Civic Liberties Research Articles

Pirates on the Liquid Shores of Liberal Democracy: Movement Frames of European Pirate Parties

In this article, the movement frames of European Pirate Parties are analysed through a thematic analysis of texts relating to the Pirate Parties and transcripts of semi-structured interviews with representatives of Pirate Parties across three European countries—Germany, the United Kingdom and Belgium. At the level of the diagnostic and prognostic frames the Pirate Parties address contentious issues and discourses about civic liberties, privacy and access to knowledge in a digital era, but they also critique liberal representative democracy as such, which they argue needs to incorporate delegative models of democracy. In addition to this, a pro-social frame is presented emphasising free education and a basic income. In order to achieve these aims the Pirate Parties develop a distinct collective identity and foster political agency through activism and by participating in electoral politics. Lack of electoral appeal and low levels of membership is some countries, inability to deal with conflicts and an unwillingness to clarify the ideological position and the precise relationship between a libertarian freedom-related agenda and a social justice agenda represent challenges for the Pirate Parties.

Democracy in Post-Invasion Iraq

In the decade since the U.S. invasion in 2003, procedural democracy was established in Iraq. A new constitution was adopted, creating a federal parliamentary democratic system, and multiple rounds of national and provincial elections have been held. The existence of institutional forms of democracy, however, is not enough to ensure the quality of democracy. This paper evaluates the quality of Iraqi democracy, using indicators ranging from corruption levels to living conditions and political freedoms. Compared to the era of Ba’ath Party rule under Saddam Hussein, Iraqis enjoy greater civic and political liberties and multiple political factions compete for power. However, the democracy that has emerged is limited in significant ways, and it has not brought peace and prosperity to much of the population.

Sailing Along New Cleavages: Understanding the Electoral Success of the Swedish Pirate Party in the European Parliament Election 2009

In the Swedish European Parliamentary Election in 2009 the Swedish Pirate Party took two seats in the parliament and 7.1 per cent of the Swedish voters’ support. The party was absolutely new and the usual concept of populist parties does not seem to fit the Pirate movement very well. It is anti-authoritarian and aims to enhance civic liberties for youngsters, to give open access to culture through the internet and to improve personal integrity and human dignity on the World Wide Web. Transnationalism is one foundation for the party but another is a value foundation of universal human rights and individual freedom, disregarding national borders. This article is an investigation of the Pirate Party as a possible new party family, driven by new sociopolitical cleavages in the modern information society.

Rawls and the Forgotten Figure of the Most Advantaged: In Defense of Reasonable Envy toward the Superrich

This article aims to correct the widespread imbalance in contemporary liberal thought, which makes explicit appeal to the “least advantaged” without parallel attention to the “most advantaged” as a distinct group in need of regulatory attention. Rawls's influential theory of justice is perhaps the paradigmatic instance of this imbalance, but I show how a Rawlsian framework nonetheless provides three justifications for why implementers of liberal justice—above all, legislators—should regulate the economic prospects of a polity's richest citizens: as a heuristic device for ensuring that a system of inequalities not reach a level at which inequalities cease being mutually advantageous, as protection against excessive inequalities threatening civic liberty, and as redress for a liberal society's inability to fully realize fair equality of opportunity with regard to education and politics. Against the objection that such arguments amount to a defense of envy, insofar as they support policies that in certain instances impose economic costs on the most advantaged with negative or neutral economic impact on the rest of society, I attend to Rawls's often overlooked distinction between irrational and reasonable forms of envy, showing that any envy involved in the proposed regulation of the most advantaged falls within this latter category.

The Arab Spring, Digital Youth and the Challenges of Education and Work

Aided by new media and digital communication tools, youths have helped foster a democratic ethos throughout North Africa and the Middle East regions. The internet generation has a very firm grip on rights, civic liberties and democratic accountability and has well honed the art of single issue campaigns using new media. This paper argues that, for the most part, youth movements using new media platforms exhibit great adeptness at articulating a way forward for civic and political rights, and are on more shaky footing when it comes to economic rights, fair labour practices, and distributive justice. It explores possibilities for economic and democratic renewal in this context.

