeted higher education by abolishing academic asylum.
If the latter is one of the bedrocks of any university in the democratic world,
in Greece it has an extra symbolic and political significance, due to its
brutal violation by police forces seeking to suppress the student protest
movement against the military dictatorship. The most prominent violation took
place in November 1973, when a military tank entered the Polytechnic School to
crush a student uprising, killing at least 24 students (the exact number has never
been officially confirmed) and injuring many more, an event that played a
seminal role in the fall of the military regime. As a result, once democracy
was restored, police were prohibited by law from entering the university campuses
– unless a crime was being committed. However, one of the first laws passed by
the ND government abolished the asylum, thus permitting the police to enter the
universities. Furthermore, after one year without the physical presence of students
and teaching staff in the universities, with escalating prohibitions of public
gatherings in the name of the pandemic, and without any real dialogue with the
academic community, Law 4777/2021 passed on February 11th.
Interestingly, this law was not introduced
by the Minister of Education and Religions alone, but together with the
Minister of Citizen Protection. The collaboration of these two ministries in
educational affairs is unprecedented.
To defend Law 4777/2021, which the academic community overwhelmingly rejects, private and public mainstream media, under the control of the Mitsotakis government, orchestrated an extensive propaganda campaign. The propaganda aimed to discredit universities as centers of lawlessness, disorder, and violence, and their staff as “addicted” and trapped in this situation. In this way, university staff have been portrayed as unable to solve such problems internally, thus requiring external state intervention. A few cases of extremely violent acts against academic authorities and staff, mainly at the universities in the center of Athens, were presented as examples of a generalized situation of criminality and public danger. Also, the media disseminated false reports that the deployment of police corps independent of university administration is a common practice across Europe and the US, and that Greece is just “catching up” with the best practices of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
The
new law introduces two major changes that threaten academic freedom and university
autonomy, as well as the public character of higher education. First, it creates
a special corps of 1,030 policemen that will be installed inside the universities and authorized to patrol, arrest, and
interrogate whomever they consider to be “disturbing academic life”, a corps accountable
not to university authorities but directly to the Chief of the Greek police. Furthermore,
fences and checkpoints will be placed at the entrances of each campus, and “Centers
for the control and reception of signals and images” will be established, which
will have authorization to collect and store information that might infringe on
the data privacy of teachers, administrative employees, and students. Furthermore,
the law allows for many
disciplinary measures to be taken against students and makes teaching staff serve
in a disciplinary capacity to judge students’ acts (from plagiarism to the
organization of parties, public events, and takeovers inside the campus) and
punish them with fines that can go up to their expulsion from the university.
All of
these measures are in direct violation of the principle of university
self-government, as guaranteed by the Constitution, and have as ultimate goals
the subjugation of students and teachers to strict disciplinary measures, and
the banning of unionism and political contestation inside universities. It is also scandalous
and ironic that in such a ravaged economy, with universities suffering from
chronic underfunding, the yearly cost of this special corps will be as much as 20
million euros out of a total of about 90 million euros of yearly funding for all
the universities (while an extra 30 million euros will be spent in the first
year on control equipment). Moreover, those universities that will not accept
police in their campuses will see substantial reductions of their state funding.
The second major change introduced by the law is the application of a system of admission where a minimum of 23% of candidates will be denied entry to public universities. This measure will transfer the cost of these students’ education from the state to their families, as their exclusion will create a pool of students who will turn to private colleges. In November 2020, the same government recognized diplomas by unregulated private colleges to be equivalent to those of public universities. So those candidates who fail the criteria for public universities will be able to enter without any criteria to private colleges, if they can afford the fees. This will lead to the closure of one in every three university departments in the country, affecting mostly peripheral universities. Law 4777/2021 is to be followed in the months to come by another law that will probably replace elected university administrations with nominated ones. The new law will also likely introduce student fees and loans, and the implementation of 3-years diplomas.
The academic community has expressed strong opposition against these neoliberal and authoritarian measurements. It is not fully united, as some academics have supported, and still support, the neoliberalization of higher education over the past two decades. However, there is unanimous recognition of the need for better protection of university campuses, equipment and people – protection that should be controlled by universities and not the police. Staff unions, university councils, rectors, and other academic groups have made concrete propositions for public funding for that purpose – propositions that, unfortunately, the government has now taken into consideration. But protection is something radically different from policing, and it is the latter that provokes strong objections (NoUniPolice 2021). Despite the lockdown and the ban on rallies, thousands of students and teaching staff have demonstrated in Athens and other Greek cities since January 2021, both before and after voting on the law. Moreover, student takeovers are spreading to universities all over the country at this very moment. The law also finds no consent among the majority of elected rectors and councils of the 24 Greek universities, with few exceptions, such as the authorities of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Also, numerous university teachers and some of their unions are now planning other means to continue their struggle against the law – for example, seeking to argue in the Supreme Court that several parts of the law are unconstitutional, and exploring possibilities for political disobedience to resist the law’s implementation.
Towards a closed and authoritarian university
The measures introduced with Law 4777/2021 aim to create a closed university, both physically and socially. Physically, by installing fences and control technology that will abolish open access to the campuses. Socially, by restricting the number of students who will have access to higher education, and by transforming the university from a place of sociability and open debate into to a sterilized place where students can only pursue their individual academic and professional paths. The law will definitely not solve any of the existing problems of the universities and it will likely open an era of tension and escalating violence. The brutal police attack at the Aristotle University in February can be seen as a “rehearsal” for such a turn.
More
generally, over the past four decades, universities in Greece have been major
centers of resistance against the neoliberalisation higher education and
society, of critical thinking, and of political activism. They have been
privileged places for fostering ideas of social justice and equality. Such
critical forces are now faced with the risk of self-restraint, self-censorship,
and self-disciplining due to surveillance and the police presence inside university
campuses. The establishment of the police inside the universities transgresses
democratic principles and transcends the limit of the thinkable until now. Similarly
unthinkable until now is PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ euphemistic statement in
Parliament that, under the new law, “it
is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”. If the
state succeeds in passing the “law and order” doctrine and transforming
universities into places of fear, surveillance, and repression, while breaking
the existing social contract by curtailing the right to free public education, then
it will become easier to establish a generalized climate of terror and to
ignore social claims and opposition to further restrictions of social rights. If
this happens, when the lockdown is over, Greece will be a structurally
different country, both in terms of economy and democracy.
Aliki Angelidou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Her academic interests include economic anthropology, global economic history, anthropology of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, migration, borders and transnationalism. Currently, she carries out research on household and circular economy in post-memoranda Greece.
References
Angelidou, Aliki 2017. “Anthropology in Greece: Dynamics, Difficulties and Challenges”, in Barrera
A., Heintz M. &
A. Horolets (eds.),
Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnology in Europe:
An Intricate Institutional and
Intellectual Landscape, New York, Oxford,Berghahn Books, 250-276.
Gefou-Madianou,
Dimitra 2000. “Disciples,
Discipline and Reflection: Anthropological Encounters and Trajectories”, in M.
Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in
Accountability, Ethics and Academy. London: Routledge, EASE Series, pp.
256–78.
Initiative of Academics No Police on Campus 2021. “Greek Universities
Targeted, Democracy under Threat The New Bill on Higher Education Threatens
Academic Freedom and Brings Police Rule on Campuses”, online
petition.
Image 1: Online Petition, “Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS” (Screenshot by FocaalBlog editors, this petition has our undivided support, we call on our readers to join us as signatories)
Cite as: Angelidou, Aliki. 2021. “’It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy’: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn.” FocaalBlog, 18 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/18/aliki-angelidou-it-is-not-the-police-that-enters-the-universities-but-democracy-greek-universities-as-spearhead-of-an-authoritarian-turn/
Sacrifice zones—abandoned, economically shattered places, with growing social and health problems—are spreading in historically white rural areas and small towns across the United States. Rural decline, rooted in economic restructuring and financialization, exacerbates racial resentment and fosters regressive authoritarian politics.
