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Of Sameness and Difference
Introduction
Differences between humans are omnipresent. Sameness, though rarer, is also in plentiful supply, especially when theoretical concepts like rights are involved. But when do difference and sameness become a normative and political issue? How should we deal with them and what are their consequences? These are the questions I seek to answer in this essay. In this process I will explain the difference between difference and sameness on the one, and (in)equality on the other side. I will then outline why beyond ethical considerations, all (in)equality requires justification. In the next step we can then look at what these justifications can look like.(In)equality is Normative
In the framework I try to establish here equality and inequality are inherently normative because they are the normative expressions for sameness and difference. That is to say that a difference in income between two people is simply an observation or a fact. An inequality in income is a normative observation which requires justification. Two people receiving the same benefits is again an observation, receiving equal benefits is a normative observation which requires justification. Any equality or inequality between people that lacks justification is unjust. Justification here can be derived from an academic discourse or political means. The latter could be for instance that a majority believes an (in)equality to be justified. I would locate this framework in the tradition of ethical emotivism, in which ethics are an expression of our emotions. Something is wrong, or unjust, first and foremost because we experience it to be so.Why Does (In)equality Need Justification?
Apart from ethical considerations there are also practical reasons why (in)equality must be justified. Ultimately people are disinclined to accept (in)equality without reason because it triggers our inherent desire for justice and fairness. We feel that something is unjust, it makes us angry, sad or frustrated. In this framework any (in)equality for which people do not demand justification has been falsely labelled and should be called difference or sameness instead. That is because if people do not demand justification, it seems it does not bother them much. For example, people rarely get angry about the fact that some are taller than others. It is thus an issue difference, rather than inequality. Now you might ask why people believing an (in)equality to be unjust is of relevance. I might point to an unjustified (in)equality and be outraged by it but why should you care? In short, because me and most other people are willing to go to great lengths to address injustice including armed conflict, sabotage and grass-roots redistribution (boring people call it theft). If you care about living in a peaceful and stable society, (in)equality matters. (In)equality then, needs justification so that we feel that power, wealth, chances or even natural predispositions are distributed in a fair way. Some have power because they are strong, some were wealthy because God said they are monarchs, we receive the same education so that we have equal chances, you are healthy because you have done good in your past life. Anything can be a justification, but we do need it. If people are faced with (in)equality and there is no good justification and nothing is done to address the (in)equality the consequence is conflict. Thus, beyond a theoretical discourse, determining where (in)equalities exist and assessing how convincing their justifications are is crucial if we seek to avoid conflict.What Is a Good Justification?
Justifications can range from reasonable, to funky to downright insane. Here are some:- Some have power because God told the Pope that they are monarchs
- Everyone receives equal education so that we have equal chances
- Some are healthier than others because they did good in their past life
- Some are wealthy because their parents are rich
- Some are poor because they do not work enough
- Everyone has equal rights because we are all humans
Anything can be a justification, but we do need it. If people are faced with (in)equality and there is no good justification, and nothing is done to address the (in)equality the consequence is conflict. Thus, beyond a theoretical discourse, determining where (in)equalities exist and assessing how convincing their justifications are is crucial if we seek to avoid conflict. Justifications for inequality or equality do not need internally sound, but they must be convincing enough to those affected. I want to stress that ANY social system whether unequal or equal in wealth, power, chances, spiritual status and so on must have convincing justifications for differences or the lack thereof so that those affected can consider it fair. Still the justifications must only be perceived to be convincing. Faith and spirituality for instance may seem to some to be a rather poor justification for inequality but if people perceive it to be convincing, then they believe the (in)equality to be just. That is why analysing and challenging contemporary justifications is so crucial. An inequality must always be justified or resolved. But if both equality and inequality must be justified then there is two ways to do so. The first is to strip the (in)equality of its normative status and turning into sameness or difference. People might have sought justifications for the inequality in health and attributed it to God or Witches or past lives. With advancements in medicine, we discovered that some diseases are caused genetically about which we cannot do much yet. The issue was thus turned into a difference rather than an inequality. With further advancements in medicine, we might be able to treat genetic diseases in the future and depending on how affordable these treatments we are likely to bring the issue back into the realm of inequality. The second, and much more common way to resolve a conflict around (in)equality is done by redefining justification. We can redefine justifications to make them more convincing given our existing circumstances. For example, excess wealth used to be justified by societal status which granted land ownership. With the rise of a mercantile class and later capitalists during the industrialization, wealth inequality persisted but the old justifications were unconvincing. Thus, a new justification to fit existing circumstances was necessary. We created the idea that excess wealth was not a consequence of exploitation but instead hard work and smart investments. As dumb as this justification might be to some of you it still works today. It gets more complicated when we face an injustice based on (in)equality which cannot be resolved simply by changing or adapting the justification. Most civil rights movements are good examples where an inequality in rights cannot be addressed by changing justifications for inequality. This was attempted of course, think of racial profiling where people have effectively less rights. The justification used to be based on genetics where minorities are profiled because they are for example People of Colour. To maintain this inequality a new justification was created in which we take a detour by saying that some minorities have less wealth and are thus more likely to commit crimes. This justifies racial profiling but not because they are of that minority but because they are more likely to commit crimes due to their socio-economic circumstances. Of course, the two are inherently linked and the new justification changes nothing about the fact that wherever we permit racial profiling we give less rights to affected minorities. Anyway, if the conflict about exiting (in)equalities is successful we then have a both a change in justification and in circumstances. Women are equal to men so they can work, vote, open bank accounts, and earn the same wages. Once men were clever enough to listen to women and realize this, people started to change circumstances by giving women (un)equal rights based on new justifications centred around (in)equality. Since most were concerned with rights they were mostly about giving equal rights to women, but some are in fact unequal and for good reason. For example, men do not get pregnant and have to give birth so giving equal rights in a work environment would ultimately disadvantage women. To give all equal chances to have successful careers and earn equal wages we must have unequal rights.
So we know that difference and sameness, if normatively charged, become equality and inequality which both require justification. This justification is necessary to avoid conflict. If some people consider a justification to be unconvincing, they must point out why it is unconvincing and why an alternative justification is better or why a change in whatever creates the (in)equality is necessary. But if any (in)equality is unproblematic if it is supported by a justification that is perceived to be convincing then why should we prefer one system of (in)equality over another? As long as everyone is on board it seems like it really does not matter whether we find ourselves in a dictatorship or democracy and how much wealth a small minority has or does not have. Here we come to the last point which is conflicting values.
(In)equality and Conflicting Values
In short, the point here is that whether we believe any system or status quo to be “good” is not just dependent on (in)equality but other factors as well. These can be summarized in values derived from input and output-based theories. Although most people probably do not consciously think in these categories most opinions on values can be assigned to one or both of these categories. Input based justifications rest on intention, principles and rules. For example, it is ethical to steal food if your intention is to save a starving kid. Or following the rule or principle that anything is permissible to save your own life you can use violence to defend yourself against an attacker. Emotivism can also be located here but we do not consciously think about rules or principles but instead we derive them from our emotions towards an issue. Stealing food to save a kid’s life feels right and so it is. Of course, these cases are uncontroversial, but they serve to illustrate how input-based ethics approaches a question. Output-based ethics in contrast focus on the consequences of an action. Often this is approach is summarized under utilitarian principles such as any action should bring about the greatest love for the greatest number. Or, that we should aim to increase average wellbeing for everyone. Stealing is permissible then if the positive consequences outweigh the negative ones.Now let us say that you believe people should not starve based on your principles. Then any system no matter how internally sound it may be will come under scrutiny if it leads to people starving to death. Similarly, if you believe that addressing climate change is necessary based on a utilitarian calculus then any system which exhibits (in)equality that is conducive to damages to our climate will, again, come under scrutiny. Justifications for (in)quality are mainly reliant on being internally sound but can be challenged if arrangements contradict other values that we hold. It might have seemed like a justified inequality that women cannot vote but it conflicts with ideas of human equality, representative democracy, universal rights, self-determination and so on.
I run out of space here and believe this essay to be filled enough of my opinions already. I also already wrote a long time on this essay and want to get it done so this will be a bit of a ramble. I want to stress however that current arrangements of (in)equality are shit. They might be better than they used to be, but they ultimately stand in the way of sustainability, peace and human welfare globally. But why is it so hard to change them. The question we should ask instead is “qui bono?”, who profits? Limiting extensive rights to white men with property was understandable, if cruel, from a male perspective because they maintained power and wealth. Having power and wealth it was easy for them to supress any kind of resistance or opposing views to this arrangement. Today the situation is more complex because interest groups are harder to define but the issue remains. People or legal entities with wealth and power will cling to whatever allows them to remain rich and powerful. People do not want climate change but big oil wants profits, so they stall, while their CEO’s earn so much money that their CO2 emissions are often thousands of times higher than that of the average person (globally). The Zuckerbergs of this world want to maintain control over public discourse so they invoke ideas of freedom of expression while their platforms make people depressed, lonely, anorexic, violent and ultimately misinformed about Zuckerberg’s rich friends so that they can stay in power. All of this are generalizations of course but as far as generalizations go, I think this is one of the more accurate ones. To maintain their dominance these interest groups must prevent that contemporary arrangements of (in)equality are challenged. They do so by controlling media outlets, social media platforms, spreading misinformation and lobbying. But this is not a pessimistic outlook, it is a description of our current condition. We are on a good way to put an end to patriarchy (mainly talking about Europe here) and have already won some major battles regarding equal rights. Defeating rich white men is almost synonymous with defeating the rich and powerful today. If we done it once, we can do it again.
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How (not) to Recapture Voters from Right-Wing Parties
Democracies in Europe are straining under external and internal pressures. Rising inequality, climate change, flagging productivity growth, Russia’s invasion into Ukraine, Trump. Although differing in their severity the mounting pressure has had several impacts on Europe’s political landscape, the most prominent issue being the rise of right-wing parties. In this essay I want to explore how the concept of issue ownership can be used to explain current changes in Europe’s political landscape and challenge the strategies of ongoing efforts halt the rise of right-wing parties. For that purpose, we must first understand what issue ownership means and its relevance in the competition for votes. Then we can use the concept to criticize current strategies. I will conclude with some opinions on dealing with Europe’s right, their agenda and their voters.
Understanding Issue Ownership
At its core, issue ownership refers to political parties having “ownership” over an issue because voters consider them most competent in addressing it. It is then assumed that whenever a topic is discussed over which a party has issue ownership it benefits this party in the competition for votes. This is regardless of whether the parties name or agenda is mentioned or not. Issue ownership is ultimately a personal judgment because each voter must decide whether they consider a party to be competent in addressing a given issue or not. If on a country level most voters, consider one party to be most competent in addressing a specific issue, then this party has ownership over the issue. A crucial underlying assumption here is that the quality of policy proposals and the party’s manifesto are only relevant in so far as they impact the perceived competence of a party to address an issue. It is very much possible that a party’s policy proposals are utter rubbish and yet voters still consider them to be most competent. This could happen for instance because the previous track-record of the party is convincing or simply because some members perform well in debates and press conference. Given the fact that most voters are not able to analyse party manifestos and policy proposals of all parties on all issues and judging their quality, there is bound to be a discrepancy between the quality of solutions by a party for an issue and how competent voters perceive this party to be. I believe this discrepancy to be rather large. Thus, a party might have issue ownership over an issue for which they have no convincing strategy to tackle it. I would go so far as to say that competence is hardly a criterium given voters inability to judge, but instead party identity. Conservative parties centre around security and a liberal economy. Green parties, focus on sustainability, while socialist parties revolve around workers’ rights and social security. That is of course an oversimplification, but you get the gist. Voters have an image of a party and if their current concerns match with the identity of a party they are likely to vote for that party while mostly disregarding actual competence. If we now consider how people make their voting decisions employing the framework of issue ownership, we must ask two questions. What are the voter’s current concerns. Which party has issue ownership over which issues. When concerns match issue ownership then the voter is likely to vote for that party. As mentioned before, issue ownership can be achieved through perceived competence which is influenced by actual competence but also by party identity (among other factors of course but I will focus on these two). The balance between competence and party identity is crucial which will become clear in the next paragraph where we will look at current strategies to halt the rise of right-wing parties.Current Strategies
In response to the rise of right-wing parties, other parties have tried to capture their voters by developing their own solutions for problems raised by the right. Whether these issues should be addressed to begin with I will get to later. Currently, most mainstream parties assume that it is the quality of their policy proposals which ultimately convinces voters. They might be so convincing that a party gains ownership over an issue but at the very least they can contest proposals by right-wing parties. The assumption is that they can capture voters on any issue if they are able to communicate effective solutions. If voters are concerned about issues surrounding migration, centre parties focus on this issue by developing and communicating their own ideas of how to address this issue. If voters are convinced by effective policies this strategy would be sound, given that many right-wing parties lack any convincing strategies of how to tackle migration. But what if voters do not care about the quality of the policies but instead, vote based on issue ownership? If issue ownership was derived only from competence, then the result would be the same. But it is not competence, but perceived competence influenced by party identity, which matters. Then the strategy of developing convincing solutions to issues raised by the right does not weaken them but has precisely the opposite effect.Why Current Strategies are Counterproductive
By communicating strategies to tackle, for example, issues surrounding migration, mainstream parties draw attention to this topic. It then rises in the voters ranking of issues they are concerned with. Rember that the first question we must ask is what the voter’s current concerns are. If politicians from all parties and consequently media and social media only talk about migration, then this issue will be prevalent. Continuing with migration we then must ask which party has ownership over this issue, meaning that they are perceived to be most competent in dealing with it. For most left-wing and centre parties, migration does not fit their party identity or only on a tangent. To stress this, point most voters will not be convinced by a green party’s policy proposals to tackle the issue of migration because it is not their domain. It might even be the case that left-wing parties cannot formulate solutions to issues such as too much immigration because it goes against their party identity. The issue does not fit to the party and contradicts their identity even if their proposals are convincing. It is a fickle thing to pin down party identity of course and it differs between voters, but I think you have a feeling of what I am getting at. Coming back to issue ownership and the notion that it is party identity rather than competence which impacts the perceived competence of parties then the problem becomes obvious.Parker must vote soon and all they heard about recently was migration. Even the centre parties for which they voted last time are discussing nothing else. They say it’s too expensive to integrate refugees, and that they are a security risk and so on. Parker wanted to have look at the party manifestos of each party but did not find the time and finds it difficult to judge whether policies like more border controls or better integration will help the issue. Still, they are concerned because everyone seems to be concerned with the issue. Parker is now standing in the ballot box and must decide which party to vote for. The green parties? Well, they have something to do with sustainability. The socialist and centre, right? They are all about workers right and such. Maybe conservative parties since they are all about security, that feels like a better fit. And yet the party that has been talking non-stop about migration even long before the election was the right-wing party.
I find this explanation of why addressing issues raised by the right is counterproductive strategy quite intuitive. These parties have been talking about nothing else but issues surrounding migration, refugees, LGBTQ+ and so on. In most people’s minds these right-wing parties are perceived to be most competent in tackling these issues. They have issue ownership over them. Constantly talking about these issues does not win voters back but instead just increases the number of voters who are now concerned with issues over which the right has issue ownership. Centre parties are talking about ever more right-wing talking points which normalizes them and at the same time confirms that there is something to worry about. But when it comes to elections, people will always choose the original brown shit by right-wing parties rather than the microwaved instant shit offered by centre parties.
Shifting Public Discourse
Of course there is a large variety of strategies to recapture voters from the right, but I want to stay withing the framework I created so far which offers to main avenues. We can make people be less concerned about issues over which the right-wing parties have issue ownership. Or we can contest the issue ownership. Let us start with the first. Here the goal is to shift public discourse. I think there are issues people are taught to be concerned about such as migration and there are issues that people are concerned about because of experience (or a combination of both). When we shift the discourse, we must tackle both.Many of the right-wing talking points are taught issues. Think for example of rural dwellers who never met a migrant but are still concerned about foreigners imposing their culture on Germans. There is no experience to trigger this concern, it is entirely taught. We must teach people to be concerned about other things like climate change (something that is only starting to be experienced now). In addition, we must also give a bigger platform to issues experienced by voters which go unaddressed and are rarely mentioned in public discourse. Think of the inability to find affordable housing and pay rent or public safety for people from the FLINTA community. This is not just up to politicians but also media and civil society but there is a feedback loop that must be broken here. Media reports on what politicians say which influences people’s opinion which is then represented in media and influences politicians (very much simplified). If any of these players can contribute to break the loop. How? Simply ignore right-wing talking points and raise issues over which centre parties hold issue ownership or which are experienced by voters. In political debates for instance whenever someone raises concerns about the security risks of migration instead of elaborating on convincing ideas of how to solve these issues one should instead just change the topic. Deaths from terrorist attacks by migrants are far surpassed by deaths from femicides for example. Of course, both are horrible but in terms of relevance it can easily be claimed that femicides and misogyny are a much more important security risk given their prevalence.