Multicultural Religious Education in a Trinitarian Perspective

Multiculturalism is now confronted with pressures of maintaining a balance between unity and diversity on the one hand and building a global civic culture aiming at civic equality, liberty, toleration, and recognition in a global, transnational community on the other hand. With these difficulties, this article attempts to provide a model of multicultural education in a Trinitarian perspective in which students and teachers mirror the triune divine community and participate in communion, allowing them to move beyond the dichotomy between unity and diversity and universalization and pluralization toward a shared understanding and promote peaceful coexistence among global societies with adequate theological and educational principles. This article, based on the doctrine of Trinity and grounded in an awareness and analysis of the realities of social situations, suggests positive hope for God's future and a concrete model for human society in which equality, openness, and relationality are closely related as they achieve mutual respect, especially in teaching and learning process.

The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City (review)

Reviewed by: The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City John J. McGavin Margaret Rogerson, ed. The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2011. Pp. xiv, 248. £50.00; $90.00. Margaret Rogerson, the editor of this valuable collection of academic, critical, and practice-based studies, has been a leader in the field of medieval drama for many years now. With Alexandra F. Johnston, she edited the inaugural Records of Early English Drama on York (1979), and she returns to the York plays here in a volume revealing the still-vibrant life of a topic that has held the attention of different academic and non-academic communities alike over many years. In an expertly managed set of papers, Rogerson makes a virtue of the eclecticism that now more than ever characterizes the field, taking the reader from manuscripts to the material exigencies of wagons; from the unavoidable cognitive blending of reality and fiction in the spectator’s mind to the dutiful piety of late medieval believers imagining the events of Christ’s Passion; from the complex communities that originally produced the plays to the varied goals of those who now perform them half a millennium later. The voices that join company in this collection come from many different directions—from the academy, theater, heritage, festival culture, church, engineering, guildry—and from Australia, Canada, the UK, the United States, and Israel. The interpretative matrix of the volume is correspondingly wide, so that cognitive theory rubs shoulders with medievalism in one essay (Jill Stevenson), and, in Rogerson’s own academic contribution (in addition to an excellent introduction), Stanislavski’s demands on actors prove less alien to the world of medieval drama than previously thought, if linked [End Page 426] to those of affective piety. Mike Tyler’s essay joins traditional literary criticism with Edgar Schein’s theory of cultural organizations to explain the effect of familial forces in the Noah play. Pamela M. King, taking a line that archeologists will recognize, valuably nuances the festivity of medieval confraternity by turning to a cognate contemporary event, the Siena Palio. There are also tightly analyzed accounts of document, context, and institution included here. For example, in a chapter that will be required reading for anyone interested in the documentary bases for interpreting the public scene, Richard Beadle expertly locates the construction of the York Register in a Ricardian political setting, while Sheila K. Christie takes on definitions of genre, and guild and civic jurisdiction, impressively mapping the history of the Masons’ changing involvement in York plays onto their aspirations and ability to work out of religious rather than civic liberties. Rogerson is one of those thoughtful editors who does not balk at providing an index for an essay collection, and so one can find there Artaud and Augustine; the Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament and Merleau-Ponty, and many other intriguing entries to demonstrate the uniquely varied hold of medieval drama on the modern imagination. Literally and symbolically at the center of the volume is a set of papers (some in the form of edited testimonies) from thirteen practitioners addressing the theoretical, physical, and dramatic challenges of putting such plays before a public that might or might not share the faith of those who originally wrote and watched them. These varied and thought-provoking accounts introduce the reader to the practical problems of dealing with physical performance: space, timetabling, nesting owls, alien language, commerce, health and safety, and licensing; but they also engage with wider cultural issues such as how the “live energies” (Gweno Williams) or the “tension and contrast” (Alan Heaven) necessary to drama can be achieved for the modern audience, and what theories of drama or verse-speaking, and what kinds of music, might promote that theatrical success. Drawing both on theory and a particular production in Tel Aviv, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi bridges the worlds of interpretation through textual analysis and performance in a study of how the York Crucifixion text makes explicit the practical necessities of production, bearing witness to the aesthetic and diachronic priority of staged activity over the written account, and to “gestural, pretextual theatricality as a characteristic of the York...

Contested Secularities: Religious Minorities and Secular Progressivism in the Netherlands

In this paper, we propose to analyze ideas, practices, institutionalizations, and public controversies related to the religious-secular divide in the Netherlands in terms of contested formations of secularity. We introduce the concept of ‘multiple secularities’ and use it as an interpretive device for an analysis of the historical emergence and transformation of Dutch secularity. After that we show how historically shaped notions of secularity operated within the parliamentary debates on blasphemy, freedom of speech, and religion that unfolded between 2004 and 2009. We argue that long-standing notions of secularity as a means for balancing religious and ideological diversity are challenged by and give way to a new preponderance of secular progressivism. By secular progressivism we mean the idea that within an ‘immanent frame’ in which the secular ontologically embodies the ‘real’ and constitutes the ground for normative universalism, religion turns into a historical vestige whose protection must be subordinated to universalistic notions of civic liberties. However, this development is still contested in the Netherlands.

