Liberalism and the problem of domination

Liberalism as recognition

Giuliano Amato in ‘Defending Rights. Between Parliaments and Courts’ discusses how constitutional courts should go about in situations where the protection of individual rights stands in conflict with cultural and religious traditions. He asks, ‘When the request of recognizing an individual right, whatever it is, raises such an intense divergence of opinions, a sort of confrontation between different collective identities inside our societies, is it for the courts to make a decision or is it for the parliaments, the bodies representing the electors and reflecting their opinions and their wills?’ Amato thinks that the courts should rule in favor of individual rights and against the majority opinion in society, if there is ‘no possible moral reason, no tradition worthy of respect’ that could be used as an argument against the rights. He makes the example of the Loving case of 1967 in the United States, in which the Court declared the ban on interracial marriages as unconstitutional. However, Amato argues that ‘when around the new right there is a harsh and unsettled dispute’, and both sides have legitimate moral concerns as in the case of assisted suicide, it is preferable that courts suspend their decision and leave it to the parliament, the most representative body in a democracy. In conclusion, when rights and traditions stand in stark opposition, and traditions have some kind of moral justification and are widely supported in society, traditions tend to trump rights.

All the question then is when traditions that violate individual rights actually have some moral justifications. With regard to the Loving case, Amato holds that the kind of racism banning interracial marriages is unjustifiable, at least in the context of the United States. But what about similar discriminations in non-Western contexts where traditions have a much heavier weight? This rises interesting questions not only for courts in these countries but also for Western NGOs operating in the region.

Subrata Mitra in ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls? A “Vulnerability-Responsibility” Model Based on Democratic and “Dignified” Transactions’ analyzes how to come to terms with the vulnerability of citizens. Is it the welfare state that compensates forms of domination and is responsible for the satisfaction of basic needs or is it the political agency of the vulnerable itself, which a democracy fosters and encourages, that empowers them? Mitra, criticizing the welfare state, sees the solution to the problem of vulnerability in ‘an active civil society and a participatory political environment’. He denies that vulnerability is an objective condition, determined by certain criteria. He contends that ‘vulnerability implies the feeling of being “weary and burdened.” This subjectivity turns it into a catch-all variable, not amenable to rigorous measurement and analysis’. Therefore, the welfare state, quite independent of the neo-liberal challenge that it is facing, must necessarily fail to address vulnerability. The welfare state has been instituted as a response to objective basic needs, largely ignoring the subjectivity of the citizens. In many respects, the growth of the non-profit sector and civil society organizations over the last decade is seen as compensating this deficit of the welfare state (Minow 2002). However, Mitra does not simply think that the welfare state needs to be complemented but rather abolished outrightly, given ‘the inadequacy of the welfare state as an appropriate institutional response to social vulnerability’. According to Mitra, ‘spreading the concepts of entitlement, enfranchisement, empowerment and participation to all the nooks and crannies of society, seeking out the vulnerable and giving them a voice that simultaneously empowers and spreads the message of accountability, is the best solution that the modern state can adopt to meet the challenge of vulnerability’.

Whereas it is easy to understand that democratic participation can increase the responsiveness of the state to vulnerability and improve political governance more in general, it remains a question to what extent the effective state mechanisms, that result from the democratic process to get to grips with vulnerability, are different from the traditional welfare state. Further questions are how permeable a democratic process based on majorities can be to the social demands of the worst-off and if vulnerability does not hamper democratic agency as such.

Seán Golden in ‘Roles and Rights in the Context of Just Governance and Just Social Mores’ is most outspokenly critical of the notion of universal individual rights. Discussing the Chinese context, Golden defends the communitarian concept of relationality against rights. Golden does not claim, as Amato, that a state would have great difficulties defending and implementing rights in a strongly communitarian society as China and therefore should compromise. More like Mitra, he contests the objectivity of rights and the ‘a priori and prescriptive approach’ that goes along with them. Golden condemns the normativity of rights ‘as a form of epistemic insouciance, a lack of concern about whether beliefs are supported by facts, or worse, a form of epistemic malevolence, an attempt to undermine knowledge, a strategy of misinformation’. When approaching China, Golden thinks that one cannot but take into account the individual’s social embeddedness and dependence on relationships with others. Rén, ‘or person in Chinese cultural constructs is not the independent individual, but involves a reciprocal relationship of linkage with another’. Moreover, human behaviour is ‘meant to correspond to key “roles,” defined by key “names” or “titles,” by keywords’. And Chinese society is organized around ‘ritual, protocol, etiquette, courtesy’ that reinforce behaviour in line with social roles. As a consequence, given that relationships ‘come to be there prior to the individual’, obligations and not rights are constitutive of society.

