Tag: globalisation

Opening Views against the Closure of the World

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in contemporary socio-economic situation, publications, social quality, works, projects, publications

New Publication, open for preorders

Opening Views against the Closure of the World

Author: Peter Herrmann (EURISPES – Istituto di Studi Politici, Economici e Sociali, Rome, Italy, and others)

Book Description: 
The chapters of the present book analyze contemporary societal challenges and changes in light of the social quality approach and French regulationist thinking. This means overcoming as much as possible existing boundaries of social science in some main areas:

  • interdisciplinary approaches are important, but should be pushed beyond the mainstream concept, aiming at an integrated social science approach
  • critique of economism is important, though we should not forget that the question is not about “how much” but about what kind of economy
  • increasingly obvious is the lack of social integrity of contemporary growth policies, but less obvious is what is needed to fundamentally change the scene
  • treating globalization as a matter that goes beyond widening and deepening relations of countries and regions around the globe, seeing it as a news stage of world systems

By working along these different frontlines, the chapters take up important issues that can be found in different areas as ”growth beyond GDP”, human development”, “quality of life”, “world systems” and the like. In the end, it is about looking at the current political-economic patterns and the possibilities they entail when it comes to the claim that “another world is possible”. (Imprint: Nova)

for further information

Disappointments

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in contemporary socio-economic situation

Following up on the recent post, here is something more on the issue of the European Fortress

Press Release from Watch the Med/the Alarm Phone

On April 20, the Joint Foreign and Home Affairs Council of the EU released a ten-​point action plan outlining their response to the recent deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. Many other proposals have also been made over the last few days. We are activists who have been involved in the struggles against the European border regime for several years and who have been in touch on a daily basis with hundreds of people who have crossed the Mediterranean through Watch The Med and the Alarm Phone project. Faced with the hypocrisy of the “solutions” that have been proposed so far, we feel compelled to undermine their falsity and attempt to open up an alternative space for reflection and action.

  1. We are shocked and angered at the recent tragedies that have claimed at least 1200 lives in the Mediterranean Sea in the last week. We are shocked, although not surprised, by the unprecedented number of deaths in merely a few days. We are angered because we know that without a radical change these are just the first of many more deaths to come in 2015.
  1. We are also angered because we know that what is proposed to us as a “solution” to this unbearable situation only amounts to more of the same: violence and death. The EU has called for the reinforcement of Frontex’ Triton mission. Frontex is a migration deterrence agency and Triton has been created with the clear mandate to protect borders, not to save lives.
  1. However, even if saving lives was to be its core task, as it was the case for the military-​humanitarian operation Mare Nostrum in 2014, it is clear that this would not bring dying at sea to an end. Those who suggest a European Mare Nostrum should be reminded that even during its mission, the most grandiose rescue operation in the Mediterranean to date, more than 3.400 people died. Is this figure acceptable to the European public?
  1. Others have called for an international military operation in Libya, a naval blockade or the further enlisting of African countries for the policing of their own land borders. The history of the last 20 years in the Mediterranean shows that stepping up the militarization of migration routes is only cause to more death. Each and every time a route into Europe has been blocked by new surveillance technologies and increasing policing, migrants have not stopped arriving. They have simply been forced to take longer and more dangerous routes. The recent deaths in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean are the result of the militarization of the Gibraltar Strait, of the Canary Islands, of the land border between Greece and Turkey, and of several land borders in the Sahara. The “successes” of Frontex mean death to thousands of people.
  1. International organisations as well politicians from across the whole political spectrum have denounced smugglers as the main cause of death in the Mediterranean Sea. Several prominent politicians have compared the smuggling of migrants to the transatlantic slave trade. There seems no limit to hypocrisy: those who uphold the slave regime condemning the slave traders! We know very well that smugglers operating in the context of the Libyan civil war are often ruthless criminals. But we also know that the only reason why migrants have to resort to them is the European border regime. Smuggling networks would be history in no time if those who now die at sea could instead reach Europe legally. The visa regime that prevents them from doing so was introduced only 25 years ago.
  1. Those who have called, once again, for the creation of asylum processing centres in Northern Africa should be reminded of two examples that are the most accurate examples of what these centres would actually mean. First, the Tunisian Choucha camp managed by the UNHCR, which abandoned those who sought refuge there from the Libyan conflict. Even those who were recognized as needing international protections were left behind in the Tunisian desert, often without any other choice than trying to cross the sea. Second, the creation by Australia of offshore processing centres on remote “prison-​islands”, which is now hailed by many as a role model for Europe, only shows how hideous the forceful confinement of asylum seekers can be. These “solutions” serve only to displace the violence of the European border regime away from the eyes of Western publics.
  1. Faced with this situation, what is to be done? Comrades and friends with whom we have shared common struggles in the past years have been calling for freedom of movement as the only viable response to this situation. We too make this demand ours, as it is the only one that has managed to open up a space of political imagination in an otherwise suffocating debate. Only unconditional legal access to the EU can end the death of migrants at sea. And yet we think that a general call for the freedom of movement is not enough in the current context. We want to consider the freedom of movement not as a distant utopia but as a practice – enacted by migrants on a daily basis often at the cost of their lives — that should guide our political struggles here and now.
  1. These are the reasons why we call for the institution of a humanitarian ferry, that should travel to Libya and evacuate as many people as possible. These people should be brought to Europe and granted unconditional protection in Europe, without undergoing an asylum process which has lost its original purpose to protect and has de facto become yet another tool of exclusion.
  1. Is the idea of a ferry unrealistic? In 2011, at the height of the Libyan civil war, humanitarian ferries evacuated thousands of stranded migrants from Misrata to Bengasi, overcoming obstacles such as shelling, constant fire and sea mines. This shows that even in the current volatile situation of Libya, considering such an action is possible. Moreover, ferries would certainly be immensely cheaper than the prospect of a massive rescue mission at sea and of any military solution.
  1. The only reality we know is that any solution short of this will continue to lead to more deaths at sea. We know that no process of externalisation of asylum procedures and border control, no amount of compliance with the legal obligations to rescue, no increase in surveillance and militarization will stop the mass dying at sea. In the immediate terms, all we need is legal access and ferries. Will the EU and international agencies be ready to take these steps, or will civil society have to do it for them?