CAPITALISM IN THE CLASSICAL AND HIGH LIBERAL TRADITIONS

AbstractLiberalism generally holds that legitimate political power is limited and is to be impartially exercised, only for the public good. Liberals accordingly assign political priority to maintaining certain basic liberties and equality of opportunities; they advocate an essential role for markets in economic activity, and they recognize government's crucial role in correcting market breakdowns and providing public goods. Classical liberalism and what I call “the high liberal tradition” are two main branches of liberalism. Classical liberalism evolved from the works of Adam Smith and the classical utilitarian economists; its major 20th century representatives include Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The high liberal tradition developed from John Stuart Mill's works, and its major philosophical representatives in the 20th century are John Dewey and, later, John Rawls. This paper discusses the main distinguishing features of the classical and the high liberal traditions and their respective positions regarding capitalism as an economic and social system. Classical liberals, unlike high liberals, regard economic liberties and rights of private property in productive resources to be nearly as important as basic liberties. They conceive of equality of opportunity in more formal terms, and regard capitalist markets and the price system as essential not only to the allocation of production resources, but also as the fundamental criterion for the just distribution of income, wealth, and economic powers. High liberals, by contrast, regard the economic liberties as subordinate to the exercise of personal and civic liberties. They are prepared to regulate and restrict economic liberties to achieve greater equality of opportunities, reduce inequalities of economic powers, and promote a broader conception of the public good. And while high liberals endorse markets and the price system as essential to allocation of productive resources, they do not regard markets as the fundamental criterion for assessing just distributions of income, wealth, and economic powers and positions of responsibility. The paper concludes with some reflections upon the essential role that dissimilar conceptions of persons and society play in grounding the different positions on economic justice that classical and high liberals advocate.

The hegemonic copyright regime vs the sharing copyright users of music?

In this commentary the increasing discrepancy between the emerging participatory networked culture and the hegemonic copyright and intellectual property regime is contextualised and subsequently problematised. While this is a feature and growing conflict for every form of authored work – news, films, books, academic work, photography, the focus here is on music and more in particular on the sharing of music. Sharing music is not a new phenomenon, but current copyright users share music with weak peers in addition to strong peers which has taken sharing to a whole different level reminiscent of a gift-culture, but with less need for reciprocity. Music audiences attribute less value to a digital product than to an artefact such as a CD or vinyl record. The reaction of the music industry to these phenomena has been hostile up until now, criminalising the copyright user and lobbying for the close monitoring of the online behaviour of all internet users. However, while the industry foregrounds its potential losses based on the number of downloads, as well as the difficulties this provokes for young beginning artists, others are pointing towards the societal benefits of worldwide free access to such a wide variety of music. Furthermore, several counter-voices in the copyright debate have emerged, from copyleft to copyriot and more and more artists mainstream and alternative are engaging fully with the participatory culture. In this commentary an argument is developed in favour of the music industry embracing this participatory networked culture rather than take us back to the future of 1984. Democracy and civic liberties are more important than the corporate interests of a few.

Participation and Rights in Athenian Democracy: A Habermasian Approach

This article analyzes the actual interaction of private and public immunities in ancient Athens, and argues that ancient democracy echoed to a greater extent than traditionally assumed the general dynamics and normative foundations of deliberative democracy. Without denying the important differences that distinguish ancient democratic Athens from modern democracy, I analyze the Athenian situation in light of Habermas's theory of deliberation, and argue that civic and individual liberties in Athens were democracy-enabling because they undergirded the exercise of collective political power. In Athens, the considerable respect accorded to the rule of law (as distinct from majority rule), legitimated private autonomy and created the circumstances that made collective self-government possible. Thus, this article contradicts the dichotomous approach to liberty held by some of the most prominent critics of Athens such as Isaiah Berlin and Benjamin Constant.

Racionalismo y constitucionalismo en Hispanoamérica. Hipótesis y tesis sobre la formación, el desarrollo y la crisis del constitucionalismo en el mundo hispánico

The core matter the article stands is that the contemporary crisis of the constitutionalism in general and the specific case of the Hispanic American constitutionalism, demands a critical study of its formation and development. This assumption leds the authors to oppose the typical organizational model of the constitutional rationalism to the concrete historic constitution of the Spains, and to compare them through the ideas of order and organization, civic liberties and human rights, societal plurality and pluralism, public religiosity and State laicism, decentralization and power concentration. The article finally suggests that the dichotomy between the public and the private, the transformation of political representation into the Party State, the strengthening of the State linked to nationalism and the lost of the social autonomy because the State sovereignty, can be explained because of the success of the legal and political positivism.