Furthermore, we must also figure out what voters are really concerned with. Every day we hear about migration so if you ask a random person on the street, they will undoubtedly mention this as a major issue. But continue the conversation and many people are more concerned about losing their house due to rent hikes than lose their life in a terrorist attack. It might seem a bit arrogant to say that the concerns that people raise are not what they are actually concerned about. And there is truth to that. But to strengthen my claim I would like to highlight how we know what people are concerned about: Surveys. It is stunning how much of what is discussed in political campaigns is based on surveys which often pose a handful of yes or no questions to a few hundred participants. Even elections can be seen as a form of survey. These surveys can be called quantitative research, where we ask a large number of people a few short questions. But there is also qualitative research. A method centred around taking a deep dive with a few participants into a specific issue. There is very little research that tries to capture what people are concerned with using a qualitative approach mainly because doing so with a representative sample is almost impossible due to resource constraints. But I would hypothesize that such research would reveal significant discrepancies between issue rankings in quantitative surveys versus qualitative surveys. To change the issues people are concerned with we thus need to do two things. We need to ignore taught issues by the right and introduce our own, preferably relevant ones which are currently not experienced by many like climate change. We also must figure out what people are concerned with based on their everyday experience so that we can give a bigger platform to them. To do so I would recommend doing more qualitative research rather than quantitative surveys.
Contesting Right-Wing Issue Ownership?
The other point of leverage would be to challenge right wing issue ownership over specific issues such as migration. Although possible I think this is not a very smart approach for one simple reason. Often, they do not matter. They are taught issues which many people do not experience and can therefore not be tackled anyway. Consider the outrage of the right over efforts to make language more inclusive. You now have a significant number of people who hate the fact that we should use inclusive language although in their life they have never been forced to use it. Right-wing parties are exceptionally good at making up an issue, talking about it all the time and make it feel relevant to voters for whom it is, in reality, utterly irrelevant. Why should any party that takes itself serious try to gain issue ownership over irrelevant issues? Furthermore, the only convincing way to do so would be to offer solutions. But how can a made-up issue have a solution? Trying to solve the “issue of migration” is like trying to get rid of the ghost underneath your kid’s bed. You cannot tackle it by addressing it, you tackle it by distracting from it until we all forget that it ever was an issue. Best case scenario a party does end up in control of a largely irrelevant issue. That would deprive right wing parties of it but has little impact on how well of the voters are. Worst case the attempt to contest issue ownership just draws additional attention to an irrelevant issue over which right-wing parties have issue ownership leading to even more voters electing them. What is happening right now is a combination of both scenarios. To a non-issue like migration and recapture voters from the right, mainstream parties try to prevent migration from happening. This means starving European economies of foreign workers, breaking humanitarian law, and abandoning ethical treatment of those looking for security and better opportunities, while right-wing parties are still growing. Everyone loses. And the problem? Well, it is still there. It is made up so there is no solution. Now it is not foreign migrants who are the issue but those who already have citizenship but “refuse to integrate”. The new talking point is “remigration”. Once mainstream parties jump on that idea the next issue will be to fortify Europe’s borders and so on. There is no solution to a made-up issue, so it is remarkably stupid to try to address it. Instead of trying to tackle made up issues over which the right holds issue ownership we must distract and shift our focus on more pressing matters. If we do so we not only avoid wasting time and energy tackling made up issues, but we also avoid doing harm by trying to tackle them and ultimately recapture voters from the far right by stopping to parrot their talking points and shifting the political discourse to issues that they do not hold issue ownership over. Lastly, I want to comment on the made-upness of issues and people’s concerns. I have been claiming that there are no issues surrounding migration and of course that is not true. There are many issues. From safer migration routes, to integration, to security risks. But the issue is heavily over-inflated and many of the issues surrounding it are made up. For example, migrants do not threaten the “cultural sphere of the occident”. I am also aware that claiming people’s concerns are made up is well-founded but of course not always true. Someone who lost a loved one or family member to a terrorist attack for instance has a very real concern about safety based on experience. I do not believe the solution is to stop migrants from entering the country, but this concern must be acknowledge. For simplicity’s sake I presented both the made-upness of issues and “reality” of people’s concerns as black and white, and I just want to point out that I know it is not always like that. Usually, I think, it is purple -
Compulsory Military Service in Germany
Putin’s willingness to launch a full-on invasion on Ukraine without provocation and sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Russian lives is scary. In Germany this sparked fears about a potential war against Russia which has led to a significant increase in military spending and discussions about a compulsory military service. It is no secret that the state of Germanies military is far from stellar. Still the plans to address this issue are questionable. In this essay I will address some statements and notions I have picked up in debates on the compulsory military service and give my thoughts to them. In the end I will outline some concerns that receive little attention in the current debate.
“Democracies must defend themselves”
A common conception is that we must fight if we are being attacked. Killing the aggressor is always better than being conquered. It has become almost a precursor to debates on military service to say that “democracies must defend themselves”. Usually this is done by people who most certainly would not fight themselves. But must democracies defend themselves?Let’s say France invades Germany with the goal of introducing French rule of law and force all Germans to speak French. Most people would not be happy about that, but neither would they be willing to fight a war over this. I hope. Sure, it is not great, but do we need to kill people over it? Luckily, we have democratic institutions to decide. So, we could have a referendum before mobilizing the military in which two thirds of Germans vote to accept French rule of law. Well then, we would not fight right? That is all to say that democracies are the only political system in the world where its citizens (should) decide whether they want to fight or not. Undermining this idea by saying democracies must defend themselves as if it is the most common-sense idea is undemocratic and shows a lack of understanding for the democratic privileges we enjoy.
I do want to add three things. First, a Russian invasion does not mean we must learn Russian. At least not only that. It also means targeted killings of minorities, opposition and the arrest of all dissidents. And that is just the bloody tip of the iceberg. Ukraine where (to my knowledge) a majority is still willing to fight is a good example of people in a democratic system choosing to fight, because the alternative is worse. Second, we must ask ourselves under which conditions it may be democratic to vote on the end of democracy and if democracies can and should be able to abolish themselves through a popular vote. I do not want to go into this discussion but I think in a defence scenario a lot of it depends on what the consequences of a military conflict would be. Third, I think it is important to have democracies build in a way where citizens can decide who and when to fight. Martial law and forced conscriptions can very quickly lead to a point where it is not the citizens deciding but a few political and/or economic elites who will never be on the frontline themselves. Putin, by means of being a psychopathic dictator, can force Russians to fight. Democracies and their citizens do not have to fight, they can fight, if they so choose, let’s keep it that way.
Why does Germany need 20.00 soldiers?
So, Germany does not have to fight, but let’s say its citizens choose to fight or to invest in their military as part of a deterrence strategy. What do we need compulsory military service for? Well to fill the free positions in the military. But what do we need those for? Why do we need 20,000 additional people working for the military and how will compulsory service fill these positions?In short, it was decided that to defend Germany and based on current and predicted vacancies the military needs around 200,000 soldiers. Currently it has only around 180,000 soldiers. That means we need 20,000 more. Simple enough. Why exactly we need them is hard to discern. In official statements and interviews terms like “the ability to defend Germany” are often used, but it is hard to come by any specific information. Germanies military is relatively small, but I find it surprising that there is hardly any information on why Germany needs more soldiers to defend itself. Why are 180,000 not enough?
An interesting problem that the German military does have is that according to some experts only half of all military units can be deployed. The rest is lacking soldiers or equipment. Some, like me, might find it surprising that despite lacking only 10% of the 200,000 soldiers Germany seeks to have, 50% of its units cannot be deployed. Now of course there is not necessary a linear relationship. Just because the military lacks 10% of soldiers, does not necessitate that only 10% of units cannot be deployed. But it is still a striking discrepancy. Imagine we could increase the deployable units to 80% simply by providing the equipment. Would we still need the additional 20,000 soldiers that desperately then? Furthermore, imagine Germany manages to hire more soldiers but deployable units are still around 50%. Then nothing was gained.
To summarize the point so far, I just wonder where these numbers come from, who calculated them and if having more soldiers means more deployable units which I am guessing is the goal (although again that is hard to tell because there is little public information). But I mean why have soldiers if you cannot deploy them? In the next step we must ask ourselves if compulsory military service is going to help fill these gaps.
How do 700,000 people do compulsory military service?
Each year, around 700,000 people would have to do compulsory military service. Some of those will not be able to do the service because the military discriminates against disabled people. Some might refuse to serve and will probably have to do civil service as “punishment”. In addition, the 700,000 currently include women who by constitutional law cannot be forced to do military service in Germany. It might be seen as unfair, but I would count it as a win if 350,000 less people had to do compulsory military service.So, we are left with around 300,000 conscripts. Given that there are currently only 180,000 professional soldiers I guess the military would first have to hire more training personal to train these people. If we have one trainer responsible for 300 conscripts we would need around 1,000 trainers. But wait. Isn’t the problem of the military that they struggle to hire new personal? I am sensing a problem here. But let us assume that the military simply reduces its capabilities even further, at least in the short term, and has some of its professional soldiers train the 300,000 potential soldiers. Would it work?
I think yes. But for no good reason other than conscripts with an average age of 18, they spent around 5% of their life in the military and 100% of their post-school professional career. If you would force 300,000 people into any job after school for one year some would probably stick around. If German politicians are so keen on taking rights away from young people, why not for more critical professions like teachers or nurses?
Can we force young people to serve
That brings me to my next point, can we force young people to do military service and sacrifice a year of their life so that they can kill people? In my opinion the answer is no. I want to highlight one argument, a response to it and a counterargument. If you have read a previous post on voting rights for children, you will already be able to anticipate my argument. Can we force children to do things if they were never able to vote? Most people who will be forced into military service never had the chance to vote and are thus forced to something on which they had no democratic influence. I find this highly undemocratic and in general a pretty shitty move. In addition, young people are a minority in current democratic systems. In Germany people above 55 make up half the voting population so they would be able to decide whether young people should do military service or not. At the very least I would find it a lot fairer if we were to discuss military service for 30-year-olds. They are, I think, still young and fit enough for military service but also have the chance to spend their adult life lobbying and voting against a compulsory military service. To make it most fair conscripts should have the average age of those eligible to vote, so 55. Ok maybe not.A common counter argument against the notion of not wating to force minors to do stuff is that we are already doing it: School. There are two important differences though. School is only compulsory in Germany until age 16. Compulsory military service would be compulsory also for adults who are 18 or older. Infringing on adult rights who we consider to be old enough to make their own choices is much different than infringing on children’s rights. But there is another important point to consider. School is intended purely as a benefit to the kid. It aims to increase equality and educate young people in a way that they can understand today’s world and live in it. Now you might say that it is simply a production of educated workers for Germanies labour market and that is fair, but I think it is important to recognise that I still have the freedom to move to Canada, change my citizenship and use my German education to have a good life there. There is benefit in educating children that goes beyond the nation state. Ultimately a large majority of children benefit from compulsory education. In difference to that, military service has hardly any proven advantages except if you decide to continue your military career afterwards. Furthermore, the benefits are purely for the state. Most teenagers who are forced into military service will not benefit but the state will be able to fill the gap of 20,000 soldiers in its military.
The Free-Rider problem
This is probably the dumbest argument of them all and I will keep it brief. Some people who are against a compulsory military service or generally reject fighting for their country are accused of freeriding on those who are willing to serve. But all citizens are paying for defence through taxes. If anything, German soldiers are freeriding because most of them never fought anyone. We just pay them in case, because the enemy is doing the same. They almost never fight are a bigger risk to their own lives than anyone else’s and would not be necessary if all countries simply would not have a standing army. But that is beside the point. Accusing a taxpayer of freeriding because they do not want to serve in the military is like accusing paying customers in a bakery of freeriding because they are not willing to become bakers themselves. It is such a stupid argument and yet I hear it regularly. Says a lot about political debates in Germany these days.Now I will move away from points that are often discussed in debates and move on to points that are, surprisingly, not talked about.
Labour shortage and more military
The military is currently employing around 180,000 soldiers and an additional 80,000 staff that is working for the military. If we assume that some of that staff have other jobs on the side, we might end up with something like 250,000 people working only for the military. Although some might question the intelligence of someone joining the military, many soldiers are highly educated and include everything from pioneers to doctors. The people who work for the military could just as well work for the private sector. That is a hefty chunk of qualified labour taking out of the labour market. If we now add 300,000 teenagers and young adults who could otherwise start their work or further education sooner, through compulsory military service we end up with 550,000 people who could fill other important gaps in our labour by becoming teachers, nurses, or craftsmen. The military would then make up 1% of Germanies total labour force (43,000,000). Sure, we might need some military but 1% of Germanies labour force just sitting around while the whole country hopes they will never have to be deployed is a bit odd to say the least.How fair will it be?
I also want to point out that I have serious doubts about the fairness of a military service in general and especially a compulsory one. People with lower incomes and few perspectives in life will always be overrepresented in military because why become a soldier when you could be a lawyer. If a service is compulsory, I would be surprised if the rich and powerful do not find ways to circumvent this. That would make military service discriminatory against people with a poor socio-economic background. Furthermore, the outright exclusion of disabled people in the compulsory military service raises further doubts. Another issue would be people from the LGBTQ+ community and People of Colour. Will trans-men be allowed or excluded? Does the fear of discrimination within the military allow them to avoid service. All this to say, compulsory military service will likely be only for strong, non-queer, men with a weak socioeconomic background.Threats from within: the AfD
Now you might have read this whole text and still think that we need a compulsory military service because it is the best way to defend Germany. I think if you want to make anything compulsory in Germany let it be being a teacher. We have a party that, among other things, takes bribes from Putin, considers the Nato as the aggressor instead of Russia and is willing to hand Ukraine over to Russia. Not only do we have such a party, but it also is the second largest and given current trends could soon be the largest. If you want to worry about German security I would worry about them first. Maybe even defund police and military so that the AfD has little to work with if they come to power. -
Coercion in Labour Markets
Initially this post was intended to be on how a Universal Basic Income (UBI) introduces Grass-Roots ethics into the economy. In writing the post I realized that another issue is much more pressing: coercion in labour markets. The topic of this essay will therefore be Coercion in Labour Markets. The main question is whether some people might be coerced to work rather than being persuaded or choosing to do so out of their own motivation. As per usual I will briefly explain some terminology. Then the current situation in the labour market will be outlined with a focus on unemployment. Having laid the foundations, we can then discuss if people accept jobs based on authority, persuasion or coercion. In the end we look at who coerces, and I will outline how a UBI could be a solution to this issue and give some final remarks.
Terminology
Coercion will be seen here as a form of power. It is the ability of a person, let’s say Mary to make another, Finn, act in a way that Finn would not otherwise do. Often, this implies that it is against Finn’s interests. Another form of power is force or violence, but this aspect of power will be less relevant in this discussion. Persuasion in contrast is Mary convincing Finn to act in a way that Finn is convinced is ultimately in his own interest although Finn had his doubts initially. Authority is Mary making Finn act against his will because Finn respects Mary and considers her to be legitimized in giving orders. Markets are the physical or conceptual space in which goods and services are exchanged while the labour market is essentially the place where we trade money for time or the completion of a task. UBI takes many different forms depending on who you ask. In general, it can be treated as an income that everyone receives, and which is enough to support a “good” life. By Grass-Roots Ethics I mean the expression of personal ethical convictions outside of official institutions such as elections or interest groups.The Labour Market and Unemployment
So how could there be coercion in labour markets? Let’s start by outlining the conditions we face in most European states which will be the focus today. A large majority of people work more or less by choice. We do apprenticeships or study and eventually end up with a job that at the very least pays the bills. Still, many of us end up with jobs that they dislike or no job at all. There are many reasons why people do not work or dislike their jobs. The work is lacking purpose, is boring, redundant or too demanding. The compensation is not high enough, we find ourselves in conflict with corporate structures or we question the impact of our work. No surprises so far. What happens if we do not work? We get social benefits. We have a human right to a dignified life after all and dying of hunger lacks both the dignity and the life part. So, our society has to provide for us. There is a problem, however. Our state is in international competition with the others, so our economy needs to keep up with the other states. Furthermore, much of the productivity we already have relies on some people doing the shit jobs. Thus, instead of simply redistributing what we have to those who do not want to or cannot find appropriate work, we need to find another way. We have to get as many people working as possible (but not too many cause then inflation rises and we do not want that either, so some people should better be unemployed).Many things we need in order to have a dignified life can be bought. To ensure that people still try to find a job while also ensuring that on paper they still have a dignified life we give them almost all the things necessary to do so that cannot be bought (such as freedom of speech and things like that). Then we just have to write a check for the rest, and we are done. But how high should the check be? Here comes the trick. The state calculates what you need for a dignified life to the cent and transfers the money. As an unemployed person you could technically live a dignified life (although that is also somewhat doubtful in many cases) but if you misspend a few Euros and do not optimize your budget you will not be able to afford your dignified life for that month. In Germany, 50 Euros of the total social benefits a single person with no kids receives is intended for food. You do not have to live in Germany to know that 50 Euros is very little. Losing a 2 Euro coin from a whole in your pocket which you cannot fix because you lack the money means losing 4% of your monthly allowance for food. That’s insane. By making it so hard to live on social benefits the state tries to make unemployed people find and accept jobs. This also means that anyone who does not have sufficient savings to support themselves in case of unemployment is at constant risk of having to live of social benefits which can hardly be considered to be enough to live a dignified life. We also have to discuss what happens if you are unemployed and do not accept jobs offered to you by the job centre. If a person on social benefits regularly rejects job offers, then their social benefits are reduced. Under extreme circumstances it is legal in Germany to entirely cancel social security including the payment of rent. It happens extremely rarely but it is a credible threat.