The Alarm Phone

wtm-​alarm-​phone@​ antira.​info

http:// ​www​.watchthemed​.net/​i​n​d​e​x​.​p​h​p​/​p​a​g​e​/​i​n​d​e​x​ /12
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2015/04/23/ferries-not-frontex-10-points-to-really-end-the-deaths-of-migrants-at-sea/

Comparison, differences and how do we find out where we want to go together

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, contemporary socio-economic situation, joys - what we usually take for it, Peter's Log, social quality, works, projects, publications

What comes first to your mind when you compare Berlin with Moscow?

This had been the question asked by a Dutch colleague – and my prompt reply had been something like:

How can I and why should I compare apples and a piece of furniture?

These two places are really so hugely different that any comparison must end up in misunderstandings, wrong formulations and misleading prompts.

Sure, it is about two settlements and they are located in two different nation states. But in actual fact, even these general placeholders are somewhat misleading.

From the Grundrisse we know that

[t]he concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.

It is worthwhile to think another time about this statement in the context of comparing different cities, places as diverse as Amsterdam, Berlin and Moscow.

And it is worthwhile too to briefly mention that the colleague also said during the short time we could talk about the misleading perception: not individual people make history, but complex settings and arrangements are constitutive – providing, sharing spaces within which individuals act, but even then they do not act as mere individuals, even if they are outstanding figures of history”.

Travelling to and through different cities has frequently a bit of the déjà-vu experience: one thinks one knows and is still not entirely sure. In such a case of returning to in any case large cities – even if the figures are quite different:[1]

Amsterdam

Population (municipality, May 2014; urban and metro, May 2014; Randstad, 2011)

Municipality 813.562

Density 4,908/km2 (12,710/sq mi)

Berlin

Population (December 2014)[1]

City 3,562,166

Density 4,000/km2 (10,000/sq mi)

Moscow

Population (2010 Census)

Total 11,503,501

Rank 1st

Density 4,581.24/km2 (11,865.4/sq mi)

Urban 100%

Rural 0

– the likelihood of coming to different areas is quite high. And also the likelihood of perceiving the areas, one visited before, in different ways is remarkable: with the time one can go deeper into things, can explore the details one overlooked on earlier occasions.

Leaving aside that these are so different cities, the one point springing to my mind is that these are not only spaces, settlements but histories – and as much as history does not repeat itself, histories cannot be compared. The concrete is still entailed in the generalisation.

Berlin – a city which had been the platform for an black-haired Austrian gnome to start his March to secure global rule of the “Arian race”, starting racing with tanks towards east, after conquering the submissive west.