Golden recognizes, in line with Confucius, that it is civic discourse that determines ‘ordering’ and constitutes ‘names/terms/roles’. He states that, for Confucius, it is ‘a common social consensus that would determine a common understanding of the keywords that structure society and the social duties that had to be established’. Golden continues that ‘this meant that everyone should understand and agree upon the roles and responsibilities corresponding to keywords, such as what it means to be “human.” Trouble arose when there was a lack of consensus on the meanings of these terms/roles’. One might ask, however, if China’s current concept of ‘responsive authoritarianism’, widely accepted by Golden, is sufficiently based on a social consensus.

Runya Qiaoan maintains in ‘From Chinese Civil Society to Chinese Civil Sphere: A Conceptual Reconfiguration of the Space Between State and Society that Facilitates Intellectual Debates’ that the civil sphere could indeed be the source of a possible social consensus in China. Qiaoan is critical of civil society in China but also elsewhere. ‘Civil society is generally defined as NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and their activities in the third sector’ and ‘the NGOization of civil society around the world is reflected in the institutionalization, professionalization, and bureaucratization of civil society’. According to Qiaoan, this NGOization has largely contributed to expel ‘the public out of civil society’ and to conceive civil society in terms of social services and charity, in short as a substitute of the welfare state. Yet, as also Mitra argues, civil society is fundamentally ‘a contested space where the public fights for rights and opinions’ take place. Qiaoan individuates in the discourses and debates between the New Left, the Liberals and the New Confucians a civil sphere in China that is based on the active element of political agency currently absent in civil society. These debates contribute ‘to the consolidation of a pluralist intellectual life’ in China, providing a general value system, cultural logic and symbolic codes underlying any kind of social consensus.

Whereas Qiaoan (see also Qiaoan 2021) sees civil society partly as instrumental to state power, one could ask whether the civil sphere does not itself legitimize the state rather than putting its domination into question. The civil sphere could give rise to an appearance of individual freedom, while remaining, as a matter of fact, ‘limited to Internet sites or small-circulation intellectual works and periodicals’, and being, in the words of Shoulong Mao, more similar to a ‘storm in a teacup’ than anything else. The risk is that the civil sphere in China, without more individual liberties – and which NGOs and civil society more in general precisely tend to advocate – does not really provide citizens with the instruments to review and negotiate their supposed roles and obligations, given also the fact that civil sphere discourses are largely dominated by the more authoritarian approaches of the New Left and New Confucians.

Liberalism as non-domination

Marina Calloni in ‘Legitimizing Political Power from Below. A Reinterpretation of the Founding Myths of Thebes, Athens, and Rome as a Critique Against Private and Public Violence’, discussing gender-based violence, gets to the heart of the approach of non-domination and the limits of a human rights approach based on negative liberty alone: ‘Yet, laws can only go so far if the cultural conditions of patriarchy remain unchanged and the inherently masculinist nature of the state is not radically transformed to avoid the reproduction of repressive structures. The struggle against gender-based violence and forceful imaginaries requires, in fact, deeper symbolic and cultural transformations’. Analyzing the founding myths of Thebes, Athens and Rome, Calloni shows just how far cultural change and the revision of collective identities have to go, if societies want to achieve true justice and states be legitimate. Calloni argues that the founding myths of the three cities are ‘tied to the perpetration of sexual crimes, domestic abuses and intra-familiar homicides that bring about a destabilization of the state’, revealing the illegitimacy of its foundation. Private abuses, with its traumatic effects not only for the victims but also for the community as a whole, lay the grounds for the perpetuation of political violence and injustice, making ‘gender-based violence enacted in the family the primary cause for the delegitimization of political power’. As a consequence, in order to end gender-based violence and domination, societies have, practically, to overhaul the very roots of their cultural and religious foundations.

As Calloni recognizes, the approach of non-domination goes far beyond modern political theory in which the family still lies outside the realm of politics and society, and violence in the domestic sphere ‘was considered a “private” issue with no “public” resonance’. However, as she notes, contemporary liberal theory is quite aware that social justice starts in the family. On the one hand, non-domination certainly requires states to empower citizens ‘from the family level’, justifying state interventions in the private and domestic sphere to prevent violence, ‘as all citizens must be allowed to live free from fear in the household’. Yet, paradoxically, on the other hand, the founding myths and with them culture and religion more in general, through the ‘collective cultural memory’ of the victims, rather than normalizing violence, do ‘carry the hope that one day violent gender-based relations could come to an end’. Hence, in Calloni’s account, culture is not only the origin of the problem domination but also part of its solution.