A Case of Authority?
So, if we accept a job because we cannot live a dignified live on social benefits or are at risk of receiving cuts to them does this constitute a case of coercion? Let us start by ruling out some potential alternatives starting with a case for authority. For it to be a case of authority we would have to accept the legitimacy of whichever actor is making us act against our interests. For example, we accept a job offered to us by the job centre because we recognize its authority and respect the institution. There might be some people who accept jobs with this motivation. The fact that some people do reject jobs and receive penalties for it, is however prove enough that many people do not accept the authority of job centres to put them into jobs which are deemed adequate for them. I think it is an uncontroversial claim that most people do not accept jobs because they believe in the authority of job centres. I had some more arguments here but the post is much too long, so I cut them out.Persuasion and Coercion
How about persuasion then? It is safe to say that it would be a case of persuasion if we do not intend to accept a job offered to us but the employee at the job centre makes such a compelling argument for it that we decide to take it anyway. In general, we can consider it a case of persuasion if we initially thought an action was against our interest but were then convinced of the opposite for example by being informed about substantial advantages. To illustrate this point and discern between persuasion and coercion let’s say we do not intend to get a vaccine but a conversation with our general practitioner convinces us that we should get it. If we find out about a positive impact of an action or receive a positive incentive, we have cases of persuasion. Pointing out potential negative consequences has the feeling of coercion: If you do not do this then something bad is going to happen. Coming back to the vaccines we can notice an important difference though. Let us say the general practitioner convinces you that you should get a vaccine because otherwise you might die of a virus. That is a clear case of: If you do not do this then something bad is going to happen. But is the doctor coercing us? I think not. The key nuance is that the general practitioner is not responsible for the negative consequences but just informing you about them. They do not say: get the vaccine or I will infect you with a deadly virus. Instead, they are pointing out the potential negative consequences of your action or the lack thereof. That is in my opinion a key difference between coercion and persuasion when considering negative consequences of an action. If the agent who wants, you to act differently is responsible for the negative consequences then we have a case of coercion. Otherwise, it is persuasion. Coming back to the job centre, it is the employees who tell people to get jobs or else they will lose their social benefits. The job centres are however also responsible for filing for penalties against people who do not accept jobs and are thus responsible for the negative consequences. We have a case of coercion.There is also another way to approach this. Many scholars believe that coercion lacks choice. If someone tells us to accept a job or die than that is no choice (or at least most scholars think so). Persuasion on the other hand must leave the option to decide between options, for example if the job centre tries to convince us that a shitty job is better than none. Being coerced with threats to our life are not particularly common in the labour market but we might have something else at stake, our human dignity. Taking the human rights as an indication we might for example say that if we are offered the choice between accepting a job or losing our social benefits which are necessary to live a dignified life than we lack the choice. This of course rests on the assumption that choices where one option is losing our life or human dignity are no choices at all and that being faced with such a decision constitutes a case of coercion. It also rests on the assumption that one cannot live a dignified life on social security. I want to take this a bit further by considering cases where we are not online coerced to work but have to give up our personal ethics or religion in the process. For example, if the job centre, under threat of losing their social benefits, coerces a Hindu into working in a butchery for cows. Or a case where a pacifist is coerced to work for a weapons manufacturer. The power that the state has over us, manifested in the penalties the job centre can put on us, can not only coerce us into acting against our interests (we do not want to work but are forced to), but also act against our personal ethics and religious beliefs. Working under the assumption that social benefits do not pay for a dignified life. Then employees who do not have sufficient savings to support themselves if they quit their job are coerced to keep working even if they deem their work unethical (or contribute to an unethical company).
So let us sum up the part on coercion. If Mary is outlining negative consequences of an action which Finn intends to do, but Mary is not responsible for the consequences, then Mary is attempting to persuade Finn to act differently. If she is however responsible for the consequences than we have a case of coercion. In addition, if Mary gives Finn a choice between acting in a way she wants or else kill him or violate his human rights in other ways then we do not actually have a choice and thus face a case of coercion. If we then accept that cutting social security if one does not accept a job leads to the inability to live a dignified life and thus a violation of our human rights, we again face a case of coercion. The job centre attempts to coerce people into accepting jobs. If go so far as to accept that living a dignified life on social security is impossible than we are presented with a much larger case of coercion. Everyone who is unemployed but not at risk of cuts is also being coerced into accepting a job. In addition, everyone who is currently in a job and lacks sufficient savings in case they quit their job is coerced to keep working.
Who is the Coercer?
I also want to address in this post is who the coercer is. I have been talking a lot about job centres today but are they the coercers? They might do the deed, but they are not responsible for it since they operate within a legal framework sanctioned by most of society. In fact, they are also being coerced to coerce others given that their refusal to do so might lead to them losing their jobs. So, who makes the laws, who decides on the amount of social benefits and potential penalties? The government? Well in Europe politicians are elected by us, by those eligible to vote. They act based on the mandate given to them. Unless they intentionally misinform the population or pass laws secretively. This does happen of course, but it is definitively not the norm. We then end up with two groups left, general society and interest groups. General society has the right to organise protests, to be politically active and try to persuade their fellow citizens to adopt a different stance. Many members of society are also able to vote. Interest groups also influence government both by setting the agenda and influencing public opinion for example through their control of some media outlets. They can also influence government decisions by advising them how to address issues that are already on the agenda. Interest groups are of course also part of society, but I thought important to consider them separately. What remains then is that we are all responsible for the coercion in labour markets. Anyone who does not oppose this coercion or benefits from it is to a degree complicit in it. I say degree because I do not think we are all equally complicit. I leave it too you to determine the degree of your complicity and act based on that because, again, the post is already too long.Solutions?
I want to finish by pointing out a way in which we might be able to end coercion in labout markets. There are several ways of course but the one I wanted to mention today is a UBI. If we all receive enough money to live a good life the coercion loses much of its threat. If we can live a dignified and even a “good” life if we do not work or refuse to accept jobs, then people cannot be coerced to work. There is also a second benefit. Remember the Hindu who is forced to work in a cow butchery or the pacifist who is forced to work in a weapons manufacturer? They do not have to accept these jobs. In general, if people have doubts about the ethicality of their jobs they can simply quit because the alternative is still a “good” life. Suddenly many companies will find themselves hard pressed to find workers who are willing to do their bidding. By addressing other issues such as inequality and the marketization of wealth where being wealthy becomes the most attractive lifestyle, we could soon find ourselves in a system where people can decide their work not only based on what pays most but personal interest and ethical considerations. I doubt that many people for example find it attractive to work in factory farming and yet many do it because you earn money. Imagine not working were an alternative. This is what I meant in the introduction of grass-root ethics in labour markets. If we are not coerced into work and the rich lifestyle becomes unpopular then we create a system where people can choose jobs on their personal ethical convictions.Let me also give a quick outline of the impact of UBI, in economic terms. We generally think of the labour force for a specific field of work as those who are willing to work in general and who have the necessary qualification for that field. The smaller the labour force the more expensive it is to hire new workers. If we now add a third category to the willingness to work and the qualification which is the ethicality of the job, companies who are generally considered unethical will find it hard to hire workers. They need to increase salaries to attract workers which might lead to their bankruptcy, or they address the ethical concerns. If we also consider that people can be just as much persuaded by the ethicality of a job than what it pays, then even increasing salaries might not do the trick. I am perfectly aware that I am ignoring many other economic consequences of an UBI. Given that, again, the essay is already much too long I will have to address them another day. I do want to draw your attention to one key point though. If you do accept that our labour market is coercive in nature, are you willing to accept this for the sake of economic prosperity? It is a question that I have answered for myself, but I do not want to provide you with my decision. Instead, I want to give you a case to highlight the severity of the question. Would you accept slavery if you knew it would lead to prosperity for slaves and masters alike?
Final Remarks:
I think this idea of introducing ethics into the economy could be critical in addressing the shortcomings of our current economic system and moving away from a system that prioritizes monetary gains and capital growth both personal and corporate over human welfare. If we seek to move towards a system that prioritizes human welfare two things must happen. First people must be able to choose their jobs based on personal convictions, interests and qualifications rather than the need for (more) money. That means addressing the coercion currently taking place in our labour market. Second, we must stop the marketization of wealth, where a wealthy lifestyle is generally considered the best. The more inconsequential monetary gain is for job decisions the better. Our current economic system is a powerful engine, but we have not yet managed to get the hang on how to use it properly. We are driving a car while completing our driver’s license and running over people and nature left right and centre. If we can get full control of this engine and use it in way that fixes our global climate instead of destroying it, that helps people out of poverty rather than exploiting them, that enables people to prioritize their personal wellbeing rather than trying to look like the model on the poster or the social media star, if we steer the engine to promote human welfare rather than monetary gains, then we will live in a much happier world. And once we arrived there, we can start thinking of turning the engine off. -
Property is Made Up
Property, more specifically private and public property are everywhere. Stop right here and think of something that is not owned by anyone. Hard to come up with anything right? Air does not belong to anyone and neither does most of the oceans. Abstract or cultural goods are also often not owned by anyone. Language for instance, or the believe in a higher power. Still as far as physical things go everything is owned by someone or at the very least by a legal entity such as a company or a government. It is therefore hardly surprising that we accept property and more importantly private property as a given constant similar to gravity or the fact that milk always boils over the second you are not looking. Not only do most humans accept property as a constant, but they also accept the methods of determining what things belong to whom. In this essay I want to argue two points. First, I want to show that there is no natural property or an objective way to determine what is whose property. Instead, we as society decide what property is, what can be owned and who gets to do so. This will lead me to my second point where I want to outline why I believe expropriation to be a misguiding term that presupposes a natural ownership of property and by so doing hides the idea that an “expropriation” is not the act of taking away property but the societal act of renegotiating what property is.
Let us begin with some common conceptions about property. First it is important to note that although property was in fact a constant for most of human history, the understanding of it differed dramatically. Communist or anarchist societies highlight this well since property in these societies is considered to belong to everyone or those who most need it. Property is not absent but collectivized, which poses a fundamentally different understanding than the one we have today. In capitalist countries and nation states property plays a crucial role in deciding who owns what. In these systems arises the distinction between public and private property. Private property is owned by individuals or non-elected legal entities like companies. Public property is owned by an elected body such as a government. I find it somewhat misleading to call property owned by dictators or single party systems public since it fulfils roughly the same criteria as private property, the only difference being that the gracious owner decided to share his property with the public. In the contemporary understanding of property, the ability to use it does not determine whether it is ours. Just because I am using your pen after taking it from you does not make it mine. Property as we understand it today is instead based on the idea of ownership. If you own something, then it is your property. Thus, when we discuss common conceptions about property the real question should be when someone gains ownership over a good. A second question then is what can constitute a good according to our current societal understanding.
So how can anyone claim to own something? The short answer is that any way that other people are willing to accept works. In our contemporary world anything that we put work in belongs to us, or anything that was given to us through a contract. Salaries are a good example where you agree on a contract with a company where you give them your labour and they give you money which is then yours. Similarly, when you go to a shop and by something you also enter a contract where you receive a good in exchange for money. Now it is important to note that the only reason why these things are yours is because the large majority in your society accepts that it is in fact yours. Ownership is thus a consequence of labour and contracts. Furthermore, you cannot own everything. We agree today that owning people should not be a thing so even when you did buy them, and they let themselves be bought without coercion or a dire need for money (which is of course not how it worked historically) you do not get to own a person. That is despite going through the same process as any other product you could acquire. Thus, for private property, we can say that ownership can be achieved by either putting labour into something or entering contracts, but we can only own things that our society deems as ownable.
For public goods, or property owned by an elected government, determining ownership is even simpler. Something is public property if the majority decides that it is. Maybe there is some constitution that prevents decisions about ownership that discriminate against minorities so then you might need a two thirds majority or something similar, but you get the gist. The people decide what is public property. Anything can be public property. Even things outside the country in which the elected government resides can be public property you just have to take it from other people.
Here we get to a funny problem. If I say this is my property and you say its yours, who is right? Within states we can turn to the majority and see what they think but in interactions between states that is harder. Why? Because there is no one to enforce a majority decision. That brings us to the last point I want to raise before turning to expropriation. Unless we have a universally accepted understanding of property or ways in which to settle disputes (like courts or discourse) there is really no way to enforce property except for violence imprisonment and death. You say the orange juice in the fridge is yours, I say it is mine. We discuss for a bit, and you say it’s yours because you bought it, and I say it’s mine because I need it more. So, we turn to society, and they decide in your favour. But I still believe the orange juice is mine, I am super thirsty and desperate for a glass of orange juice. So, I take it out of the fridge and start drinking it. What can you do? Either you do nothing and accept that it is my orange juice after all. Or you use violence. You call the police and tell them how your crazy flatmate stole your orange juice. I will not give up my orange juice, so I fight with the police until they overwhelm me and put me in handcuffs. If I repeatedly challenge property in this way I will likely end up in prison. Property cannot exist without violence unless everyone accepts the terms and conditions of ownership or trusts the means of settling disputes. Since that is currently not the case you constantly use violence or the threat thereof to keep ownership over property that you think is yours. Now neither you nor me are willing to die over an orange juice but when it comes to a conflict between nations things are a bit different. What is at stake here is not just some delicious refreshing glass of orange juice but the land that people live on. Here people are willing to die to enforce their ownership. And it’s not just land. Think of the American civil war where half a nation fought, mostly to maintain their right to own a PoC. In modern capitalist systems, property needs violence (and in most others too).
Turning to my last point I want to touch own why expropriation is a misguiding term. If we accept that property is dependent on ownership and ownership is determined by whatever theory most people prefer, then agreeing to take someone’s property is simply the process of renegotiating ownership. Something was owned for reasons we decided on and now we changed the rulebook, and you do not own it anymore. At this point there is no property to take away anymore, nothing to expropriate. Now this might sound like plain semantics, but I think it is important to highlight that private property and ownership are not some natural things, but it is something we made up and is subject to change. The term expropriation how its currently used undermines this notion by making it seem like natural property is being taken away for one reason or the other. What is happening in reality though is that something which was considered the property of someone is their property no longer. The terms of what determines ownership have changed. The moment that happens, there is no property to take away anymore.
Lastly, I wated mention that initially my plan for this post was to discuss the inconsistencies of our current understanding of property but in writing this I realized how redundant that is. If we as society accept the inconsistencies of how we determine ownership, then who cares if the inconsistencies exist or not. It is not about having a consistent theory of property instead it is about having one that people agree on. A consistent theory might be convincing but it’s not what is relevant (I would also like to bring up the idea that it is the inconsistencies that might make our current understanding of property and ownership so attractive). I think it is also important to consider the reasons for why we accept one theory of property over another. Drawing on major philosophical theories I think we can make a distinction between output-based and input-based theories. In short do we care about the terms of ownership producing a certain output (for example functioning capitalist systems and global markets), or do we care about the input, which means expressing our contemporary understanding of justice and fairness in our terms of ownership without much consideration for output.
I want finish by saying that there is no natural ownership. What is and is not your property is, on a societal level, up for discussion so we can decide who gets to own what.
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Democratic Realism
The Assad regime has fallen. Now Syria needs democracy. This has been an almost universal demand by western leaders following the victory of HTS and other rebel groups in Syria. In addition, leaders demanded the protection of minorities, usually implying the formulation of a constitution. Whether Syria or elsewhere, it is a reflex by western leaders to demand these two benchmarks of any western government to be established. First, democratically elected leaders and second, a constitution which protects minority rights as well as the democratic institutions. But why? Is democracy the best political system? Does it work the same everywhere and in every situation? The western answer is yes.
Democracy as we know it today is a milestone in humanity’s eternal struggle to manage distribution of power in a way that is beneficial (measured by current standards) and addresses challenges such as urbanization, population growth, technological advancements and globalization. Its ability to come to decisions for millions of people while taking into consideration most voices is monumental. Some of the most successful states (using current standards such as life expectancy, GDP per capita and real purchasing power) were and still are democratic. Of course, there are many different forms of democracy but still if you look at the biggest economies today, most of them are democratic, but not all. It comes as no surprise then that many people in western nations consider democracy as the most successful political system. Its success in states across the globe, for instance Japan, Estonia or Costa Rica reinforces the notion that democracy is universally applicable. Democracy is seen as the final evolution of politics. This, of course, is nonsense.
It is nonsense not because I know a better political system but because assuming that any political or economic system is there too last is unrealistic at best. In fact, it is hard to believe that any system the human comes up with will last forever. Given the recent struggles that democratic states face with Trump being elected in the US and several European countries struggling to form governments I believe it is clear that despite being a decent political system, democracy is by far not the final one. And yet people struggle to imagine a viable alternative to democracy. Here is a good point to introduce one of my favourite books and the inspiration for this essay. ‘Capitalist Realism’ by Mark Fischer discusses how and why we cannot conceive a viable alternative to capitalism. Although not as desperate as the issue of alternative economic systems, I believe a similar development is taking place regarding political systems. The inability in western countries to imagine a viable alternative to democratic systems is democratic realism.