Jewish Traveling Cultures and the Competing Visions of Modernity

During the nineteenth century, Jews in the German lands received, in exchange for their religious, cultural, and political transformation, civic liberties. Viewing the national as the realm of cultural interaction, production, and contestation has underlined the tortuous and conflicted process of German Jews' integration. Yet, at the dawn of modernity, Jewish communities in Germany grew out of temporal and spatial networks that the emerging nation-state absorbed only in a very limited fashion. As Stuart Hall has observed, for diasporic communities, memories about the past homeland and the interaction between overlapping communities continued to have a decisive impact upon their formation and maintenance. Indeed, the still largely unexplored German Jewish traveling culture acquired a new importance during the first decades of the twentieth century and formed a cultural practice that involved transcending cultural, political, and national boundaries.

In search of true monarchy: Montesquieu, Speranskii, Karamzin and the politics of reform in early nineteenth-century Russia

From the early eighteenth century, Russian autocracy derived its legitimacy in part from the policy of enlightened reform in accordance with the principles of Western political theory. An increasing engagement of the representatives of the Russian elites with the same notions towards the beginning of the nineteenth century led them to formulate critiques of Russia's recent historical development and its contemporary political system. This article examines how the reformer Mikhail Speranskii used Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws in order to advocate constitutional limitations on autocracy, while the official historiographer Nikolai Karamzin used the same source in order to demonstrate the inapplicability of constitutionalism for the Russian case. Correlation between civic and political liberty, the definition of the monarchy and nobility as well as the right principles of legislation constitute the basic dimensions of a comparison that reveals a greater difference between the two authors than hitherto assumed. It also reveals Speranskii's commitment to the ideal of constitutional monarchy that puts into question the earlier view of him as the statesman who sought to achieve the ideal of Rechtsstaat through rationalized bureaucratic absolutism.

Civic Obligation and Individual Liberty in Ancient Athens (Oxford Classical Monographs) by Peter Liddel

Civic Obligation and Individual Liberty in Ancient Athens (Oxford Classical Monographs) by Peter Liddel

Introduction: urban stability and civic liberties

One of the most widespread stereotypes about modern urban life claims that it is more dangerous and crime-ridden than life in the country. Journalists use the evidence of delinquency-rates in big cities to argue for the presence of contemporary crime waves. The police apply new methods of crime prevention such as the so-called ‘zero tolerance’ strategy first in large metropolises. The tabloid press detects ‘murder capitals’. The film industry loves scenes from urban life in their thrillers and we love to watch them. Evidence used in the popular press seems to prove an almost natural link between urban life and crime. This connection, however, is not a contemporary phenomenon. In his famous Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers Henry Fielding described the streets of London in 1751 as places of crime and insecurity. Archives of towns and cities are full of court proceedings and criminal records dating from the late middle ages, when town magistrates started to take measures against so-called delinquency – a contemporary legal term. Violence, in particular, seems to have been endemic in towns and cities. It could be tempting, therefore, to conclude that the link between urban life and crime is self-evident, if not to say timeless. However, historical statutes and town records can also be read in a rather different way. In both normative sources and court proceedings we can discern a clear will to ensure peace and stability in towns and cities. Without this will, our sources would simply not exist, for crime and conflict would have gone by unnoticed and unrecorded.

In defence of corporate liberties: early modern guilds and the problem of illicit artisan work

This article analyses different aspects of illicit artisan work, especially in early modern Lübeck. It was a significant political problem especially for the guilds, because in their view it was a severe encroachment on their corporate liberties. In particular, the social control of clandestine artisans was a controversial issue: while the guilds regarded the right to carry out visitations as a central part of their privileges, this practice clashed with other civic liberties for example the protection of the ‘house-peace’ (Hausfriede).