Amsterdam, giving in and accepting the new ruler more or less like several other European countries.

Moscow, the at that time blossoming metropolis, developing its own identity, to some extent against the former zarist complement – and with this the new identity of an entirely new state.

The one still refusing the responsibility of the predecessors, refusing to pay their debts, still not completely accepting the fact that many knew about the human dramas their “government” caused in the concentration camps, while the other is still thinking about the loss of most likely nearly 30,000,000 people in the Great Patriotic War.

The one morning, while leaving the hotel to a short walk I see the wires, spanning between the large buildings, offering accommodation for so many: they remind of the efforts of the electrification and industrialisation of a country that – at the time – only recently got rid of the joke of the zarist regime, standing against the old metropolis: in the one case the administrative centre of a “hegemone of the past and the future”: the old Prussian power, aiming on gaining superiority in and over Europe, and the claimant of the thousand year long empire. In the other case the old trade metropolis, which surely lost its glamour of the colonial times (sure, Auke know well about some strange places that still do exist as witnesses of those times…., though it managed well to rescue part of it and translate it into some kind of sedated modernity in the most amiable way.

This kind of light and likely drowsiness (I know, a pardox)  is surely difficult to find in a city with a population of over ten million, though the walk along the river, or large lake in the middle of the still dormant city is most pleasant, and the large alleys offer some compensation for the otherwise densely populated “sleep-cities”.

Marks of orientation – it is always catching my consideration how we actually find the ways – something that surely changed fundamentally, first with the common use of street maps, then again with the common use of the GPS. But it changed also in another way: the marks are something that is remarkable.

Looking at Berlin, it is surely relevant that it is (as nearly all larger conglomerations) a merger of different villages but also a place that still carries its marks from having been a city of two countries.

And Amsterdam is still characterised by the way it integrated socio-natural conditions (the channels) and the social hierarchy (going from the central “Single” over the “Herengracht”, positioning the Keizer to the margin, and the Princes even further out – the latter surely a specific form of translating the words:

give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God

– the nobility left in some memorable places of history, and god outside …

Moscow then, somewhat torn between the two dimensions: height and width: the height needed for the permanently increasing population and the width not least accepted to maintain some spaces.

These spaces consist of some of the old areas, and of the parks and park-like areas as for instance the one I mentioned a bit earlier or the area around the Moscow State University Lomonosov , reaching to sparrows hill – I remember well the time of an earlier stay when I lived in the old Lomonosov building and enjoyed the area every morning while I had been jogging.

There is something special when it comes to Moscow though it may be special just for me as some years ago, when I had been collected from the university building, from where we walked to the All Russian Centre, the driver said:

Things changed so much. Several years ago we could find our orientation by holding on to enterprises, chimneys, industrial sites – today these orientation marks are shopping centres, usually all with the same names of international chain stores …

And there is something else I am getting aware every day now, when leaving the metro on the way home at the Домодедовская – it has its name from Domodedovo International Airport. And there is a metal relief pointing this out … – and there are huge posters, telling us what to buy, which shops are close …, hardly allowing us to remain attentive for the reliefs …

We do not recognise many of these areas on the first occasion – not least after a long drive from the airport which directs our thinking towards seize, i.e. quantity, but time allows switching to quality: the small details we usually miss while dashing across airports, over the highways and along the alleys, the quantity that occurs with “pure reproduction”, which seems to be more a matter of being reproduced, pushing aside considerations about where we want to move and how we actively produce, even if this is, when seen relationally, also very much a matter of reproduction.

The Auchan, media market, Electrolux and bmercuditoydas – BMW, MERCEDES, AUDI, TOYOTA, SCODA, MERCEDES, AUDI, TOYOTA, SCODA – gained already dominance.

***************

TV in the background, a song, or better to say a singers-competition. May be it is politically incorrect saying children instead of young women: girls singing about love and longing, though it is more about sexual lust and seduction, staring in the spotlight – though thoroughly enjoying it, incited by members of the jury and parents to compete – who is the best … . At least many of the songs are in English language – does it matter? Or in which way does it matter – indicating to be part of … well …

… another world. It is not least a bit about redefining participation: the socialisation of hyper-individualism: staring, competing, so different to singing in a choir, something many cannot do as it conflicts with the schedules of work, with the requirements of competitive thinking that harshly stands against just the joyfulness of both, the “aimless” singing of people gathering to express themselves with others, and the obliviousness of enjoying oneself as somebody who is content, content while feeling being part of the universe, not in a metaphysical sense, but in the understanding of appropriateness of the old fisherman who resisted accepting the Irony of the Rat as unavoidable rule of life.

The TV had been silent since some time – we had been sitting around the fire, looking up to the stars. Three people, academics, usually talking about development economics, globalisation and labour market policies – and frequently forgetting that all this is so much about such details as the joy of singing in a choir and gaining for oneself and for others – even if it is possibly “only” the gain of not burning out, not being tempted by drugs, not feeling alone when it comes to the point of needing somebody …, and not being open to fundamentalisms that comes along under so many different headscarves and varieties of temptations, replacing apples by Easter eggs and playing other tricks …

***************

– Surely, all this is something that, being stated with the full awareness of the ambiguity, especially on such a day where we celebrate here orthodox Easter and Gagarin-day ….

***************

Part of the points are elaborated in notes written in preparation of presentations here in Moscow at the Plekhanov university in cooperation with the All Russian Center for the analysis of Living Standards

  • Employment Crisis or Crisis of Employment
  • Eurasia – Potentials for taking a strategic role for sustainable sociability

 ******************************

[1]            In the following taken from Wikipedia – 12/04/15

Opening Views against the Closure of the World

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in works, projects, publications

Just doing there final work – proof reading etc. – A book under the title

Opening Views against the Closure of the World

should then soon ready for publication at http://www.wvfs.at. Some overview in the following. 

The contributions collected in this volumes are all centred around challenges we face globally – and saying globally means that they are taking such perspective seriously as one that “concerns us all”. Too often social science remains explicitly limited by understanding the process of globalisation as a matter of (i) maintaining the old developmentalist perspective, presuming the superiority of what is today called global north or (ii) as suspicious, i.e. defending in one way or another indigeneity. A possible further move consists in (iii) claiming some form of merger, the caminare insieme, for which the present pope can claim some fame, is then reduced on some moral statement, translated into demanding collective rationality against greed and the appealing to the mercy, facing the invisible hand with the negative effects of pure individualism. There remains a huge gap here and there – when it comes to developing an understanding that goes fundamentally further, actually seriously discussing the autochthonous mindsests. And saying this, it is also necessary to remind ourselves that these concepts are anything else than autochthonous. History calls for caution – and though the contributions cannot claim the present a radical rupture in thinking, it is at least an attempt to push considerations further into that direction. In this way the book also tries to give space for questions instead of coming up with answers.

TOC (page numbers provisional)

Preface and Acknowledgements……….. 6

Research on demand Academics between self-consciousness and self-chastisement……….. 14

European Policies of Social Inclusion – Fatality of Good-Will……….. 32

Capability and Social Policy – The Search for Social Quality……….. 63

Social Quality – Social Anomie. Two Sides of one Coin?……….. 88

World Systems Theory and Theory of Social Quality as Proposal for a Methodology for Rethinking a World in Crisis and Transformation……….. 105

Environmental Democracy – New Challenges……….. 133

Crisis and no end !?……….. 152

globalisation in the small

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in contemporary socio-economic situation, quotes, thoughts on life and its philosophy

There are different sides to globalisation, and different ways to look at it and do the maths – and some may be easily overlooked:

Doubtless all small towns, in all countries, in all ages, Carol admitted, have a tendency to be not only dull but mean, bitter, infested with curiosity. In France or Tibet quite as much as in Wyoming or Indiana these timidities are inherent in isolation.

But a village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius.

Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors.

And such a society, such a nation, is determined by the Gopher Prairies. The greatest manufacturer is but a busier Sam Clark, and all the rotund senators and presidents are village lawyers and bankers grown nine feet tall.

Though a Gopher Prairie regards itself as a part of the Great World, compares itself to Rome and Vienna, it will not acquire the scientific spirit, the international mind, which would make it great. It picks at information which will visibly procure money or social distinction. Its conception of a community ideal is not the grand manner, the noble aspiration, the fine aristocratic pride, but cheap labor for the kitchen and rapid increase in the price of land. It plays at cards on greasy oil-cloth in a shanty, and does not know that prophets are walking and talking on the terrace.

If all the provincials were as kindly as Champ Perry and Sam Clark there would be no reason for desiring the town to seek great traditions. It is the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, the Jackson Elders, small busy men crushingly powerful in their common purpose, viewing themselves as men of the world but keeping themselves men of the cash-register and the comic film, who make the town a sterile oligarchy.

VII

She had sought to be definite in analyzing the surface ugliness of the Gopher Prairies. She asserted that it is a matter of universal similarity; of flimsiness of construction, so that the towns resemble frontier camps; of neglect of natural advantages, so that the hills are covered with brush, the lakes shut off by railroads, and the creeks lined with dumping-grounds; of depressing sobriety of color; rectangularity of buildings; and excessive breadth and straightness of the gashed streets, so that there is no escape from gales and from sight of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the loiterer along, while the breadth which would be majestic in an avenue of palaces makes the low shabby shops creeping down the typical Main Street the more mean by comparison.

The universal similarity—that is the physical expression of the philosophy of dull safety. Nine-tenths of the American towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to another. Always, west of Pittsburg, and often, east of it, there is the same lumber yard, the same railroad station, the same Ford garage, the same creamery, the same box-like houses and two-story shops. The new, more conscious houses are alike in their very attempts at diversity: the same bungalows, the same square houses of stucco or tapestry brick. The shops show the same standardized, nationally advertised wares; the newspapers of sections three thousand miles apart have the same “syndicated features”; the boy in Arkansas displays just such a flamboyant ready-made suit as is found on just such a boy in Delaware, both of them iterate the same slang phrases from the same sporting-pages, and if one of them is in college and the other is a barber, no one may surmise which is which.

From: Sinclair Lewis, 1920: Main Street

Reality – perversion, reversion, revision 

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in contemporary socio-economic situation, general, thoughts on life and its philosophy

The discussion on privatisation, retrenchment, alteration, economisation, marketisation etc. is not new – nor is it a matter that can be easily access when looking at the figures. Actually we find contradicting figures, and it is frequently emphasised that the problem is not “less spending” but diverted spending.

Looking at the figures, and concisely analysing them as matter of facts and trends, is surely of utmost importance, finally we are talking about the future, and that means not least that we are talking about out children.

Apropos children: European societies claim, though in different ways, to be especially child friendly: indeed, nostri carini bambini; Children, our future; and even the notion that we only borrowed the world from them …
Here, social care and social security is also a crucially important issue. And as much as the state is still often represented in the figure of Leviathan, the Vater Staat (state as father), Uncle Sam, the personification of a sovereign that actually can only claim his sovereignty from the people as legal sovereigns, there is of course also a mother to all of this, and of course: the caring part, looking after the children and not only considering the blunt material aspects but reaching out with her TLC – the tender loving care.
Part of it is in Finland the Edelliset äitiyspakkaukset, i.e. Maternity Package. It is part of the Finish policy, nowadays seen as part of the national culture and surely there are many things that can be discussed (including the fact that the 2014 package contains condoms which may be misunderstood in this context). More serious, the point that it had been known for a ling time as MATERNITY package, instead of being seen as package for the children or Parental Package …
Now to globalisation: This package had never been free. Actually (terms and conditions apply) people could chose this package or a cash payment of 140 Euro, and trusting the figures, approximately 95 % chose the good value for money instead of the money pure – as said: there is the “cultural dimension” to it.
Anyway, that it is much appreciated can also be seen in the initiative by three young fathers: namely Anssi, dad of Otso, Anton, dad of Thilde and Max and Heikki, dad of Ronja and Joel.
Oh yes, we see, Finish men can also develop this TLC-attitudem, act as “mother state” to its citizens. And they offer it globally:

GET YOURS FOR $459 (limited time pre-order offer)

Much can be said – among the many things ultimately: there is a serpent creeping around Europe, filling every pore with he toxic venom of consumerism, commodification of everything … — and it will only be stopped by reviving the specter that had been haunting Europe in the middle of the middle of the 1800s.

mutation effects of globalisation?

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in contemporary socio-economic situation, general, thoughts on life and its philosophy

Have a look at this, the nice and vivid young people, enjoying life and living …, shown in this SKYPE ad, I recently received – and then make a rough count of country/region of origin.

I do not really know the target group of this ad in terms of country or region – but I remember that on a recent visit to China I had been somewhat surprised when looking at the large poster ads: many, especially female “exhibits” looked very “Western”.
Nothing wrong with looking Western or looking Eastern, still remarkable how globalisation apparently changes even how we look and who we are (supposed to be) , isn’t it?