Cosmopolitan Ottomans

posy by Azra Raza in 3 Quarks Daily: Ussama Makdisi in aeon:


Proclamation of Greater Lebanon in 1920. Photo by Photo12/Getty

Throughout modern history, the weight of Western colonialism in the name of freedom and religious liberty has distorted the nature of the Middle East.

It has transformed the political geography of the region by creating a series of small and dependent Middle Eastern states and emirates where once stood a large interconnected Ottoman sultanate.

It introduced a new – and still unresolved – conflict between ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’ in Palestine just when a new Arab identity that included Muslim, Christian and Jewish Arabs appeared most promising.

This late – last – Western colonialism has obscured the fact that the shift from Ottoman imperial rule to post-Ottoman Arab national rule was neither natural nor inevitable. European colonialism abruptly interrupted and reshaped a vital anti-sectarian Arab cultural and political path that had begun to take shape during the last century of Ottoman rule. Despite European colonialism, the ecumenical ideal, and the dream of creating sovereign societies greater than the sum of their communal or sectarian parts, survived well into the 20th-century Arab world.

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And I, innocently, thought that it was only the Sykes-Picot line that caused a problem in the area.

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There’s A Battle Of Storytelling About Migrants And Muslims: Populists are winning

posted by S Abbas Raza in 3 Quarks Daily: Suketu Mehta in Scroll.in:

A truly thoughtful piece of writing which deserves a wide audience.


Illustration: Nithya Subramanian

These days, a great many people in the rich countries complain loudly about migration from the poor ones. But the game was rigged: First, the rich countries colonised us and stole our treasure and prevented us from building our industries. After plundering us for centuries, they left, having drawn up maps in ways that ensured permanent strife between our communities. Then they brought us to their countries as “guest workers” – as if they knew what the word “guest” meant in our cultures – but discouraged us from bringing our families.

Having built up their economies with our raw materials and our labour, they asked us to go back and were surprised when we did not. They stole our minerals and corrupted our governments so that their corporations could continue stealing our resources; they fouled the air above us and the waters around us, making our farms barren, our oceans lifeless; and they were aghast when the poorest among us arrived at their borders, not to steal but to work, to clean their shit, and to sleep with their men.

Still, they needed us. They needed us to fix their computers and heal their sick and teach their kids, so they took our best and brightest, those who had been educated at the greatest expense of the struggling states they came from, and seduced us again to work for them. Now, again they ask us not to come, desperate and starving though they have rendered us, because the richest among them need a scapegoat. This is how the game is rigged today.

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The social-democratic roots of global governance: Welfare internationalism from the 19th century to the United Nations

an article by Jens Steffek and Leonie Holthaus (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany) published in European Journal of International Relations Volume 24 Issue 1 (March 2018)

Abstract

Welfare internationalism was and still is one of the most powerful justifications for establishing international organizations. It suggests that public international organizations should cater to the material needs of individuals, rather than solve conflicts among states.

In this article, we trace the origins of welfare internationalism, challenging the dominant narrative that depicts it as a projection of the British welfare state or the American New Deal to the globe.

We show that welfare internationalism emerged earlier and combined ideational elements of very different origins. Notions of professional colonial administration migrated to the international context and dovetailed with a cosmopolitan interpretation of 19th-century public unions as caretakers of citizen interests.

Reform socialist approaches to the social question inspired domestic and international developments simultaneously, leading to the foundation of the International Labour Organization, which became a crucial venue for the promulgation of welfare internationalism.

We thus document how international theorists and practitioners of the early 20th century established a new perspective on international affairs, emanating from individuals and their needs. That perspective came to rival the traditional conception of international politics as intergovernmentalism and delivered important building blocks for the (self-)legitimation of the League of Nations and the United Nations.

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‘Regulating the Poor’: Observations on the ‘Structural Coupling’ of Welfare, Criminal Justice and the Voluntary Sector in a ‘Big Society’

an article by John J. Rodger (University of the West of Scotland) published in Social Policy & Administration (Special Issue: Crime and Social Policy) Volume 46 Issue 4 (August 2012)

Abstract

The article argues that the criminalising tendency in contemporary social policy gets to the heart of how contemporary welfare systems work today. Analyses which point to criminalizing social policy (Rodger 2008), governing through crime (Simon 2007), cultures of control (Garland 2001) and the penalisation of the poor (Wacquant 2009) all focus on what I will argue is actually the normal working of contemporary Western welfare systems.

In the face of autonomous global economic processes, and largely uncontrollable macro-economic systems which place governments in a subordinate relationship to global financial forces, governance of present-day society is increasingly focused on the management of the behavioural dispositions of populations.

In order to make these key themes and relationships visible, the article draws on Niklas Luhmann’s functional structural systems theory and his concept of structural coupling to theorise the emerging policy relationships between the welfare system, the criminal justice system and civil society.

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