I add the western countries because in many non-democratic countries people find it easy to conceive alternative systems and think them viable as well. Thus, the issue is not a global one like capitalist realism but specifically applies to western nations and its people. By western I mean North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zeeland and a few other democracies like Costa Rica which might not be strictly western but due to the vagueness of this term I would add them to the list for this discussion.
In any case the issue of democratic realism in the western world is severe. There are few alternatives to democracy that are currently being lived and most of them are dismissed immediately often for good reason. This means that to develop new ideas for political system we must turn to theory. Here lies the problem. Although there are some people who theorize about new systems or even try them in small communities, the average citizen rarely knows these projects exist. Many non-average citizens do not either do not either. Being able to point at another nation and say, “look how they are doing things, what can we learn from that?” is what inspires reflection about one’s own political system. For most of human history interactions of this kind caused major shifts in political systems. For instance, the European Enlightenment period was in part kickstarted by interactions with radically different political and social systems lived by native Americans. Arguably these interactions, in combination with other factors such as an increasingly powerful merchant class or the rediscovery of ancient Greek authors, brought us democracy in Europe in the first place. All this is to say that we struggle to imagine alternative systems to the one we live in. Encountering a new system which developed independently from our own is the best and potentially the only good way in which we can truly imagine an alternative because it is real, it is being lived.
Theorizing about new forms of deliberative democracy, council systems or anarchy is destined to remain theory because except for a few experts who develop these theories or live it on a small scale (usually in dependence on systems in which their project is located) nobody can imagine how they might be lived. If we cannot imagine an alternative there might be one, but we will never achieve it. Even many political theorists these days will admit that their ideas for new political systems are more fundamental in nature. What rights should citizens have, how should wealth be distributed and so on. Nobody can (for the time being) create a complete and all-encompassing blueprint for a new political system and neither will they be able to prove that it is functional with complete certainty (or scientific certainty). And even if theorists could, who cares if you cannot see a nation or large group of people live this system and prove that it works.
What we are left with then is the system that we know. It is the only viable one for most people and despite its shortcomings we cannot come up with a good alternative. We make small adjustments here and there and maybe, in a few hundred years, people look back and realize that the systems did change and are now fundamentally different compared to our current ones. Still, a process without a vision or ideal is slow going and arduous. Democratic systems can already feel the strain of it. Things are changing but in tiny steps and without a clear direction. There is no new inspiration for change, no outlook for how things might be different. Thus, any politician regardless of where their political views lie, who promises anything that somewhat resembles a vision, is bound to be attractive to the people. But the only convincing vision is the one being lived. And so, given the lack of viable alternatives, politicians turn to the past. They promise to restore some lost aspects of the old system from 50 years back and although it is quite literally a backwards vision, it works, because people lived it. This is how democratic realism opposes even the change on a small scale and has the potential to undermine democracy itself. Maybe, the times when we still had strong rulers were better than the endless squabbling of politicians today? Maybe, the times where men held more power were better? Maybe, the times when we didn’t have diversity, immigration and globalization were better? Do you remember these days? Many do. And so democratic realism becomes a poison to democracy. Without a viable alternative but with a desperate need for a vision, an ideal, something to work towards, the only direction we know is backwards.
I do not know how to change this fact. I would love to pretend that theorizing until we find a convincing vision is the way forward, but I doubt it is. I do see value in projects that try to live alternative systems, but these are usually known only by the people who live them or are affiliated to them. In addition, the small scale makes it hard to believe how such an alternative might work in the world we live in. I also do see some value in small adjustments, that, over longer periods of time, will result in substantial changes. Small adjustments create security and prevent major missteps, but still, this resembles going on a hike without a map. Yes, you will move forward slow and steady but after a while you will start to wonder where it is that you are going. And every new step comes with more questions, more doubt, and then frustration. So, there is no doubt that we are in desperate need of a vision, an alternative political system. Without it we wander without purpose or, even worse, we retrace the steps we walked in the past.
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What is a Police State?
I am walking from Tahrir Square to my favourite cafe in Cairo called الحرية or Freedom. After no more than a few steps I look up and stand face to face with a police officer in full riot gear. Next to him are two more policemen, rifles in hand and behind them towers an armoured vehicle. Going around the vehicle I can see more policemen sitting inside through the shooting slits. As I discovered during my short stay in Cairo this is a common sight which makes it no less disturbing. Throughout the bustling streets of Cairo, police are positioned at every main street or intersection. The large chunks of metal and their motionless guards stand out in a city which is always on the move. It is a display of power. The policemen do not do anything, at least nothing that I observed, but they show everyone the might that will be directed towards them if they step out of line. It is the most obvious and blunt way to express power and not the one that the Egyptian state with Sisi at its head employs. Travelling throughout Egypt I noticed that one does not get further than 100km without a police control. Oftentimes the luggage is searched or I had to wait without apparent reason and no clue what to do next. The treatment of Egyptians was much worse than mine. Creating this uncertainty is a used often enough by those in power to show their control over you and yet every time I encounter it, I can feel how it works. The checkpoints along highways are supported by military vehicles often with mounted machineguns. The word “police” sprayed on the side of these vehicles fails to hide that the state is effectively using its military to control the Egyptian people. I chose these words carefully to convey that it feels as if the Egyptian people are controlled by an outside force, an occupier, which is the regime. As occupiers, the regime employs police and military to control Egypt. But blunt displays of power and control are not enough for a regime to truly control a population. The armoured trucks and policemen stand out too much, can be avoided too easily.
Apart from the normal cops, throughout Egypt there are policemen without uniform. Sometimes they were a walky-talky or a gun which outs them as policemen under closer inspection. Still there are many you do not see. In addition, there is also secret police without any of the tell-tale signs of a policemen and trained not to stand out. Despite the lack of surveillance cameras in many parts of Egypt the combination of police and secret police means that there is a constant sense of surveillance in public. With severe limitations on freedom of speech and political acts in general it means that it is almost impossible to have an open political discussion with an Egyptian citizen in public. Dissidents, journalists, and academics are all targets for the regime since they pose a significant threat to the regime. While controlling them in public is important because acts in this sphere influence others, it is equally important to control the private. Listening in on calls, hacking phone microphones or simply blocking people from accessing certain social media apps are some of the ways in which the Egyptian regime controls the private. Along with seemingly arbitrary arrests this creates fear, a feeling that I have encountered many times in my time in Egypt. Fear is the last component of the regime’s control over the Egyptian people.
From my experience it is safe to say that Egypt is a police state. But most definitions for the term lacked a dimension that I only discovered in my time in Egypt. It is the sense that the regime would be smashed to pieces by the people it occupies the moment that the control ceases. Throughout my time in Egypt and the interactions I had, this feeling was constantly hidden behind a façade put up to protect oneself from the regime. But it was there. Many Egyptian people are desperate for change. They think it impossible to reach and given the control that the Egyptian state exercises maybe they are correct. Still, I have no doubt that the slightest opportunity will be ceased. A police state lives of control, if it crumbles, people will be ready take it apart and hopefully, build something better from the pieces left.
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The Untold Consequences of War
No Signal
I am sitting in a café close to As-Salt drinking mint tea and looking across the Jordan Valley and the mountain range beyond where the sun is slowly setting. It is a remarkable sight, and one I wish to return to, so I take out my phone to save the café. Trying to find it on google maps I check my location and am surprised to discover that according to my phone, I am currently at Queen Alia Airport, about 50km away from where I actually am. Probably some malfunction with my phone I tell myself, so I ask my friend to find the café for me. After a minute he looks up at me from his phone in confusion and tells me his location on google maps is at Queen Alia Airport. So not a coincidence then. After some discussion as to why both of our phones are not working, we ask a local. She explains to us that Israel is jamming GPS signals in the border region between Israel and Jordan since April, when Iran attacked Israel with missiles and drones. For Israel it is a way to protect itself from GPS guided missiles. Having seen Iranian misses fly across the Jordanian sky myself, I can at the very least testify that this is protection against an existing threat. Still, it is something that I never heard about. It is also quite inconvenient. The signal is usually jammed in a 20km wide corridor along the 482km border with Israel, although it is happening most consistently in the North of Jordan. On some days the jamming reaches as far as Amman, leaving millions without GPS signal and thus complicating navigation. Especially among cab drivers who rely on GPS navigation for their income this has led to a lot of frustration.Like the jamming of GPS in Jordan, in this Post I want to draw your attention to the consequences of the war in Gaza, and now in Lebanon, which have largely gone unnoticed and unmentioned outside the Levant. What I discuss here is undoubtedly less severe than the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, but it deserves attention, nonetheless. I already talked about the jammed GPS signals and will now share a story about the Jordanian tourist industry. Lastly, I want to share my impression on the sentiments regarding the end of the wat and the future of this conflict. The three impressions are by far not all unmentioned consequences of war and yet I hope they will give you a better understanding of what is happening right now. In addition, they will illustrate to you how divers the impacts of conflict can be and make you look closer when considering other wars and conflicts and their consequences.
War and the Jordanian Tourist Industry
Two weeks ago, I went on a short trip to visit Wadi Mujib and Dana with some friends. After visiting Wadi Mujib and Wadi Al Hasa on the first day, we arrived late in the evening in a small village close to Dana, where we had booked a cabin. The host welcomed us warmly and after dinner and some small talk, he expressed his gratitude choosing to book one of his cabins for the night. His business consisted of eight small cabins to sleep in which he had built around 3 years ago together with his brothers. He was and still is working as a teacher. Initially he wanted to make the cabins his main source of income and quit working as a teacher and in the first two years after building the cabins it seemed like the plan would work out. The cabins where often all booked and even in winter there were plenty of tourists coming. He hosted people from all around the world, eating, singing and dancing with them in the communal building we had eaten in as well and were now having tea. The income was covering the investment he and his brothers had made to construct the cabins. Then, in the evening of October 7th, 2023, our host recalled how his phone was buzzing with more and more cancelations. He told us that at first, he thought it was coincidence, that a few people decided to cancel their trip at the same time, but the cancelations kept coming. The next morning, he read the news and immediately understood what was happening. At the end of the week, most of the cabins were empty and stayed that way until now. He has guests around once a month now, usually foreigners who work or live in Jordan. We were his first guests since August. He expressed his hope for the war to end soon. Most importantly so that killing of civilians ends but also because then tourists will return to Jordan.With its rich culture, religion, beautiful nature and long history, Jordan has the potential to attract tourists from all around the world. Yet the conflict in the region deters many from coming. After a sharp drop in tourism after the Arab spring, the industry recovered, benefitting from Jordans stability. State, businesses and private individuals invested in accommodating, entertaining and educating tourists. Much of the infrastructure that was developed in the past decade is now unused. Overall, the number of tourists has decreased by 7% in 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, causing losses of around 350 million USD. The losses are however very unevenly spread. The number of tourists from other Arab countries has barely decreased while the number of American tourists halved and the number of European tourists decreased by 40% compared to last year. This means that sectors catering to these tourists are hit particularly hard, like our host who mainly accommodated European tourists before the war started.
Resignment and Hopelessness
The War has also led to a less tangible change. A change in mood. A Jordanian friend who worked in peace initiatives for 30 years, told me that he had lost hope to ever find out what peace in the Levant looks like. He has largely given up on peace initiatives and now focuses on the wellbeing of the Jordanian people. It is an attitude that I encounter almost daily. A large part of Jordan’s population has Palestinian roots, and they closely watch as their country shrinks, and their people are being murdered in Gaza and the West Bank. There is outrage but it there is also resignment and hopelessness. Whenever I bring up the topic with people from the Levant, they all tell me the same. Violence will not bring them peace and justice, but diplomacy and negotiation will not either. The only reasonable course of action then is to continue with life. Try to take care of family and friends who are affected or put in danger by the war. Attend the weekly protest in Amman’s city centre where the demands for peace and justice which have been repeated for decades sound more unachievable and hollow every week. It is disheartening but understandable that so many people have given up. I had no clue how the War could be ended, and the underlying conflict be resolved before I first came to Jordan. Having lived here for almost two months I know even less. I understand why conversations on this topic always end in one sentence. إن شاء الله, if God wills it. Many people in Jordan have lost faith in the ability of Jordan and its neighbours to end this conflict. I am not religious, so to me turning to God is not a very convincing course of action. Yet, I do believe the chance of divine intervention resolving this conflict might be similar to the chance of people doing so. Frustratingly low. -
Voting Age To 0
Introduction
The title of this post might confuse some people, but it is by no means far-fetched. I will admit it involves some click-bait because I do not want to argue here that we should carry 1-year olds to the polling station and let them place an X for the party they prefer. Instead, the idea is that 1-year olds ought to be able to vote but for practical reasons cannot. The tension of these two assumptions must be resolved and that is precisely what I set out to do today.The Right to Vote
I want to start by justifying the two assumptions I outlined in the introduction. First, is why should a 1-year-old have the right to vote. The answer can be found at the foundations of any democratic system and for simplicity will be split in two arguments although there are undoubtedly more than that. The first argument is a practical one. For a political system to be functional it helps if people can influence the decisions imposed on them. Otherwise, why should you follow the laws imposed on you, especially if they are not in your favour? Think of the following situation. You want to grab dinner with your friends. You disagree on where to go but two of your friends say they will decide and end up deciding against your preferred restaurant. Does not sound very nice, does it? Now instead think of the same situation but you and your friends deliberate the price and quality of each choice. In the end you vote, and your choice ends up as the minority. Still, we feel much better in complying with the imposed decision, right? This is the practical argument. If we want a functional political system, it helps if people at the very least think they can influence decisions. In democracy this influence is achieved in part though voting.This brings us to the second argument which is an issue of legitimacy. As a citizen of a democratic system, you get to vote and participate in the general political discourse but thus must accept its decisions even when you do not agree. Most people must accept the decisions because they cannot choose their citizenship. If someone cannot choose their citizenship and do not get to vote, then they simply do not live in a democracy. For a political system to be legitimate democracy all citizens must be able to vote. It follows naturally that 1-year olds should be able to vote as well. They were not able to choose their citizenship so for a system to be democratic it must allow them to vote. In addition, minors might not realize their state of oppression but especially when considering teenagers shortly before voting they are very much aware of the fact that decisions are imposed on them while they have few ways to influence them.
Practical Issues of Children Voting
This brings us to the second assumption which is the practical issue of having children vote. To be quite honest I do not think that many children will make voting decisions which are much worse than over voters above 18. The simple reason for this is that while children cannot make informed decisions, they at the very least do not make misinformed decisions. Still, they are more easily manipulated and strategies to gain their votes are likely to not have much to do with actual politics. I am anticipating that the contest to gain children’s votes will quickly devolve into a contest of who has the most attractive party logo. Or maybe who is best able to equip parents with the skills necessary to make their kids vote for the party that they vote for. This would be funny to observe, but not very productive for a democratic system. In any case I think it to be quite obvious why children cannot vote and will not use more of your and my own to time to explain why this is. At what age they can, I do not know, although I am generally in favour of 16. The main reason for this is that with voting cycles being usually every 4 years lowering the voting age to 16 would mean that citizens vote, on average, with 18 for the first time.Solutions
So, what about the children between 0 and 16? For a democratic system to be legitimate they should be able to vote but because of practical reasons they cannot. Here I quickly want to highlight the severity of this issue using the US as an example. Currently, 22% of US citizens cannot vote due to their age. With a life expectancy of 76 years a US citizen will on average miss 5 elections due to age which make up around a fifth of the 19 votes they could have had in their life. Age excludes every fifth US citizen from voting and makes the average citizen miss one fifth of the votes in which they could have participated.There are some ways to address this issue. One could be to give parents the votes of their kids. In the best-case parents will use their own vote on issues they are concerned about and use their kids vote on issues that the kid cares about such as better education, child protection, a liveable climate and so on. In the worst-case parents will simply treat their kids votes as they own giving significant power to large families. As you can probably imagine this is not the best of solutions.
Instead, I want to propose something else. Every time a child misses an election due to their age, they get an extra vote once they old enough to vote. If voting age is 16, a child could miss 4 votes until they can vote for the first time. To make up for this, they can then vote twice in the four elections after they are eligible to vote. This would have several positive effects. First it addresses the tension between maintaining a democratic political system while dealing with the practical issue of children not being able to vote. In addition, it gives young people additional votes which is crucial in aging societies especially in Europe and the US where most voters are now over 50. Furthermore, people tend to vote on issues that affect themselves or are close to them. Consequently, issues such as education, childcare and investment in universities are not very popular in political discourse because only a small share of voters are experiencing or have recently experienced them. Still these issues are crucial for a functional society and putting more focus on these issues by letting people to vote twice for every election they missed could help to improve policy making in these fields. There are still some benefits I left undiscussed here just as there are downsides. There are most certainly also other ways to overcome the tensions between maintaining a democratic system while facing the practical issue that children cannot vote. I will conclude my post here however, so it does not become to long and I invite you to think about this issue yourself.
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Boycotts and the Jordanian Economy
Boycotts in Jordan
As the days in Amman are getting cooler, I find increasingly pleasant to stroll around the city. Small shops, restaurants, and the occasional supermarket are complemented with street vendors and the unmistakable jingle of the pick-up trucks which deliver water and gas. But there is something missing. Something, I could not place my finger on until I was standing in front of a large commercial building with the logos of McDonalds and Starbucks outside. The building, I quickly noticed, was entirely empty. Still, it looked as if it has not been like this for long. I started to pay attention to large chains and discovered that almost all of them had closed. The only thing I could find was a small Carrefour close to where I live which was full of products but no customers in sight. I already had a suspicion what the cause of the closing of so many large chains might be, and it was confirmed in a conversation with a friend. He was born in Jordan, but his family is originally from Palestine, a story that he shares with many people who live in Amman. He explained to me that most of the large chains like McDonalds or Starbucks are being boycotted. McDonalds for instance gave out free meals for IDF soldiers in Israel. My friend also pointed out companies which I did not notice are being boycotted. Pepsi for instance was a widely available product until the end of 2023 where boycotts started to show their impact. Now you will struggle to find it anywhere in Jordan. Pepsi products have been replaced by Matrix, a Jordanian soft drink producer which brings us to the topic I want to discuss today. Boycotts in Jordan have been more effective than I ever thought they could be. By effective I do not mean that companies changed their behaviour because of them, for that Jordan is unfortunately too small of a market. Instead, I mean that Jordanians have done what is within their power. They boycotted companies tied to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land so consistently that they are forced to close shop in Jordan. Something like that would be unimaginable in Europe where boycotts tend to put a small dent into companies’ profits at most. As a consequence of boycotting some international companies, Jordanian consumers have sought alternative products, often Jordanian ones, such as Matrix soft drinks.The Impact of Boycotts on Domestic Markets
There is a lot of theory that explores the ethical, political and economic dimensions of boycotts. Something that I could not find however is how boycotts affect domestic markets not of the boycotted country, but of the one that is doing the boycotting. I think that is a consequence of most of this research being conducted in countries which never experienced boycotts that were so effective that companies had to close shop. I do not want to get in a complex statistical analysis here, mainly because I do not have the skills or data for that, yet. Instead, I want to outline some key factors to consider when discussing the impact of boycotts on domestic markets using Jordan as a case study.The first factor I already touched upon is the substitution of boycotted products with alternative ones. The key question here is, if consumers switch to domestically produced goods or simply to another foreign producer. If the latter is the case, then there will hardly be any change in the domestic markets. If, people do switch to domestic brands, for example with Pepsi being substituted with Matrix, domestic demand for these goods increases. The likely impact of this development would be higher employment, profits which are invested in the domestic markets and higher taxes paid to the Jordanian government. All of these would be positive effects for Jordan. This effect points to two other factors, employment and profits as well as where they are invested. As McDonalds and Starbucks are closing a key question is if enough consumption shifts to other companies so that they employ the equivalent amount of those who lost their jobs at the boycotted companies. If that is not the case than the total disposable income in Jordan decreases which would have negative effects for its economy. The last factor is profits and investment. If boycotted goods are substituted with domestic ones, then profits will stay in the domestic market. A rising demand for these goods will also create an incentive to invest these profits into the domestic market. This again would be coupled with additional employment. These factors are just the surface, and it is hard to guess how big the impact of boycotts on domestic markets is without data and statistical analysis. Still, I found it an interesting facete of boycotts and one that, in my opinion, deserves more attention.
Final Remarks
I want to conclude by pointing you to the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement (BDS). The movement originated in the BLM movement and is now mostly concerned with ending the support of companies which profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. In the recent past it has also been applied to environmental protection and climate justice. Regardless of the cause, you will find plenty of information online, which explain how and why BDS works. Something that I particularly like is that websites and apps often provide short and clear outlines why they think a company should be boycotted and what this company should do if it wants boycotters to buy their products again. In addition, they let you take pictures or scan Barcodes of products in the supermarket to quickly find out if you should buy them or not. It is an easy way to make a small difference, and I invite you to become part of the movement.
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Of Sameness and Difference
Introduction
Differences between humans are omnipresent. Sameness, though rarer, is also in plentiful supply, especially when theoretical concepts like rights are involved. But when do difference and sameness become a normative and political issue? How should we deal with them and what are their consequences? These are the questions I seek to answer in this essay. In this process I will explain the difference between difference and sameness on the one, and (in)equality on the other side. I will then outline why beyond ethical considerations, all (in)equality requires justification. In the next step we can then look at what these justifications can look like.(In)equality is Normative
In the framework I try to establish here equality and inequality are inherently normative because they are the normative expressions for sameness and difference. That is to say that a difference in income between two people is simply an observation or a fact. An inequality in income is a normative observation which requires justification. Two people receiving the same benefits is again an observation, receiving equal benefits is a normative observation which requires justification. Any equality or inequality between people that lacks justification is unjust. Justification here can be derived from an academic discourse or political means. The latter could be for instance that a majority believes an (in)equality to be justified. I would locate this framework in the tradition of ethical emotivism, in which ethics are an expression of our emotions. Something is wrong, or unjust, first and foremost because we experience it to be so.Why Does (In)equality Need Justification?
Apart from ethical considerations there are also practical reasons why (in)equality must be justified. Ultimately people are disinclined to accept (in)equality without reason because it triggers our inherent desire for justice and fairness. We feel that something is unjust, it makes us angry, sad or frustrated. In this framework any (in)equality for which people do not demand justification has been falsely labelled and should be called difference or sameness instead. That is because if people do not demand justification, it seems it does not bother them much. For example, people rarely get angry about the fact that some are taller than others. It is thus an issue difference, rather than inequality. Now you might ask why people believing an (in)equality to be unjust is of relevance. I might point to an unjustified (in)equality and be outraged by it but why should you care? In short, because me and most other people are willing to go to great lengths to address injustice including armed conflict, sabotage and grass-roots redistribution (boring people call it theft). If you care about living in a peaceful and stable society, (in)equality matters. (In)equality then, needs justification so that we feel that power, wealth, chances or even natural predispositions are distributed in a fair way. Some have power because they are strong, some were wealthy because God said they are monarchs, we receive the same education so that we have equal chances, you are healthy because you have done good in your past life. Anything can be a justification, but we do need it. If people are faced with (in)equality and there is no good justification and nothing is done to address the (in)equality the consequence is conflict. Thus, beyond a theoretical discourse, determining where (in)equalities exist and assessing how convincing their justifications are is crucial if we seek to avoid conflict.What Is a Good Justification?
Justifications can range from reasonable, to funky to downright insane. Here are some:- Some have power because God told the Pope that they are monarchs
- Everyone receives equal education so that we have equal chances
- Some are healthier than others because they did good in their past life
- Some are wealthy because their parents are rich
- Some are poor because they do not work enough
- Everyone has equal rights because we are all humans
Anything can be a justification, but we do need it. If people are faced with (in)equality and there is no good justification, and nothing is done to address the (in)equality the consequence is conflict. Thus, beyond a theoretical discourse, determining where (in)equalities exist and assessing how convincing their justifications are is crucial if we seek to avoid conflict. Justifications for inequality or equality do not need internally sound, but they must be convincing enough to those affected. I want to stress that ANY social system whether unequal or equal in wealth, power, chances, spiritual status and so on must have convincing justifications for differences or the lack thereof so that those affected can consider it fair. Still the justifications must only be perceived to be convincing. Faith and spirituality for instance may seem to some to be a rather poor justification for inequality but if people perceive it to be convincing, then they believe the (in)equality to be just. That is why analysing and challenging contemporary justifications is so crucial. An inequality must always be justified or resolved. But if both equality and inequality must be justified then there is two ways to do so. The first is to strip the (in)equality of its normative status and turning into sameness or difference. People might have sought justifications for the inequality in health and attributed it to God or Witches or past lives. With advancements in medicine, we discovered that some diseases are caused genetically about which we cannot do much yet. The issue was thus turned into a difference rather than an inequality. With further advancements in medicine, we might be able to treat genetic diseases in the future and depending on how affordable these treatments we are likely to bring the issue back into the realm of inequality. The second, and much more common way to resolve a conflict around (in)equality is done by redefining justification. We can redefine justifications to make them more convincing given our existing circumstances. For example, excess wealth used to be justified by societal status which granted land ownership. With the rise of a mercantile class and later capitalists during the industrialization, wealth inequality persisted but the old justifications were unconvincing. Thus, a new justification to fit existing circumstances was necessary. We created the idea that excess wealth was not a consequence of exploitation but instead hard work and smart investments. As dumb as this justification might be to some of you it still works today. It gets more complicated when we face an injustice based on (in)equality which cannot be resolved simply by changing or adapting the justification. Most civil rights movements are good examples where an inequality in rights cannot be addressed by changing justifications for inequality. This was attempted of course, think of racial profiling where people have effectively less rights. The justification used to be based on genetics where minorities are profiled because they are for example People of Colour. To maintain this inequality a new justification was created in which we take a detour by saying that some minorities have less wealth and are thus more likely to commit crimes. This justifies racial profiling but not because they are of that minority but because they are more likely to commit crimes due to their socio-economic circumstances. Of course, the two are inherently linked and the new justification changes nothing about the fact that wherever we permit racial profiling we give less rights to affected minorities. Anyway, if the conflict about exiting (in)equalities is successful we then have a both a change in justification and in circumstances. Women are equal to men so they can work, vote, open bank accounts, and earn the same wages. Once men were clever enough to listen to women and realize this, people started to change circumstances by giving women (un)equal rights based on new justifications centred around (in)equality. Since most were concerned with rights they were mostly about giving equal rights to women, but some are in fact unequal and for good reason. For example, men do not get pregnant and have to give birth so giving equal rights in a work environment would ultimately disadvantage women. To give all equal chances to have successful careers and earn equal wages we must have unequal rights.
So we know that difference and sameness, if normatively charged, become equality and inequality which both require justification. This justification is necessary to avoid conflict. If some people consider a justification to be unconvincing, they must point out why it is unconvincing and why an alternative justification is better or why a change in whatever creates the (in)equality is necessary. But if any (in)equality is unproblematic if it is supported by a justification that is perceived to be convincing then why should we prefer one system of (in)equality over another? As long as everyone is on board it seems like it really does not matter whether we find ourselves in a dictatorship or democracy and how much wealth a small minority has or does not have. Here we come to the last point which is conflicting values.
(In)equality and Conflicting Values
In short, the point here is that whether we believe any system or status quo to be “good” is not just dependent on (in)equality but other factors as well. These can be summarized in values derived from input and output-based theories. Although most people probably do not consciously think in these categories most opinions on values can be assigned to one or both of these categories. Input based justifications rest on intention, principles and rules. For example, it is ethical to steal food if your intention is to save a starving kid. Or following the rule or principle that anything is permissible to save your own life you can use violence to defend yourself against an attacker. Emotivism can also be located here but we do not consciously think about rules or principles but instead we derive them from our emotions towards an issue. Stealing food to save a kid’s life feels right and so it is. Of course, these cases are uncontroversial, but they serve to illustrate how input-based ethics approaches a question. Output-based ethics in contrast focus on the consequences of an action. Often this is approach is summarized under utilitarian principles such as any action should bring about the greatest love for the greatest number. Or, that we should aim to increase average wellbeing for everyone. Stealing is permissible then if the positive consequences outweigh the negative ones.Now let us say that you believe people should not starve based on your principles. Then any system no matter how internally sound it may be will come under scrutiny if it leads to people starving to death. Similarly, if you believe that addressing climate change is necessary based on a utilitarian calculus then any system which exhibits (in)equality that is conducive to damages to our climate will, again, come under scrutiny. Justifications for (in)quality are mainly reliant on being internally sound but can be challenged if arrangements contradict other values that we hold. It might have seemed like a justified inequality that women cannot vote but it conflicts with ideas of human equality, representative democracy, universal rights, self-determination and so on.
I run out of space here and believe this essay to be filled enough of my opinions already. I also already wrote a long time on this essay and want to get it done so this will be a bit of a ramble. I want to stress however that current arrangements of (in)equality are shit. They might be better than they used to be, but they ultimately stand in the way of sustainability, peace and human welfare globally. But why is it so hard to change them. The question we should ask instead is “qui bono?”, who profits? Limiting extensive rights to white men with property was understandable, if cruel, from a male perspective because they maintained power and wealth. Having power and wealth it was easy for them to supress any kind of resistance or opposing views to this arrangement. Today the situation is more complex because interest groups are harder to define but the issue remains. People or legal entities with wealth and power will cling to whatever allows them to remain rich and powerful. People do not want climate change but big oil wants profits, so they stall, while their CEO’s earn so much money that their CO2 emissions are often thousands of times higher than that of the average person (globally). The Zuckerbergs of this world want to maintain control over public discourse so they invoke ideas of freedom of expression while their platforms make people depressed, lonely, anorexic, violent and ultimately misinformed about Zuckerberg’s rich friends so that they can stay in power. All of this are generalizations of course but as far as generalizations go, I think this is one of the more accurate ones. To maintain their dominance these interest groups must prevent that contemporary arrangements of (in)equality are challenged. They do so by controlling media outlets, social media platforms, spreading misinformation and lobbying. But this is not a pessimistic outlook, it is a description of our current condition. We are on a good way to put an end to patriarchy (mainly talking about Europe here) and have already won some major battles regarding equal rights. Defeating rich white men is almost synonymous with defeating the rich and powerful today. If we done it once, we can do it again.
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How (not) to Recapture Voters from Right-Wing Parties
Democracies in Europe are straining under external and internal pressures. Rising inequality, climate change, flagging productivity growth, Russia’s invasion into Ukraine, Trump. Although differing in their severity the mounting pressure has had several impacts on Europe’s political landscape, the most prominent issue being the rise of right-wing parties. In this essay I want to explore how the concept of issue ownership can be used to explain current changes in Europe’s political landscape and challenge the strategies of ongoing efforts halt the rise of right-wing parties. For that purpose, we must first understand what issue ownership means and its relevance in the competition for votes. Then we can use the concept to criticize current strategies. I will conclude with some opinions on dealing with Europe’s right, their agenda and their voters.
Understanding Issue Ownership
At its core, issue ownership refers to political parties having “ownership” over an issue because voters consider them most competent in addressing it. It is then assumed that whenever a topic is discussed over which a party has issue ownership it benefits this party in the competition for votes. This is regardless of whether the parties name or agenda is mentioned or not. Issue ownership is ultimately a personal judgment because each voter must decide whether they consider a party to be competent in addressing a given issue or not. If on a country level most voters, consider one party to be most competent in addressing a specific issue, then this party has ownership over the issue. A crucial underlying assumption here is that the quality of policy proposals and the party’s manifesto are only relevant in so far as they impact the perceived competence of a party to address an issue. It is very much possible that a party’s policy proposals are utter rubbish and yet voters still consider them to be most competent. This could happen for instance because the previous track-record of the party is convincing or simply because some members perform well in debates and press conference. Given the fact that most voters are not able to analyse party manifestos and policy proposals of all parties on all issues and judging their quality, there is bound to be a discrepancy between the quality of solutions by a party for an issue and how competent voters perceive this party to be. I believe this discrepancy to be rather large. Thus, a party might have issue ownership over an issue for which they have no convincing strategy to tackle it. I would go so far as to say that competence is hardly a criterium given voters inability to judge, but instead party identity. Conservative parties centre around security and a liberal economy. Green parties, focus on sustainability, while socialist parties revolve around workers’ rights and social security. That is of course an oversimplification, but you get the gist. Voters have an image of a party and if their current concerns match with the identity of a party they are likely to vote for that party while mostly disregarding actual competence. If we now consider how people make their voting decisions employing the framework of issue ownership, we must ask two questions. What are the voter’s current concerns. Which party has issue ownership over which issues. When concerns match issue ownership then the voter is likely to vote for that party. As mentioned before, issue ownership can be achieved through perceived competence which is influenced by actual competence but also by party identity (among other factors of course but I will focus on these two). The balance between competence and party identity is crucial which will become clear in the next paragraph where we will look at current strategies to halt the rise of right-wing parties.Current Strategies
In response to the rise of right-wing parties, other parties have tried to capture their voters by developing their own solutions for problems raised by the right. Whether these issues should be addressed to begin with I will get to later. Currently, most mainstream parties assume that it is the quality of their policy proposals which ultimately convinces voters. They might be so convincing that a party gains ownership over an issue but at the very least they can contest proposals by right-wing parties. The assumption is that they can capture voters on any issue if they are able to communicate effective solutions. If voters are concerned about issues surrounding migration, centre parties focus on this issue by developing and communicating their own ideas of how to address this issue. If voters are convinced by effective policies this strategy would be sound, given that many right-wing parties lack any convincing strategies of how to tackle migration. But what if voters do not care about the quality of the policies but instead, vote based on issue ownership? If issue ownership was derived only from competence, then the result would be the same. But it is not competence, but perceived competence influenced by party identity, which matters. Then the strategy of developing convincing solutions to issues raised by the right does not weaken them but has precisely the opposite effect.Why Current Strategies are Counterproductive
By communicating strategies to tackle, for example, issues surrounding migration, mainstream parties draw attention to this topic. It then rises in the voters ranking of issues they are concerned with. Rember that the first question we must ask is what the voter’s current concerns are. If politicians from all parties and consequently media and social media only talk about migration, then this issue will be prevalent. Continuing with migration we then must ask which party has ownership over this issue, meaning that they are perceived to be most competent in dealing with it. For most left-wing and centre parties, migration does not fit their party identity or only on a tangent. To stress this, point most voters will not be convinced by a green party’s policy proposals to tackle the issue of migration because it is not their domain. It might even be the case that left-wing parties cannot formulate solutions to issues such as too much immigration because it goes against their party identity. The issue does not fit to the party and contradicts their identity even if their proposals are convincing. It is a fickle thing to pin down party identity of course and it differs between voters, but I think you have a feeling of what I am getting at. Coming back to issue ownership and the notion that it is party identity rather than competence which impacts the perceived competence of parties then the problem becomes obvious.Parker must vote soon and all they heard about recently was migration. Even the centre parties for which they voted last time are discussing nothing else. They say it’s too expensive to integrate refugees, and that they are a security risk and so on. Parker wanted to have look at the party manifestos of each party but did not find the time and finds it difficult to judge whether policies like more border controls or better integration will help the issue. Still, they are concerned because everyone seems to be concerned with the issue. Parker is now standing in the ballot box and must decide which party to vote for. The green parties? Well, they have something to do with sustainability. The socialist and centre, right? They are all about workers right and such. Maybe conservative parties since they are all about security, that feels like a better fit. And yet the party that has been talking non-stop about migration even long before the election was the right-wing party.