Shelley's Cosmopolitan "Discourse": Ancient Greek Manners and Modern Liberty

When he headed for Italy in spring, 1818, Percy Shelley left behind at Marlow life-sized plaster casts of Belvedere Apollo and Medici Venus which had presided over his reading of Plato and his writing of Laon and Cythna (MWS Letters 1: 38, 38n and White 1.505). Reading A. W. Von Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature on way to Italy, a work that describes Greek classical drama as fundamentally analogous to sculpture, he anticipated a less bookish, more direct encounter with sculpture and architecture of classical civilizations (MWS J 16-21, march 1818). Like his modern Greek protagonists in Laon and Cythna, he sought to regenerate from Mediterranean culture material ruins of a classical Greek of civic liberty. Halting for summer in cool retreat of Bagni di Lucca, however, Shelley continued to analyze Greek culture through its texts--first working on a translation of Plato's Symposium and then, in late July, drafting his second try at an introduction to dialogue (Weinberg 21; Jones, xiii). This essay, which he titled on Manners of Antient Greeks, opens a cosmopolitan defense of classical Athenian manners in love--that is, of their practice of homoeroticism. Homophobia had blocked modern British readers from accepting Plato's portrayal of love between men as a desire for ideal beauty & equal to that in Phidias' and Praxiteles' sculpture. In this essay, then, Shelley attempts a sympathetic explanation of that difference in sexual orientation; and he mediates that explanation through an appeal to beautiful forms of sculpted human figure. Yet, as he works through drafts of essay in two different notebooks, his argument becomes a different sort of cosmopolitanism, one that would in his view be more inclusive and egalitarian. For Greek homoeroticism, he argues, mars otherwise perfect society of ancient Greece because it excludes a heterosexuality based upon intellectual and civic liberty of women. (1) The mediating, persuasive form of his argument is loveliness--the desirable beauty--of human form. Shelley begins drafting this preface in a small notebook (Bod. MS. Shelley adds. e. 11) just after fragment On Love. In that essay, which Donald Reiman and Steven Jones suggest was his first try at writing an introduction to Symposium translation (Jones xiv, xx n. 8; Reiman, SC VI, 638-47), he analyzes idea of epipsyche or mental projection of an version of self as an object of desire. Having explored consequences of pursuing such an ambiguous in Alasto, his reading of Phaedrus on August 4-5 would have grounded this concept more firmly in Athenian culture (MWS Journal 217-18; Halperin, Diotima 269, citing Phaedrus 255c-e). Following On Love in notebook, Discourse also associates loveliness with an idealizing image-making by lover. Though pages of these drafts include scarcely any of his characteristic visual sketches, his verbal text immediately evokes this visuality, first, with graphically expressive title, written with a flourish, and then with content. Shelley opens his Discourse by asking, What was combination of moral & political circumstances which produced [unc] unparallelled a progress ... in literature & and why it so soon recieved a check are problems left to ... posterity to wonder over, as the ruins of a fine statue obscurely suggest to us grandeur & perfection of whole (17-18). This powerful simile of sculpture as bridging time even in its ruined state leads into a consideration of original and interdependent grandeur of all arts practiced in classical Greece. Though little evidence of their painting remains except for verbal description, Their sculptures are such as we in our presumption assume to be models of truth & beauty & ^to which with all no artist of modern times can produce anything com forms in any degree comparable (18). …

Compulsory Party Democracy

Political parties in Finland deviate from the Scandinavian standard, as they are highly controlled by laws and decrees. Regulation and control have a negative connotation in Scandinavia because they are seen as associated with state interference, in opposition to the corner-stones of civic liberty. Organization theories support the negative conceptions, as publicly controlled organizations are considered more centralized and less open to membership influence. According to these theories, this tendency is most prominent in large and/or important parties. However, the present study shows that there is a wide variety among parties in their degree of hierarchical and egalitarian rule. Party organization is affected more by age of party and common ideology than by party size and importance. The system promotes a given level of membership influence, as party democracy is compulsory.

Samhällssfärerna i historiens ljus

Societal spheres in the light of historyA division of society into statecraft, economy, and civil society is found in Plato’s Republic. Its theoretical base is the differentiated and sometimes contradictory norms for these spheres. The mainstream of European structuration is traced from the ’two swords’ - state and church - that structured western European society in the Middle Ages to the six societal spheres (or cardinal institutions) of society - the economy, government, science, religion, ethics, and art - that are visible today. Each maintain a large measure of independence (Weber’s Eigengesetzlichkeit). Each is dependent on a special type of freedom: civic liberties, free trade, academic freedom, religious toleration, the right to follow one’s conscience, artistic license. The paper pauses in this differentiation process at special junctures: the English revolution, the emergence of the Latin American and North American societies, the evolution of modem society as an underpinning of democracy, the emergence of the European Union, and the post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe.