The politics of cosmopolitan memory

The political promise of cosmopolitan memory

In this article, I seek to comment on a growing body of work within the field of memory studies that proposes an empirical shift in the nature of collective memory under the impact of the globalized ‘second modernity’. Collective memory is seen as transcending the traditional container of the nation-state and entering into a transnational framework. This transformation is seen as deriving from global processes characterized by the ‘deterritorialisation of politics and culture’ (Tomlinson, 1999) and an increasing ‘internal globalisation’ or ‘cosmopolitanisation’ (Beck, 2006) where global concerns become part of the everyday local experiences and moral life-worlds of people around the world. While global interdependencies linked to migration, economies, ecological and terrorist threats are seen to be animating this shared consciousness, the primary site for the development and proliferation of this transnational memory is located firmly in the representational domain of mass media and electronically based communication.

Broadly, this shift is rendered in a positive light with the imagination of a mnemonic community transcending the nation-state seen as providing the basis for post-nationalist political alliances and a more democratic and just global polity. This epochal transformation has been theorized most extensively by Levy and Sznaider, who label the new entity, ‘cosmopolitan memory’ (2002, 2005, 2010). The conceptualization of a politically progressive or empancipatory transnational memory is, however, shared by a much wider body of work articulating a ‘connective’ turn and a move away from ‘competitive’ or ‘appropriative’ frameworks of conceptualizing collective memory. The analytical emphasis is on the ‘connectivity’ of memory, facilitating ‘affiliation across lines of difference’ (Hirsch, 2012: 21). It is my contention, however, that in this connective turn there is a tendency towards over-emphasizing the utopian potentialities of the mediated ‘connectivity’ of memory and an under-emphasis on the empirical examination of the limits, contestations and inequalities characterizing the field of symbolic politics that it enables.

In the following argument, I develop this line of critique primarily in relation to the work of Levy and Sznaider on ‘cosmopolitan memory’ (2002, 2005, 2010), focusing in particular on their limited conceptualization of the media, which removes from view questions regarding the agency of political actors whose memory-work animates the global–local dynamics of cosmopolitan memory. I then provide a brief account of the transnational memory politics around the Bhopal gas disaster, focusing in particular on the work of social movement organizations (SMOs) representing the gas survivors. The account will restore focus on the work of memory agents and the dual role of the media as public arena for contestation between different memorial narratives and as players in the same contest (Neiger et al., 2011). This rendering moves beyond a structural account of the media’s transformation into a consensual global public sphere facilitating a ‘shared morality’, foregrounding instead the circulation of multiple and potentially conflicting moral frameworks.

The mechanics of cosmopolitan memory – global–local dynamics and the imagination of the media

The primary proposition in Levy and Sznaider’s concept of cosmopolitan memory is that, under the impact of globalization, collective memory can no longer be viewed as existing within the traditional framework of the nation-state but is now marked by a global–local dynamic.

Technological shifts within the media are pivotal to this transformation. It is in the shift from a nationally bound press to a global televisual news media with the ability to produce global ‘media events’ that the global–local dynamic of cosmopolitan memory is enabled. The ‘imagined community’ of the nation-state is overcome by new affiliations across national borders. The cultural representations produced by the media are seen as constituting a global script, which is locally (nationally) interpreted. Alongside the technological affordances of rapidity and reach, the other point of emphasis in Levy and Sznaider’s account of the media is its emergence as the ‘mediator of moral affairs’ (2005: 10). Drawing on Roger Silverstone’s conceptualization of the ‘mediapolis’ (2007), Levy and Sznaider picture the media as a global public sphere, as an ‘open’ political space ‘not bound to geography’, in which ‘people come together to act and speak’ and a ‘new morality is made possible’ (2010: 36). It is argued that a ‘wider shared morality’ can be formed on the basis of identification with ‘distant others’ whose experiences the media makes available. Levy and Sznaider contend that when this mediated identification is generated in relation to the experience of distant suffering, it leads to ‘political action intended to lessen the suffering of others’ (2010: 35).

Two further conditions are laid out for this political action to be made possible. First, that the ‘current suffering of others’ be made comprehensible through media representations that employ a ‘shared language’ of suffering and, second, that these representations find ‘local resonance’ (2010: 35–7). While the achievement of ‘local resonance’ remains contingent, the shared language of suffering is seen to be provided by connections drawn between the current suffering of others and the memory of the past suffering of others. This is the framework through which the cosmopolitan memory of ‘earlier catastrophes’ is seen to become ‘relevant in the present’ and ‘determine a future … articulated outside the parameters of the nation state’ (2010: 35). The centrality of media representations connecting past and current suffering to the politics of cosmopolitan memory is quite evident in this account. What is lost from view, however, is the agency of individuals and institutions in making and stabilizing these connections, and the contested field within which they do so.

While the argument about the emergence of the media both as the dominant space for the production of narratives about the past and the fashioning of a new morality is valid, Levy and Sznaider’s account assigns this morality a clear normative valence, that of a progressive cosmopolitan morality. The production of a global script imbued with a set of ‘minimum universal norms’ or ‘cosmopolitan common sense’ is presented almost as a structural property of the global media (2010: 36). The incongruence of this rendering does not come into view because the analytical emphasis in their accounts shifts away from the question of media representations to the institutionalization of the ‘cosmopolitan memory imperative’ in transnational and national-level frameworks of human rights. The local–global dynamics becomes limited to the institutional interpretations of the global human rights regime at the national level. I argue for a return of analytical focus onto questions of agency and capacity of memory agents as they mobilize the local–global dynamics in a contingent field of media representations implicating competing moral frameworks, multiple publics and political forums.

The memory of Bhopal – connections and contestations

For the purposes of this inquiry, the field of memory in Bhopal can said to be constituted by the SMOs ¹ representing the Bhopal gas survivors, the Indian state (Government of India – GoI), the transnational corporation (TNC) Union Carbide, which owned the plant in Bhopal (hereafter UC) and the Dow Chemical Company, which acquired Union Carbide in 2001 (hereafter Dow Chemical). Contesting framings of the suffering generated by the disaster mark the memory-work performed by these different actors. An out-of-court settlement of the civil liabilities arising out of the event in 1989 allowed both the government and the corporation to claim legitimacy even in face of protests by gas survivors. The need to remediate the immediate suffering of survivors was invoked to waive claims about the inadequacy of the settlement and the inability to fix legal responsibility for the disaster (see Das, 1995). The GoI’s subsequent memorial narrative has consistently emphasized a successful transition from suffering to recovery facilitated through a welfare state bureaucracy. For its part, UC recognized the suffering of the survivors only to frame the settlement as humanitarian aid rather than an acknowledgment of legal liability (Union Carbide Corporation, 2012).

The SMOs attempted to contest these appropriations in their commemoration of the disaster by prominently emphasizing the ‘continuing suffering’ of the survivors and linking it to the inadequacies of the rehabilitation bureaucracy set up by the state. The force of the symbolic communication was directed at national-level legal forums in the hope of seeking additional damages and criminal punishment of the corporation. Following the 1991 ruling of the Indian Supreme Court which upheld the earlier settlement and a 1994 decision allowing UC to sell off its assets in India, the SMOs recognized the need to seek recognition of their grievances at transnational political and legal forums. This recognition manifested itself in a shift in the remembrance of the disaster away from a primarily local (national) orientation towards a global–local dynamics beginning in the mid 1990s and achieving a mature form by in 1999, the 15th anniversary of the disaster. The shift is concretely captured in the two campaign slogans used for the 15th anniversary: ‘We all live in Bhopal’ and ‘No More Bhopals’. The suffering of the survivors was now placed not simply in relation to a national policy of neoliberalization and appeasing TNCs but rather as symptomatic of changes all across the world. More specifically, this framing was made within the ‘environmental justice’ and ‘anti-toxics’ framework. Bhopal was connected to the memory of past chemical disasters including Minamata, Three Mile Island, Love Canal, Seveso, Chernobyl, etc. Further, more specific connections were drawn with UC’s ‘long history of causing death and injury’ in their operations in United States and in India (Bhopal Group for Information and Action, 1994: 18). With the take-over by Dow Chemical these connections were extended to similar events from Dow Chemical’s past, most prominently its involvement in the production of napalm and Agent Orange used in Vietnam (Jabbar et al., 1999: 5). Since 1999, this cosmopolitan remembrance has been strengthened and forcefully deployed across a multiplicity of political forums in an attempt to push Dow Chemical into accepting liability for Bhopal. For its part, Dow Chemical’s communication strategy has been to emphasize a legal narrative of disconnection from the Bhopal disaster (Dow Chemical Company, 2009). This memorial contestation centrally implicates technologies of communication and the institutional media.

The ability of the SMOs to effect this cosmopolitan remembrance would have been impossible without shifts in communication technologies, most importantly the arrival of the internet and affordable mobile communication. The establishment of the Bhopal.net website in 1998 allowed for the first time quick and direct sharing of information by the activists in Bhopal with supporters in other locations across the world. This helped stabilize the solidarity networks, which had been hard to sustain in the past (see Zavestoski, 2009). It also gave the SMOs the ability to maintain some degree of discursive control over campaign activities at the international level. This was done through the development of a set of shared media resources including press releases, information sheets, images, logos, slogans and a repertoire of protest actions, which could be accessed by those planning solidarity actions across the world.

Recognition by the institutional news media however continued to be important and all organizers of commemorative activities were explicitly directed to engage the news media and, further, to bring any coverage to the attention of Dow Chemical officials. Press coverage of protest actions was reproduced online and rebuttals issued of stories which questioned connections being made by the campaign. Over time, the website has become a vast archive of information linked to the disaster and is often a primary source of information for journalists and other media professionals, especially those unfamiliar with the trajectory of the disaster.

Dynamics of memory politics in institutional news media

The institutional news media, including television, which Levy and Sznaider view as the primary site for the development of cosmopolitan memory follows its own institutional logic, however; its support for the legitimacy of the SMOs’ linkage of the ‘continuing suffering’ in Bhopal to Dow Chemical is contingent. Rather than facilitating identification with the suffering of the gas survivors and generating an unambiguous moral force directed against the TNCs or the GoI, representations within the news media at international, national and local levels are often marked by conflicting narratives of the past and competing moral frames. I will illustrate this using the example of a recent campaign initiated by the Bhopal SMOs demanding that the International Olympics Committee (IOC) and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) drop Dow Chemical as a sponsor for the London 2012 Olympics.

The SMOs claimed that Dow Chemical’s Olympic sponsorship ‘legitimises its abnegation of responsibility for the health and wellbeing of Bhopal, thereby perpetuating the denial of basic rights to thousands of suffering people’ (BMA, 2012). The campaign’s actions were focused in India and UK. Since the decision-making authority lay with the LOCOG, the campaign’s success depended on mobilizing support within the British media and the British public. What is significant here is that the campaign’s success in getting its narrative into the institutional news media derived not from the simple invocation of the suffering of the survivors but rather from its strategic choice of actors recognized by British political forums and the British media. A group of opposition Labour MPs, part of the ‘Labour Friends of India’, supporting issues linked with India and the UK Indian community, were lobbied for support and functioned as memory agents on behalf of the Bhopal survivors within the British media and in other forums, including the British parliament. These articulations employed the framework of corporate human rights abuse and sought to foreground the history of violations by Dow Chemical. At the same time however, the corporation’s defence was provided by high-ranking officials from the IOC, LOCOG and British government politicians, including Prime Minister David Cameron. Their refusal of the protesters’ demand legitimized the corporation’s narrative, which denied any legal liability for the disaster. Functioning not only as memory agents but also as authorities of recognition, these officials sought to detach the suffering of the survivors from the question of Dow Chemical’s liability for the clean-up of the contaminated factory site or medical rehabilitation, emphasizing that these were ‘two very different issues’ (Sebastian Coe quoted in Philar, 2011).

It is my contention, however, that this rendering of the domain of institutional media as being marked by contestation does not necessarily indicate a failure of the politics of cosmopolitan remembrance. The demand for Dow Chemical’s removal as a sponsor sought a symbolic recognition of the validity of the claims of the survivors on a global stage. While unsuccessful in its ultimate objective, the playing out of this moral contestation within the domain of the media effectively disrupted Dow Chemical’s usage of the symbolic association with the Olympics to establish its credentials as a corporation committed to sustainability.

Further, getting actors from the British political system to perform advocacy, which should’ve been rightfully performed by Indian political representatives, contributed to a shift in the framing of the issue within the Indian news media that was advantageous to the SMOs’ overall objectives. Reporting the protests by British MPs, the Indian media questioned Indian politicians’ lack of support for the SMOs’ demands: ‘British MPs are doing what Indian MPs aren’t’ (NDTV, 2011). This adoption of an aggressive and populist ‘nationalist’ frame by the Indian news media pushed the Indian state towards a more forceful public articulation of its support for the SMOs’ demand that Dow Chemical withdraw from its role as sponsor of the games. The state’s public endorsement of the narrative of Dow Chemical’s responsibility for the clean-up of the contamination in Bhopal, in turn, has potential implications for ongoing cases in Indian courts. The GoI’s acknowledgment of the SMOs’ narrative within the national public sphere also increases the activists’ legitimacy as memory agents and their capacity to make claims in the future. At the same time, however, this support by the state is contingent and does not extend to other narratives of the past extended by the SMOs, especially those that question the competence and integrity of state institutions in dealing with the disaster. ²

This account of claim-making based on the politics of cosmopolitan memory reveals the messy entanglement of moral and political discourses and authorities of recognition located at different spatial scales. What is evident is that institutional news media, while having global interconnections, are not in any way structurally predisposed to producing a global script for a global audience; they continue to be embedded in particular national contexts to differing degrees. This impacts their own role as memory agents and the degree to which they provide space for representations by other memory agents. The news media are subject to the same local–global dynamics that are seen to transform the nation-state.

Conclusion

Levy and Sznaider’s framework outlines a neat mechanics of cosmopolitan memory: a ‘global news media’ connects the ‘distant suffering of others’, generating a politics of compassion in the ‘global audience’ which forces nation-states to redress injuries or suffer delegitimization. My argument has been that this imagination of the ‘global news media’ and a politically consequential global public sphere is based on a normative and de-contextualized rendering. Employing the example of Bhopal, I attempted to restore focus on the agency of actors, including the news media. The example of Bhopal reveals memory agents employing a connective cosmopolitan resmembrance within a much messier local–global dynamic, characterized by competing moral and political claims. In relation to the wider body of work within memory studies, which seeks to emphasize the connective aspects of memory and the political possibilities of such connectivity, this argument emphasizes a concurrent examination of the political contestations that mark such mobilization. Only then will our discussions move away from a normative and aspirational rendering, and acquire explanatory rigour and critical force.