I find this explanation of why addressing issues raised by the right is counterproductive strategy quite intuitive. These parties have been talking about nothing else but issues surrounding migration, refugees, LGBTQ+ and so on. In most people’s minds these right-wing parties are perceived to be most competent in tackling these issues. They have issue ownership over them. Constantly talking about these issues does not win voters back but instead just increases the number of voters who are now concerned with issues over which the right has issue ownership. Centre parties are talking about ever more right-wing talking points which normalizes them and at the same time confirms that there is something to worry about. But when it comes to elections, people will always choose the original brown shit by right-wing parties rather than the microwaved instant shit offered by centre parties.
Shifting Public Discourse
Of course there is a large variety of strategies to recapture voters from the right, but I want to stay withing the framework I created so far which offers to main avenues. We can make people be less concerned about issues over which the right-wing parties have issue ownership. Or we can contest the issue ownership. Let us start with the first. Here the goal is to shift public discourse. I think there are issues people are taught to be concerned about such as migration and there are issues that people are concerned about because of experience (or a combination of both). When we shift the discourse, we must tackle both.Many of the right-wing talking points are taught issues. Think for example of rural dwellers who never met a migrant but are still concerned about foreigners imposing their culture on Germans. There is no experience to trigger this concern, it is entirely taught. We must teach people to be concerned about other things like climate change (something that is only starting to be experienced now). In addition, we must also give a bigger platform to issues experienced by voters which go unaddressed and are rarely mentioned in public discourse. Think of the inability to find affordable housing and pay rent or public safety for people from the FLINTA community. This is not just up to politicians but also media and civil society but there is a feedback loop that must be broken here. Media reports on what politicians say which influences people’s opinion which is then represented in media and influences politicians (very much simplified). If any of these players can contribute to break the loop. How? Simply ignore right-wing talking points and raise issues over which centre parties hold issue ownership or which are experienced by voters. In political debates for instance whenever someone raises concerns about the security risks of migration instead of elaborating on convincing ideas of how to solve these issues one should instead just change the topic. Deaths from terrorist attacks by migrants are far surpassed by deaths from femicides for example. Of course, both are horrible but in terms of relevance it can easily be claimed that femicides and misogyny are a much more important security risk given their prevalence.
Furthermore, we must also figure out what voters are really concerned with. Every day we hear about migration so if you ask a random person on the street, they will undoubtedly mention this as a major issue. But continue the conversation and many people are more concerned about losing their house due to rent hikes than lose their life in a terrorist attack. It might seem a bit arrogant to say that the concerns that people raise are not what they are actually concerned about. And there is truth to that. But to strengthen my claim I would like to highlight how we know what people are concerned about: Surveys. It is stunning how much of what is discussed in political campaigns is based on surveys which often pose a handful of yes or no questions to a few hundred participants. Even elections can be seen as a form of survey. These surveys can be called quantitative research, where we ask a large number of people a few short questions. But there is also qualitative research. A method centred around taking a deep dive with a few participants into a specific issue. There is very little research that tries to capture what people are concerned with using a qualitative approach mainly because doing so with a representative sample is almost impossible due to resource constraints. But I would hypothesize that such research would reveal significant discrepancies between issue rankings in quantitative surveys versus qualitative surveys. To change the issues people are concerned with we thus need to do two things. We need to ignore taught issues by the right and introduce our own, preferably relevant ones which are currently not experienced by many like climate change. We also must figure out what people are concerned with based on their everyday experience so that we can give a bigger platform to them. To do so I would recommend doing more qualitative research rather than quantitative surveys.
Contesting Right-Wing Issue Ownership?
The other point of leverage would be to challenge right wing issue ownership over specific issues such as migration. Although possible I think this is not a very smart approach for one simple reason. Often, they do not matter. They are taught issues which many people do not experience and can therefore not be tackled anyway. Consider the outrage of the right over efforts to make language more inclusive. You now have a significant number of people who hate the fact that we should use inclusive language although in their life they have never been forced to use it. Right-wing parties are exceptionally good at making up an issue, talking about it all the time and make it feel relevant to voters for whom it is, in reality, utterly irrelevant. Why should any party that takes itself serious try to gain issue ownership over irrelevant issues? Furthermore, the only convincing way to do so would be to offer solutions. But how can a made-up issue have a solution? Trying to solve the “issue of migration” is like trying to get rid of the ghost underneath your kid’s bed. You cannot tackle it by addressing it, you tackle it by distracting from it until we all forget that it ever was an issue. Best case scenario a party does end up in control of a largely irrelevant issue. That would deprive right wing parties of it but has little impact on how well of the voters are. Worst case the attempt to contest issue ownership just draws additional attention to an irrelevant issue over which right-wing parties have issue ownership leading to even more voters electing them. What is happening right now is a combination of both scenarios. To a non-issue like migration and recapture voters from the right, mainstream parties try to prevent migration from happening. This means starving European economies of foreign workers, breaking humanitarian law, and abandoning ethical treatment of those looking for security and better opportunities, while right-wing parties are still growing. Everyone loses. And the problem? Well, it is still there. It is made up so there is no solution. Now it is not foreign migrants who are the issue but those who already have citizenship but “refuse to integrate”. The new talking point is “remigration”. Once mainstream parties jump on that idea the next issue will be to fortify Europe’s borders and so on. There is no solution to a made-up issue, so it is remarkably stupid to try to address it. Instead of trying to tackle made up issues over which the right holds issue ownership we must distract and shift our focus on more pressing matters. If we do so we not only avoid wasting time and energy tackling made up issues, but we also avoid doing harm by trying to tackle them and ultimately recapture voters from the far right by stopping to parrot their talking points and shifting the political discourse to issues that they do not hold issue ownership over. Lastly, I want to comment on the made-upness of issues and people’s concerns. I have been claiming that there are no issues surrounding migration and of course that is not true. There are many issues. From safer migration routes, to integration, to security risks. But the issue is heavily over-inflated and many of the issues surrounding it are made up. For example, migrants do not threaten the “cultural sphere of the occident”. I am also aware that claiming people’s concerns are made up is well-founded but of course not always true. Someone who lost a loved one or family member to a terrorist attack for instance has a very real concern about safety based on experience. I do not believe the solution is to stop migrants from entering the country, but this concern must be acknowledge. For simplicity’s sake I presented both the made-upness of issues and “reality” of people’s concerns as black and white, and I just want to point out that I know it is not always like that. Usually, I think, it is purple -
Compulsory Military Service in Germany
Putin’s willingness to launch a full-on invasion on Ukraine without provocation and sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Russian lives is scary. In Germany this sparked fears about a potential war against Russia which has led to a significant increase in military spending and discussions about a compulsory military service. It is no secret that the state of Germanies military is far from stellar. Still the plans to address this issue are questionable. In this essay I will address some statements and notions I have picked up in debates on the compulsory military service and give my thoughts to them. In the end I will outline some concerns that receive little attention in the current debate.
“Democracies must defend themselves”
A common conception is that we must fight if we are being attacked. Killing the aggressor is always better than being conquered. It has become almost a precursor to debates on military service to say that “democracies must defend themselves”. Usually this is done by people who most certainly would not fight themselves. But must democracies defend themselves?Let’s say France invades Germany with the goal of introducing French rule of law and force all Germans to speak French. Most people would not be happy about that, but neither would they be willing to fight a war over this. I hope. Sure, it is not great, but do we need to kill people over it? Luckily, we have democratic institutions to decide. So, we could have a referendum before mobilizing the military in which two thirds of Germans vote to accept French rule of law. Well then, we would not fight right? That is all to say that democracies are the only political system in the world where its citizens (should) decide whether they want to fight or not. Undermining this idea by saying democracies must defend themselves as if it is the most common-sense idea is undemocratic and shows a lack of understanding for the democratic privileges we enjoy.
I do want to add three things. First, a Russian invasion does not mean we must learn Russian. At least not only that. It also means targeted killings of minorities, opposition and the arrest of all dissidents. And that is just the bloody tip of the iceberg. Ukraine where (to my knowledge) a majority is still willing to fight is a good example of people in a democratic system choosing to fight, because the alternative is worse. Second, we must ask ourselves under which conditions it may be democratic to vote on the end of democracy and if democracies can and should be able to abolish themselves through a popular vote. I do not want to go into this discussion but I think in a defence scenario a lot of it depends on what the consequences of a military conflict would be. Third, I think it is important to have democracies build in a way where citizens can decide who and when to fight. Martial law and forced conscriptions can very quickly lead to a point where it is not the citizens deciding but a few political and/or economic elites who will never be on the frontline themselves. Putin, by means of being a psychopathic dictator, can force Russians to fight. Democracies and their citizens do not have to fight, they can fight, if they so choose, let’s keep it that way.
Why does Germany need 20.00 soldiers?
So, Germany does not have to fight, but let’s say its citizens choose to fight or to invest in their military as part of a deterrence strategy. What do we need compulsory military service for? Well to fill the free positions in the military. But what do we need those for? Why do we need 20,000 additional people working for the military and how will compulsory service fill these positions?In short, it was decided that to defend Germany and based on current and predicted vacancies the military needs around 200,000 soldiers. Currently it has only around 180,000 soldiers. That means we need 20,000 more. Simple enough. Why exactly we need them is hard to discern. In official statements and interviews terms like “the ability to defend Germany” are often used, but it is hard to come by any specific information. Germanies military is relatively small, but I find it surprising that there is hardly any information on why Germany needs more soldiers to defend itself. Why are 180,000 not enough?
An interesting problem that the German military does have is that according to some experts only half of all military units can be deployed. The rest is lacking soldiers or equipment. Some, like me, might find it surprising that despite lacking only 10% of the 200,000 soldiers Germany seeks to have, 50% of its units cannot be deployed. Now of course there is not necessary a linear relationship. Just because the military lacks 10% of soldiers, does not necessitate that only 10% of units cannot be deployed. But it is still a striking discrepancy. Imagine we could increase the deployable units to 80% simply by providing the equipment. Would we still need the additional 20,000 soldiers that desperately then? Furthermore, imagine Germany manages to hire more soldiers but deployable units are still around 50%. Then nothing was gained.
To summarize the point so far, I just wonder where these numbers come from, who calculated them and if having more soldiers means more deployable units which I am guessing is the goal (although again that is hard to tell because there is little public information). But I mean why have soldiers if you cannot deploy them? In the next step we must ask ourselves if compulsory military service is going to help fill these gaps.
How do 700,000 people do compulsory military service?
Each year, around 700,000 people would have to do compulsory military service. Some of those will not be able to do the service because the military discriminates against disabled people. Some might refuse to serve and will probably have to do civil service as “punishment”. In addition, the 700,000 currently include women who by constitutional law cannot be forced to do military service in Germany. It might be seen as unfair, but I would count it as a win if 350,000 less people had to do compulsory military service.So, we are left with around 300,000 conscripts. Given that there are currently only 180,000 professional soldiers I guess the military would first have to hire more training personal to train these people. If we have one trainer responsible for 300 conscripts we would need around 1,000 trainers. But wait. Isn’t the problem of the military that they struggle to hire new personal? I am sensing a problem here. But let us assume that the military simply reduces its capabilities even further, at least in the short term, and has some of its professional soldiers train the 300,000 potential soldiers. Would it work?
I think yes. But for no good reason other than conscripts with an average age of 18, they spent around 5% of their life in the military and 100% of their post-school professional career. If you would force 300,000 people into any job after school for one year some would probably stick around. If German politicians are so keen on taking rights away from young people, why not for more critical professions like teachers or nurses?
Can we force young people to serve
That brings me to my next point, can we force young people to do military service and sacrifice a year of their life so that they can kill people? In my opinion the answer is no. I want to highlight one argument, a response to it and a counterargument. If you have read a previous post on voting rights for children, you will already be able to anticipate my argument. Can we force children to do things if they were never able to vote? Most people who will be forced into military service never had the chance to vote and are thus forced to something on which they had no democratic influence. I find this highly undemocratic and in general a pretty shitty move. In addition, young people are a minority in current democratic systems. In Germany people above 55 make up half the voting population so they would be able to decide whether young people should do military service or not. At the very least I would find it a lot fairer if we were to discuss military service for 30-year-olds. They are, I think, still young and fit enough for military service but also have the chance to spend their adult life lobbying and voting against a compulsory military service. To make it most fair conscripts should have the average age of those eligible to vote, so 55. Ok maybe not.A common counter argument against the notion of not wating to force minors to do stuff is that we are already doing it: School. There are two important differences though. School is only compulsory in Germany until age 16. Compulsory military service would be compulsory also for adults who are 18 or older. Infringing on adult rights who we consider to be old enough to make their own choices is much different than infringing on children’s rights. But there is another important point to consider. School is intended purely as a benefit to the kid. It aims to increase equality and educate young people in a way that they can understand today’s world and live in it. Now you might say that it is simply a production of educated workers for Germanies labour market and that is fair, but I think it is important to recognise that I still have the freedom to move to Canada, change my citizenship and use my German education to have a good life there. There is benefit in educating children that goes beyond the nation state. Ultimately a large majority of children benefit from compulsory education. In difference to that, military service has hardly any proven advantages except if you decide to continue your military career afterwards. Furthermore, the benefits are purely for the state. Most teenagers who are forced into military service will not benefit but the state will be able to fill the gap of 20,000 soldiers in its military.
The Free-Rider problem
This is probably the dumbest argument of them all and I will keep it brief. Some people who are against a compulsory military service or generally reject fighting for their country are accused of freeriding on those who are willing to serve. But all citizens are paying for defence through taxes. If anything, German soldiers are freeriding because most of them never fought anyone. We just pay them in case, because the enemy is doing the same. They almost never fight are a bigger risk to their own lives than anyone else’s and would not be necessary if all countries simply would not have a standing army. But that is beside the point. Accusing a taxpayer of freeriding because they do not want to serve in the military is like accusing paying customers in a bakery of freeriding because they are not willing to become bakers themselves. It is such a stupid argument and yet I hear it regularly. Says a lot about political debates in Germany these days.Now I will move away from points that are often discussed in debates and move on to points that are, surprisingly, not talked about.
Labour shortage and more military
The military is currently employing around 180,000 soldiers and an additional 80,000 staff that is working for the military. If we assume that some of that staff have other jobs on the side, we might end up with something like 250,000 people working only for the military. Although some might question the intelligence of someone joining the military, many soldiers are highly educated and include everything from pioneers to doctors. The people who work for the military could just as well work for the private sector. That is a hefty chunk of qualified labour taking out of the labour market. If we now add 300,000 teenagers and young adults who could otherwise start their work or further education sooner, through compulsory military service we end up with 550,000 people who could fill other important gaps in our labour by becoming teachers, nurses, or craftsmen. The military would then make up 1% of Germanies total labour force (43,000,000). Sure, we might need some military but 1% of Germanies labour force just sitting around while the whole country hopes they will never have to be deployed is a bit odd to say the least.How fair will it be?
I also want to point out that I have serious doubts about the fairness of a military service in general and especially a compulsory one. People with lower incomes and few perspectives in life will always be overrepresented in military because why become a soldier when you could be a lawyer. If a service is compulsory, I would be surprised if the rich and powerful do not find ways to circumvent this. That would make military service discriminatory against people with a poor socio-economic background. Furthermore, the outright exclusion of disabled people in the compulsory military service raises further doubts. Another issue would be people from the LGBTQ+ community and People of Colour. Will trans-men be allowed or excluded? Does the fear of discrimination within the military allow them to avoid service. All this to say, compulsory military service will likely be only for strong, non-queer, men with a weak socioeconomic background.Threats from within: the AfD
Now you might have read this whole text and still think that we need a compulsory military service because it is the best way to defend Germany. I think if you want to make anything compulsory in Germany let it be being a teacher. We have a party that, among other things, takes bribes from Putin, considers the Nato as the aggressor instead of Russia and is willing to hand Ukraine over to Russia. Not only do we have such a party, but it also is the second largest and given current trends could soon be the largest. If you want to worry about German security I would worry about them first. Maybe even defund police and military so that the AfD has little to work with if they come to power. -
Coercion in Labour Markets
Initially this post was intended to be on how a Universal Basic Income (UBI) introduces Grass-Roots ethics into the economy. In writing the post I realized that another issue is much more pressing: coercion in labour markets. The topic of this essay will therefore be Coercion in Labour Markets. The main question is whether some people might be coerced to work rather than being persuaded or choosing to do so out of their own motivation. As per usual I will briefly explain some terminology. Then the current situation in the labour market will be outlined with a focus on unemployment. Having laid the foundations, we can then discuss if people accept jobs based on authority, persuasion or coercion. In the end we look at who coerces, and I will outline how a UBI could be a solution to this issue and give some final remarks.
Terminology
Coercion will be seen here as a form of power. It is the ability of a person, let’s say Mary to make another, Finn, act in a way that Finn would not otherwise do. Often, this implies that it is against Finn’s interests. Another form of power is force or violence, but this aspect of power will be less relevant in this discussion. Persuasion in contrast is Mary convincing Finn to act in a way that Finn is convinced is ultimately in his own interest although Finn had his doubts initially. Authority is Mary making Finn act against his will because Finn respects Mary and considers her to be legitimized in giving orders. Markets are the physical or conceptual space in which goods and services are exchanged while the labour market is essentially the place where we trade money for time or the completion of a task. UBI takes many different forms depending on who you ask. In general, it can be treated as an income that everyone receives, and which is enough to support a “good” life. By Grass-Roots Ethics I mean the expression of personal ethical convictions outside of official institutions such as elections or interest groups.The Labour Market and Unemployment
So how could there be coercion in labour markets? Let’s start by outlining the conditions we face in most European states which will be the focus today. A large majority of people work more or less by choice. We do apprenticeships or study and eventually end up with a job that at the very least pays the bills. Still, many of us end up with jobs that they dislike or no job at all. There are many reasons why people do not work or dislike their jobs. The work is lacking purpose, is boring, redundant or too demanding. The compensation is not high enough, we find ourselves in conflict with corporate structures or we question the impact of our work. No surprises so far. What happens if we do not work? We get social benefits. We have a human right to a dignified life after all and dying of hunger lacks both the dignity and the life part. So, our society has to provide for us. There is a problem, however. Our state is in international competition with the others, so our economy needs to keep up with the other states. Furthermore, much of the productivity we already have relies on some people doing the shit jobs. Thus, instead of simply redistributing what we have to those who do not want to or cannot find appropriate work, we need to find another way. We have to get as many people working as possible (but not too many cause then inflation rises and we do not want that either, so some people should better be unemployed).Many things we need in order to have a dignified life can be bought. To ensure that people still try to find a job while also ensuring that on paper they still have a dignified life we give them almost all the things necessary to do so that cannot be bought (such as freedom of speech and things like that). Then we just have to write a check for the rest, and we are done. But how high should the check be? Here comes the trick. The state calculates what you need for a dignified life to the cent and transfers the money. As an unemployed person you could technically live a dignified life (although that is also somewhat doubtful in many cases) but if you misspend a few Euros and do not optimize your budget you will not be able to afford your dignified life for that month. In Germany, 50 Euros of the total social benefits a single person with no kids receives is intended for food. You do not have to live in Germany to know that 50 Euros is very little. Losing a 2 Euro coin from a whole in your pocket which you cannot fix because you lack the money means losing 4% of your monthly allowance for food. That’s insane. By making it so hard to live on social benefits the state tries to make unemployed people find and accept jobs. This also means that anyone who does not have sufficient savings to support themselves in case of unemployment is at constant risk of having to live of social benefits which can hardly be considered to be enough to live a dignified life. We also have to discuss what happens if you are unemployed and do not accept jobs offered to you by the job centre. If a person on social benefits regularly rejects job offers, then their social benefits are reduced. Under extreme circumstances it is legal in Germany to entirely cancel social security including the payment of rent. It happens extremely rarely but it is a credible threat.
A Case of Authority?
So, if we accept a job because we cannot live a dignified live on social benefits or are at risk of receiving cuts to them does this constitute a case of coercion? Let us start by ruling out some potential alternatives starting with a case for authority. For it to be a case of authority we would have to accept the legitimacy of whichever actor is making us act against our interests. For example, we accept a job offered to us by the job centre because we recognize its authority and respect the institution. There might be some people who accept jobs with this motivation. The fact that some people do reject jobs and receive penalties for it, is however prove enough that many people do not accept the authority of job centres to put them into jobs which are deemed adequate for them. I think it is an uncontroversial claim that most people do not accept jobs because they believe in the authority of job centres. I had some more arguments here but the post is much too long, so I cut them out.Persuasion and Coercion
How about persuasion then? It is safe to say that it would be a case of persuasion if we do not intend to accept a job offered to us but the employee at the job centre makes such a compelling argument for it that we decide to take it anyway. In general, we can consider it a case of persuasion if we initially thought an action was against our interest but were then convinced of the opposite for example by being informed about substantial advantages. To illustrate this point and discern between persuasion and coercion let’s say we do not intend to get a vaccine but a conversation with our general practitioner convinces us that we should get it. If we find out about a positive impact of an action or receive a positive incentive, we have cases of persuasion. Pointing out potential negative consequences has the feeling of coercion: If you do not do this then something bad is going to happen. Coming back to the vaccines we can notice an important difference though. Let us say the general practitioner convinces you that you should get a vaccine because otherwise you might die of a virus. That is a clear case of: If you do not do this then something bad is going to happen. But is the doctor coercing us? I think not. The key nuance is that the general practitioner is not responsible for the negative consequences but just informing you about them. They do not say: get the vaccine or I will infect you with a deadly virus. Instead, they are pointing out the potential negative consequences of your action or the lack thereof. That is in my opinion a key difference between coercion and persuasion when considering negative consequences of an action. If the agent who wants, you to act differently is responsible for the negative consequences then we have a case of coercion. Otherwise, it is persuasion. Coming back to the job centre, it is the employees who tell people to get jobs or else they will lose their social benefits. The job centres are however also responsible for filing for penalties against people who do not accept jobs and are thus responsible for the negative consequences. We have a case of coercion.There is also another way to approach this. Many scholars believe that coercion lacks choice. If someone tells us to accept a job or die than that is no choice (or at least most scholars think so). Persuasion on the other hand must leave the option to decide between options, for example if the job centre tries to convince us that a shitty job is better than none. Being coerced with threats to our life are not particularly common in the labour market but we might have something else at stake, our human dignity. Taking the human rights as an indication we might for example say that if we are offered the choice between accepting a job or losing our social benefits which are necessary to live a dignified life than we lack the choice. This of course rests on the assumption that choices where one option is losing our life or human dignity are no choices at all and that being faced with such a decision constitutes a case of coercion. It also rests on the assumption that one cannot live a dignified life on social security. I want to take this a bit further by considering cases where we are not online coerced to work but have to give up our personal ethics or religion in the process. For example, if the job centre, under threat of losing their social benefits, coerces a Hindu into working in a butchery for cows. Or a case where a pacifist is coerced to work for a weapons manufacturer. The power that the state has over us, manifested in the penalties the job centre can put on us, can not only coerce us into acting against our interests (we do not want to work but are forced to), but also act against our personal ethics and religious beliefs. Working under the assumption that social benefits do not pay for a dignified life. Then employees who do not have sufficient savings to support themselves if they quit their job are coerced to keep working even if they deem their work unethical (or contribute to an unethical company).
So let us sum up the part on coercion. If Mary is outlining negative consequences of an action which Finn intends to do, but Mary is not responsible for the consequences, then Mary is attempting to persuade Finn to act differently. If she is however responsible for the consequences than we have a case of coercion. In addition, if Mary gives Finn a choice between acting in a way she wants or else kill him or violate his human rights in other ways then we do not actually have a choice and thus face a case of coercion. If we then accept that cutting social security if one does not accept a job leads to the inability to live a dignified life and thus a violation of our human rights, we again face a case of coercion. The job centre attempts to coerce people into accepting jobs. If go so far as to accept that living a dignified life on social security is impossible than we are presented with a much larger case of coercion. Everyone who is unemployed but not at risk of cuts is also being coerced into accepting a job. In addition, everyone who is currently in a job and lacks sufficient savings in case they quit their job is coerced to keep working.
Who is the Coercer?
I also want to address in this post is who the coercer is. I have been talking a lot about job centres today but are they the coercers? They might do the deed, but they are not responsible for it since they operate within a legal framework sanctioned by most of society. In fact, they are also being coerced to coerce others given that their refusal to do so might lead to them losing their jobs. So, who makes the laws, who decides on the amount of social benefits and potential penalties? The government? Well in Europe politicians are elected by us, by those eligible to vote. They act based on the mandate given to them. Unless they intentionally misinform the population or pass laws secretively. This does happen of course, but it is definitively not the norm. We then end up with two groups left, general society and interest groups. General society has the right to organise protests, to be politically active and try to persuade their fellow citizens to adopt a different stance. Many members of society are also able to vote. Interest groups also influence government both by setting the agenda and influencing public opinion for example through their control of some media outlets. They can also influence government decisions by advising them how to address issues that are already on the agenda. Interest groups are of course also part of society, but I thought important to consider them separately. What remains then is that we are all responsible for the coercion in labour markets. Anyone who does not oppose this coercion or benefits from it is to a degree complicit in it. I say degree because I do not think we are all equally complicit. I leave it too you to determine the degree of your complicity and act based on that because, again, the post is already too long.Solutions?
I want to finish by pointing out a way in which we might be able to end coercion in labout markets. There are several ways of course but the one I wanted to mention today is a UBI. If we all receive enough money to live a good life the coercion loses much of its threat. If we can live a dignified and even a “good” life if we do not work or refuse to accept jobs, then people cannot be coerced to work. There is also a second benefit. Remember the Hindu who is forced to work in a cow butchery or the pacifist who is forced to work in a weapons manufacturer? They do not have to accept these jobs. In general, if people have doubts about the ethicality of their jobs they can simply quit because the alternative is still a “good” life. Suddenly many companies will find themselves hard pressed to find workers who are willing to do their bidding. By addressing other issues such as inequality and the marketization of wealth where being wealthy becomes the most attractive lifestyle, we could soon find ourselves in a system where people can decide their work not only based on what pays most but personal interest and ethical considerations. I doubt that many people for example find it attractive to work in factory farming and yet many do it because you earn money. Imagine not working were an alternative. This is what I meant in the introduction of grass-root ethics in labour markets. If we are not coerced into work and the rich lifestyle becomes unpopular then we create a system where people can choose jobs on their personal ethical convictions.Let me also give a quick outline of the impact of UBI, in economic terms. We generally think of the labour force for a specific field of work as those who are willing to work in general and who have the necessary qualification for that field. The smaller the labour force the more expensive it is to hire new workers. If we now add a third category to the willingness to work and the qualification which is the ethicality of the job, companies who are generally considered unethical will find it hard to hire workers. They need to increase salaries to attract workers which might lead to their bankruptcy, or they address the ethical concerns. If we also consider that people can be just as much persuaded by the ethicality of a job than what it pays, then even increasing salaries might not do the trick. I am perfectly aware that I am ignoring many other economic consequences of an UBI. Given that, again, the essay is already much too long I will have to address them another day. I do want to draw your attention to one key point though. If you do accept that our labour market is coercive in nature, are you willing to accept this for the sake of economic prosperity? It is a question that I have answered for myself, but I do not want to provide you with my decision. Instead, I want to give you a case to highlight the severity of the question. Would you accept slavery if you knew it would lead to prosperity for slaves and masters alike?
Final Remarks:
I think this idea of introducing ethics into the economy could be critical in addressing the shortcomings of our current economic system and moving away from a system that prioritizes monetary gains and capital growth both personal and corporate over human welfare. If we seek to move towards a system that prioritizes human welfare two things must happen. First people must be able to choose their jobs based on personal convictions, interests and qualifications rather than the need for (more) money. That means addressing the coercion currently taking place in our labour market. Second, we must stop the marketization of wealth, where a wealthy lifestyle is generally considered the best. The more inconsequential monetary gain is for job decisions the better. Our current economic system is a powerful engine, but we have not yet managed to get the hang on how to use it properly. We are driving a car while completing our driver’s license and running over people and nature left right and centre. If we can get full control of this engine and use it in way that fixes our global climate instead of destroying it, that helps people out of poverty rather than exploiting them, that enables people to prioritize their personal wellbeing rather than trying to look like the model on the poster or the social media star, if we steer the engine to promote human welfare rather than monetary gains, then we will live in a much happier world. And once we arrived there, we can start thinking of turning the engine off. -
Property is Made Up
Property, more specifically private and public property are everywhere. Stop right here and think of something that is not owned by anyone. Hard to come up with anything right? Air does not belong to anyone and neither does most of the oceans. Abstract or cultural goods are also often not owned by anyone. Language for instance, or the believe in a higher power. Still as far as physical things go everything is owned by someone or at the very least by a legal entity such as a company or a government. It is therefore hardly surprising that we accept property and more importantly private property as a given constant similar to gravity or the fact that milk always boils over the second you are not looking. Not only do most humans accept property as a constant, but they also accept the methods of determining what things belong to whom. In this essay I want to argue two points. First, I want to show that there is no natural property or an objective way to determine what is whose property. Instead, we as society decide what property is, what can be owned and who gets to do so. This will lead me to my second point where I want to outline why I believe expropriation to be a misguiding term that presupposes a natural ownership of property and by so doing hides the idea that an “expropriation” is not the act of taking away property but the societal act of renegotiating what property is.
Let us begin with some common conceptions about property. First it is important to note that although property was in fact a constant for most of human history, the understanding of it differed dramatically. Communist or anarchist societies highlight this well since property in these societies is considered to belong to everyone or those who most need it. Property is not absent but collectivized, which poses a fundamentally different understanding than the one we have today. In capitalist countries and nation states property plays a crucial role in deciding who owns what. In these systems arises the distinction between public and private property. Private property is owned by individuals or non-elected legal entities like companies. Public property is owned by an elected body such as a government. I find it somewhat misleading to call property owned by dictators or single party systems public since it fulfils roughly the same criteria as private property, the only difference being that the gracious owner decided to share his property with the public. In the contemporary understanding of property, the ability to use it does not determine whether it is ours. Just because I am using your pen after taking it from you does not make it mine. Property as we understand it today is instead based on the idea of ownership. If you own something, then it is your property. Thus, when we discuss common conceptions about property the real question should be when someone gains ownership over a good. A second question then is what can constitute a good according to our current societal understanding.
So how can anyone claim to own something? The short answer is that any way that other people are willing to accept works. In our contemporary world anything that we put work in belongs to us, or anything that was given to us through a contract. Salaries are a good example where you agree on a contract with a company where you give them your labour and they give you money which is then yours. Similarly, when you go to a shop and by something you also enter a contract where you receive a good in exchange for money. Now it is important to note that the only reason why these things are yours is because the large majority in your society accepts that it is in fact yours. Ownership is thus a consequence of labour and contracts. Furthermore, you cannot own everything. We agree today that owning people should not be a thing so even when you did buy them, and they let themselves be bought without coercion or a dire need for money (which is of course not how it worked historically) you do not get to own a person. That is despite going through the same process as any other product you could acquire. Thus, for private property, we can say that ownership can be achieved by either putting labour into something or entering contracts, but we can only own things that our society deems as ownable.
For public goods, or property owned by an elected government, determining ownership is even simpler. Something is public property if the majority decides that it is. Maybe there is some constitution that prevents decisions about ownership that discriminate against minorities so then you might need a two thirds majority or something similar, but you get the gist. The people decide what is public property. Anything can be public property. Even things outside the country in which the elected government resides can be public property you just have to take it from other people.
Here we get to a funny problem. If I say this is my property and you say its yours, who is right? Within states we can turn to the majority and see what they think but in interactions between states that is harder. Why? Because there is no one to enforce a majority decision. That brings us to the last point I want to raise before turning to expropriation. Unless we have a universally accepted understanding of property or ways in which to settle disputes (like courts or discourse) there is really no way to enforce property except for violence imprisonment and death. You say the orange juice in the fridge is yours, I say it is mine. We discuss for a bit, and you say it’s yours because you bought it, and I say it’s mine because I need it more. So, we turn to society, and they decide in your favour. But I still believe the orange juice is mine, I am super thirsty and desperate for a glass of orange juice. So, I take it out of the fridge and start drinking it. What can you do? Either you do nothing and accept that it is my orange juice after all. Or you use violence. You call the police and tell them how your crazy flatmate stole your orange juice. I will not give up my orange juice, so I fight with the police until they overwhelm me and put me in handcuffs. If I repeatedly challenge property in this way I will likely end up in prison. Property cannot exist without violence unless everyone accepts the terms and conditions of ownership or trusts the means of settling disputes. Since that is currently not the case you constantly use violence or the threat thereof to keep ownership over property that you think is yours. Now neither you nor me are willing to die over an orange juice but when it comes to a conflict between nations things are a bit different. What is at stake here is not just some delicious refreshing glass of orange juice but the land that people live on. Here people are willing to die to enforce their ownership. And it’s not just land. Think of the American civil war where half a nation fought, mostly to maintain their right to own a PoC. In modern capitalist systems, property needs violence (and in most others too).