Daniele Brombal and Mengmeng Cui in ‘From Resistance to Transformation. The Journey to Develop a Framework to Explore Transformative Potential of Environmental Resistance Practices’ analyze transformative practices of resistance against environmental destruction that have the potential to bring an end to domination. Unlike Calloni, they locate the agents of change entirely in civil society, making states and their development and industrial policies as well as infrastructural projects, notably China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), responsible for the worst environmental damages. Brombal and Cui focus on local and indigenous communities that resist undesired development projects The transformation Brombal and Cui are interested in ‘(a) aims at transforming power structures and relations, from a situation of domination, injustice, violence and unsustainability to one of reduced violence, increased equality and flourishing; (b) reconfigures the structures of development through changing overarching global political economy dominated by neoliberal capitalism, into community-centric, culturally-sensitive, and ecologically regenerative models; (c) envisions and engages in a shift in society’s value-normative system from an ego-centric value system to an eco-centric one’. Brombal and Cui focus on local and indigenous communities that resist large infrastructural projects, given that according to the Environmental Justice Atlas these forms of resistance have a high percentage of some sort of success. And they elaborate the Resistance-Based Transformative Alternative (ReBasTA) Framework that ‘builds on the assumption that the transformative potential of environmental resistance can be identified, observed, and investigated through a set of criteria and observable variables’.

Interestingly, while the explicit goal of the resistance movements is environmental protection, Brombal and Cui locate the truly transformative potential of resistance less at the level of observed outcomes than at the levels of participation, inclusion, social equality and in particular the value system. Latter has the highest transformative leverage, indicating that ‘if transformation is not rooted in a value system radically departing from the dominant extractive and ego-centric model, any tentative transformation will be short-lived’. As a consequence, it is somewhat dubious if in-depth transformation is achieved intentionally by these grassroots movements or rather unintentionally, as a non-intended byproduct of their struggle for some tangible goal. Two questions arise: First, if in-depth transformation must not be simply an implicit but an explicit goal of resistance movements, as Brombal and Cui seem to assume, then we might ask if this puts not too much burden on these movements. After all, they do not want to change the world but address rather punctual problems in their communities. Accordingly, whatever means and instruments these movements use to achieve their goals should just be fine. Second, identities and worldviews might need not to be addressed more directly, head on, in order to bring about actual transformation and put an end to domination. Still, Brombal and Cui do agree with Calloni that transformations of value systems and identities take place from within cultural discourses rather than through external imposition. Accordingly, Brombal and Cui emphasize the need to have ‘accurate and deep knowledge of the cultural contexts where resistances take place, as well as access to the deepest feelings of peoples animating these movements’.

Silvio Cristiano in ‘Unpacking State-Society Relations in the Urban Space: What Are the Limit(s) of Compromise?’ discusses different urban problems in Venice (Italy) related to environmentalism, overtourism and privatization. Cristiano maintains, in line with Brombal and Cui, that these issues are just the top of an iceberg and without addressing and changing the deeper structures, we risk ‘shifting problems from where they are most visible to somewhere else’. Like Brombal and Cui, Cristiano also thinks that the issues Venice is currently facing have their origin in the capitalist paradigm of profiteering and commodification. And this ‘paradigm may be the most effective leverage point’ to be taken into consideration when addressing an issue especially at the urban scale. Cristiano argues that ‘if no change is envisioned in the city’s socio-economic system (including the productive subsystem), it seems hard to solve current issues both from the top down and from the bottom up’. Governmental initiatives that ‘satisfy either corporative or grassroots requests may just not change the systemic features of the city at all’. According to Cristiano, a more equal distribution of wealth rather than the ‘“trickle down” subsidies’ typical of the welfare state does address the societal systems more structurally.

Also for Cristiano, rights are much more than the protection of negative freedoms: ‘education, dignity, health, dwelling, satisfaction’. Nevertheless, Cristiano asks, somewhat surprisingly, who is going to protect our rights to religious and sexual freedom as much as to freedom of speech ‘after a change in governance, if the state is the only one who (allegedly) protects them?’ Does in-depth transformation of the current political, economic and social structures not risk violating individual liberties, if change goes against society rather than emerging from its midst?

Conclusion

As I argued, the paradigms of recognition and non-domination are complementary; liberalism is about both recognition and non-domination. The most coherent interpretation of the paradigm of recognition cannot do without at least some forms of emancipation, as much as the paradigm of non-domination needs to consider identities and negative liberties.

Following policy recommendations can be drawn regarding how liberalism should deal with the problem of political, economic and social domination: (1) Democratic institutions (parliament, political parties and constitutional courts) and democratic rights (right to vote, right of assembly and freedom of speech) are most efficient in combating domination. (2) Although social identities are not fixed and open to change, they cannot be engineered by the state or civil society organizations and grow out of some form of social consensus. (3) The consensus around identities takes place within the pluralist public and civil sphere of a community. (4) While the support in the development of individual capabilities by the state is effective against domination, also history and collective memory help to overcome the traumatic experience of domination. (5) Systemic transformation requires the support from below, notably from the civil society, and is based on individual liberties.