In recent years, questions of values and cultural conflict have frequently occupied the center of public discussion on both sides of the Atlantic, and these debates have taken on varied political shadings. The German discussion of a Leitkultur and, elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, the politicized expectation that immigrant populations acquire some familiarity with the language, culture, and values of the host country have often reflected underlying conservative assumptions. In contrast, in France, the defense of republican values has been more a matter of the Left and its tradition of adamant secularism, while more generally, advocacy on women’s issues and human rights have typically tended to arise on the Left (even if, in an interesting political development, they have begun to slide toward the Right). This political indeterminacy makes the topic all the more interesting. The question of values does not lend itself to easy political categorization. A broader account is called for to explain how Western political cultures—with their own internal range of positions and hardly monolithic—face sets of pressures in the context of globalization: immigration is only one dimension of a framework that includes enhanced international trade, new global media (the internet), and global environment questions, not to mention security and energy policies, even if debates typically erupt most dramatically around immigration-related topics.
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Telos Editorial Associate Adrian Pabst comments on the standing of relations between the EU and Russia in the Moscow Times. “Makavhotera Papi?” “Where did you place your vote?” Those are the words Zimbabwean voters have heard over and over again from their Head of State and former hero, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, delivered via the lips of chain- and club-wielding militias in the dark of the night. Those are the words that have brought tears, heartbreak, and the chill of terror to many homes. And now, when it’s almost time to place yet another vote, with the question now being “What will the voters do this time?” right there in the middle of everything, the opposition contestant, Morgan Tsvangirai, has announced that he is pulling out of the election and has fled into the Dutch Embassy. To complicate matters even more, the Mugabe government has insisted that the elections will go on as planned, with Tsvangirai’s name on it. Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass. —Immanuel Kant As an act of reflexive thought, the question “What is Enlightenment?” may be its very own enlightenment. Foucault’s reiteration of Kant’s question revolves around this issue of reflexivity. Putting aside the Enlightenment’s audacious projections of the future of humankind, Foucault zeroed in on what he deemed the emblematic disposition of the modern: self-critique. In its microcosmic tenor, the question zeroes in on the problematique of the relation of the self to the self, and of the self to the other. In a Kierkegaardian sense, it proposes an ironic relationship both to one’s self and to one’s other. Sapere Audere is envisioned as a bi-directional activity. Strangely enough, as interrelated as Zimbabwean post-colonial discourse has been to western thought categories, it is rare to find a serious consideration of the problematic of self-constitution and freedom, especially regarding the emancipatory goals of the Liberation Era. In its most recent issue, British political journal Democratiya features both Telos editor Russell Berman and Telos Press author of the award-winning Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism , Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11, Matthias Küntzel. After Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Reform Treaty in last week’s referendum, the European Union is in uncharted waters and needs a complete rethink. But the early signs are that Brussels and the national capitals have not grasped the true nature of this latest crisis. Paradoxically, the No vote in Ireland is pro-European. Like the Dutch and the French in 2005 (when both rebuffed the Constitutional Treaty), the Irish support a wider political project—they just want a Union different from the one currently on offer. |
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