Turning to my last point I want to touch own why expropriation is a misguiding term. If we accept that property is dependent on ownership and ownership is determined by whatever theory most people prefer, then agreeing to take someone’s property is simply the process of renegotiating ownership. Something was owned for reasons we decided on and now we changed the rulebook, and you do not own it anymore. At this point there is no property to take away anymore, nothing to expropriate. Now this might sound like plain semantics, but I think it is important to highlight that private property and ownership are not some natural things, but it is something we made up and is subject to change. The term expropriation how its currently used undermines this notion by making it seem like natural property is being taken away for one reason or the other. What is happening in reality though is that something which was considered the property of someone is their property no longer. The terms of what determines ownership have changed. The moment that happens, there is no property to take away anymore.
Lastly, I wated mention that initially my plan for this post was to discuss the inconsistencies of our current understanding of property but in writing this I realized how redundant that is. If we as society accept the inconsistencies of how we determine ownership, then who cares if the inconsistencies exist or not. It is not about having a consistent theory of property instead it is about having one that people agree on. A consistent theory might be convincing but it’s not what is relevant (I would also like to bring up the idea that it is the inconsistencies that might make our current understanding of property and ownership so attractive). I think it is also important to consider the reasons for why we accept one theory of property over another. Drawing on major philosophical theories I think we can make a distinction between output-based and input-based theories. In short do we care about the terms of ownership producing a certain output (for example functioning capitalist systems and global markets), or do we care about the input, which means expressing our contemporary understanding of justice and fairness in our terms of ownership without much consideration for output.
I want finish by saying that there is no natural ownership. What is and is not your property is, on a societal level, up for discussion so we can decide who gets to own what.
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Democratic Realism
The Assad regime has fallen. Now Syria needs democracy. This has been an almost universal demand by western leaders following the victory of HTS and other rebel groups in Syria. In addition, leaders demanded the protection of minorities, usually implying the formulation of a constitution. Whether Syria or elsewhere, it is a reflex by western leaders to demand these two benchmarks of any western government to be established. First, democratically elected leaders and second, a constitution which protects minority rights as well as the democratic institutions. But why? Is democracy the best political system? Does it work the same everywhere and in every situation? The western answer is yes.
Democracy as we know it today is a milestone in humanity’s eternal struggle to manage distribution of power in a way that is beneficial (measured by current standards) and addresses challenges such as urbanization, population growth, technological advancements and globalization. Its ability to come to decisions for millions of people while taking into consideration most voices is monumental. Some of the most successful states (using current standards such as life expectancy, GDP per capita and real purchasing power) were and still are democratic. Of course, there are many different forms of democracy but still if you look at the biggest economies today, most of them are democratic, but not all. It comes as no surprise then that many people in western nations consider democracy as the most successful political system. Its success in states across the globe, for instance Japan, Estonia or Costa Rica reinforces the notion that democracy is universally applicable. Democracy is seen as the final evolution of politics. This, of course, is nonsense.
It is nonsense not because I know a better political system but because assuming that any political or economic system is there too last is unrealistic at best. In fact, it is hard to believe that any system the human comes up with will last forever. Given the recent struggles that democratic states face with Trump being elected in the US and several European countries struggling to form governments I believe it is clear that despite being a decent political system, democracy is by far not the final one. And yet people struggle to imagine a viable alternative to democracy. Here is a good point to introduce one of my favourite books and the inspiration for this essay. ‘Capitalist Realism’ by Mark Fischer discusses how and why we cannot conceive a viable alternative to capitalism. Although not as desperate as the issue of alternative economic systems, I believe a similar development is taking place regarding political systems. The inability in western countries to imagine a viable alternative to democratic systems is democratic realism.
I add the western countries because in many non-democratic countries people find it easy to conceive alternative systems and think them viable as well. Thus, the issue is not a global one like capitalist realism but specifically applies to western nations and its people. By western I mean North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zeeland and a few other democracies like Costa Rica which might not be strictly western but due to the vagueness of this term I would add them to the list for this discussion.
In any case the issue of democratic realism in the western world is severe. There are few alternatives to democracy that are currently being lived and most of them are dismissed immediately often for good reason. This means that to develop new ideas for political system we must turn to theory. Here lies the problem. Although there are some people who theorize about new systems or even try them in small communities, the average citizen rarely knows these projects exist. Many non-average citizens do not either do not either. Being able to point at another nation and say, “look how they are doing things, what can we learn from that?” is what inspires reflection about one’s own political system. For most of human history interactions of this kind caused major shifts in political systems. For instance, the European Enlightenment period was in part kickstarted by interactions with radically different political and social systems lived by native Americans. Arguably these interactions, in combination with other factors such as an increasingly powerful merchant class or the rediscovery of ancient Greek authors, brought us democracy in Europe in the first place. All this is to say that we struggle to imagine alternative systems to the one we live in. Encountering a new system which developed independently from our own is the best and potentially the only good way in which we can truly imagine an alternative because it is real, it is being lived.
Theorizing about new forms of deliberative democracy, council systems or anarchy is destined to remain theory because except for a few experts who develop these theories or live it on a small scale (usually in dependence on systems in which their project is located) nobody can imagine how they might be lived. If we cannot imagine an alternative there might be one, but we will never achieve it. Even many political theorists these days will admit that their ideas for new political systems are more fundamental in nature. What rights should citizens have, how should wealth be distributed and so on. Nobody can (for the time being) create a complete and all-encompassing blueprint for a new political system and neither will they be able to prove that it is functional with complete certainty (or scientific certainty). And even if theorists could, who cares if you cannot see a nation or large group of people live this system and prove that it works.
What we are left with then is the system that we know. It is the only viable one for most people and despite its shortcomings we cannot come up with a good alternative. We make small adjustments here and there and maybe, in a few hundred years, people look back and realize that the systems did change and are now fundamentally different compared to our current ones. Still, a process without a vision or ideal is slow going and arduous. Democratic systems can already feel the strain of it. Things are changing but in tiny steps and without a clear direction. There is no new inspiration for change, no outlook for how things might be different. Thus, any politician regardless of where their political views lie, who promises anything that somewhat resembles a vision, is bound to be attractive to the people. But the only convincing vision is the one being lived. And so, given the lack of viable alternatives, politicians turn to the past. They promise to restore some lost aspects of the old system from 50 years back and although it is quite literally a backwards vision, it works, because people lived it. This is how democratic realism opposes even the change on a small scale and has the potential to undermine democracy itself. Maybe, the times when we still had strong rulers were better than the endless squabbling of politicians today? Maybe, the times where men held more power were better? Maybe, the times when we didn’t have diversity, immigration and globalization were better? Do you remember these days? Many do. And so democratic realism becomes a poison to democracy. Without a viable alternative but with a desperate need for a vision, an ideal, something to work towards, the only direction we know is backwards.
I do not know how to change this fact. I would love to pretend that theorizing until we find a convincing vision is the way forward, but I doubt it is. I do see value in projects that try to live alternative systems, but these are usually known only by the people who live them or are affiliated to them. In addition, the small scale makes it hard to believe how such an alternative might work in the world we live in. I also do see some value in small adjustments, that, over longer periods of time, will result in substantial changes. Small adjustments create security and prevent major missteps, but still, this resembles going on a hike without a map. Yes, you will move forward slow and steady but after a while you will start to wonder where it is that you are going. And every new step comes with more questions, more doubt, and then frustration. So, there is no doubt that we are in desperate need of a vision, an alternative political system. Without it we wander without purpose or, even worse, we retrace the steps we walked in the past.
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What is a Police State?
I am walking from Tahrir Square to my favourite cafe in Cairo called الحرية or Freedom. After no more than a few steps I look up and stand face to face with a police officer in full riot gear. Next to him are two more policemen, rifles in hand and behind them towers an armoured vehicle. Going around the vehicle I can see more policemen sitting inside through the shooting slits. As I discovered during my short stay in Cairo this is a common sight which makes it no less disturbing. Throughout the bustling streets of Cairo, police are positioned at every main street or intersection. The large chunks of metal and their motionless guards stand out in a city which is always on the move. It is a display of power. The policemen do not do anything, at least nothing that I observed, but they show everyone the might that will be directed towards them if they step out of line. It is the most obvious and blunt way to express power and not the one that the Egyptian state with Sisi at its head employs. Travelling throughout Egypt I noticed that one does not get further than 100km without a police control. Oftentimes the luggage is searched or I had to wait without apparent reason and no clue what to do next. The treatment of Egyptians was much worse than mine. Creating this uncertainty is a used often enough by those in power to show their control over you and yet every time I encounter it, I can feel how it works. The checkpoints along highways are supported by military vehicles often with mounted machineguns. The word “police” sprayed on the side of these vehicles fails to hide that the state is effectively using its military to control the Egyptian people. I chose these words carefully to convey that it feels as if the Egyptian people are controlled by an outside force, an occupier, which is the regime. As occupiers, the regime employs police and military to control Egypt. But blunt displays of power and control are not enough for a regime to truly control a population. The armoured trucks and policemen stand out too much, can be avoided too easily.
Apart from the normal cops, throughout Egypt there are policemen without uniform. Sometimes they were a walky-talky or a gun which outs them as policemen under closer inspection. Still there are many you do not see. In addition, there is also secret police without any of the tell-tale signs of a policemen and trained not to stand out. Despite the lack of surveillance cameras in many parts of Egypt the combination of police and secret police means that there is a constant sense of surveillance in public. With severe limitations on freedom of speech and political acts in general it means that it is almost impossible to have an open political discussion with an Egyptian citizen in public. Dissidents, journalists, and academics are all targets for the regime since they pose a significant threat to the regime. While controlling them in public is important because acts in this sphere influence others, it is equally important to control the private. Listening in on calls, hacking phone microphones or simply blocking people from accessing certain social media apps are some of the ways in which the Egyptian regime controls the private. Along with seemingly arbitrary arrests this creates fear, a feeling that I have encountered many times in my time in Egypt. Fear is the last component of the regime’s control over the Egyptian people.
From my experience it is safe to say that Egypt is a police state. But most definitions for the term lacked a dimension that I only discovered in my time in Egypt. It is the sense that the regime would be smashed to pieces by the people it occupies the moment that the control ceases. Throughout my time in Egypt and the interactions I had, this feeling was constantly hidden behind a façade put up to protect oneself from the regime. But it was there. Many Egyptian people are desperate for change. They think it impossible to reach and given the control that the Egyptian state exercises maybe they are correct. Still, I have no doubt that the slightest opportunity will be ceased. A police state lives of control, if it crumbles, people will be ready take it apart and hopefully, build something better from the pieces left.
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The Untold Consequences of War
No Signal
I am sitting in a café close to As-Salt drinking mint tea and looking across the Jordan Valley and the mountain range beyond where the sun is slowly setting. It is a remarkable sight, and one I wish to return to, so I take out my phone to save the café. Trying to find it on google maps I check my location and am surprised to discover that according to my phone, I am currently at Queen Alia Airport, about 50km away from where I actually am. Probably some malfunction with my phone I tell myself, so I ask my friend to find the café for me. After a minute he looks up at me from his phone in confusion and tells me his location on google maps is at Queen Alia Airport. So not a coincidence then. After some discussion as to why both of our phones are not working, we ask a local. She explains to us that Israel is jamming GPS signals in the border region between Israel and Jordan since April, when Iran attacked Israel with missiles and drones. For Israel it is a way to protect itself from GPS guided missiles. Having seen Iranian misses fly across the Jordanian sky myself, I can at the very least testify that this is protection against an existing threat. Still, it is something that I never heard about. It is also quite inconvenient. The signal is usually jammed in a 20km wide corridor along the 482km border with Israel, although it is happening most consistently in the North of Jordan. On some days the jamming reaches as far as Amman, leaving millions without GPS signal and thus complicating navigation. Especially among cab drivers who rely on GPS navigation for their income this has led to a lot of frustration.Like the jamming of GPS in Jordan, in this Post I want to draw your attention to the consequences of the war in Gaza, and now in Lebanon, which have largely gone unnoticed and unmentioned outside the Levant. What I discuss here is undoubtedly less severe than the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, but it deserves attention, nonetheless. I already talked about the jammed GPS signals and will now share a story about the Jordanian tourist industry. Lastly, I want to share my impression on the sentiments regarding the end of the wat and the future of this conflict. The three impressions are by far not all unmentioned consequences of war and yet I hope they will give you a better understanding of what is happening right now. In addition, they will illustrate to you how divers the impacts of conflict can be and make you look closer when considering other wars and conflicts and their consequences.
War and the Jordanian Tourist Industry
Two weeks ago, I went on a short trip to visit Wadi Mujib and Dana with some friends. After visiting Wadi Mujib and Wadi Al Hasa on the first day, we arrived late in the evening in a small village close to Dana, where we had booked a cabin. The host welcomed us warmly and after dinner and some small talk, he expressed his gratitude choosing to book one of his cabins for the night. His business consisted of eight small cabins to sleep in which he had built around 3 years ago together with his brothers. He was and still is working as a teacher. Initially he wanted to make the cabins his main source of income and quit working as a teacher and in the first two years after building the cabins it seemed like the plan would work out. The cabins where often all booked and even in winter there were plenty of tourists coming. He hosted people from all around the world, eating, singing and dancing with them in the communal building we had eaten in as well and were now having tea. The income was covering the investment he and his brothers had made to construct the cabins. Then, in the evening of October 7th, 2023, our host recalled how his phone was buzzing with more and more cancelations. He told us that at first, he thought it was coincidence, that a few people decided to cancel their trip at the same time, but the cancelations kept coming. The next morning, he read the news and immediately understood what was happening. At the end of the week, most of the cabins were empty and stayed that way until now. He has guests around once a month now, usually foreigners who work or live in Jordan. We were his first guests since August. He expressed his hope for the war to end soon. Most importantly so that killing of civilians ends but also because then tourists will return to Jordan.With its rich culture, religion, beautiful nature and long history, Jordan has the potential to attract tourists from all around the world. Yet the conflict in the region deters many from coming. After a sharp drop in tourism after the Arab spring, the industry recovered, benefitting from Jordans stability. State, businesses and private individuals invested in accommodating, entertaining and educating tourists. Much of the infrastructure that was developed in the past decade is now unused. Overall, the number of tourists has decreased by 7% in 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, causing losses of around 350 million USD. The losses are however very unevenly spread. The number of tourists from other Arab countries has barely decreased while the number of American tourists halved and the number of European tourists decreased by 40% compared to last year. This means that sectors catering to these tourists are hit particularly hard, like our host who mainly accommodated European tourists before the war started.
Resignment and Hopelessness
The War has also led to a less tangible change. A change in mood. A Jordanian friend who worked in peace initiatives for 30 years, told me that he had lost hope to ever find out what peace in the Levant looks like. He has largely given up on peace initiatives and now focuses on the wellbeing of the Jordanian people. It is an attitude that I encounter almost daily. A large part of Jordan’s population has Palestinian roots, and they closely watch as their country shrinks, and their people are being murdered in Gaza and the West Bank. There is outrage but it there is also resignment and hopelessness. Whenever I bring up the topic with people from the Levant, they all tell me the same. Violence will not bring them peace and justice, but diplomacy and negotiation will not either. The only reasonable course of action then is to continue with life. Try to take care of family and friends who are affected or put in danger by the war. Attend the weekly protest in Amman’s city centre where the demands for peace and justice which have been repeated for decades sound more unachievable and hollow every week. It is disheartening but understandable that so many people have given up. I had no clue how the War could be ended, and the underlying conflict be resolved before I first came to Jordan. Having lived here for almost two months I know even less. I understand why conversations on this topic always end in one sentence. إن شاء الله, if God wills it. Many people in Jordan have lost faith in the ability of Jordan and its neighbours to end this conflict. I am not religious, so to me turning to God is not a very convincing course of action. Yet, I do believe the chance of divine intervention resolving this conflict might be similar to the chance of people doing so. Frustratingly low. -
Voting Age To 0
Introduction
The title of this post might confuse some people, but it is by no means far-fetched. I will admit it involves some click-bait because I do not want to argue here that we should carry 1-year olds to the polling station and let them place an X for the party they prefer. Instead, the idea is that 1-year olds ought to be able to vote but for practical reasons cannot. The tension of these two assumptions must be resolved and that is precisely what I set out to do today.The Right to Vote
I want to start by justifying the two assumptions I outlined in the introduction. First, is why should a 1-year-old have the right to vote. The answer can be found at the foundations of any democratic system and for simplicity will be split in two arguments although there are undoubtedly more than that. The first argument is a practical one. For a political system to be functional it helps if people can influence the decisions imposed on them. Otherwise, why should you follow the laws imposed on you, especially if they are not in your favour? Think of the following situation. You want to grab dinner with your friends. You disagree on where to go but two of your friends say they will decide and end up deciding against your preferred restaurant. Does not sound very nice, does it? Now instead think of the same situation but you and your friends deliberate the price and quality of each choice. In the end you vote, and your choice ends up as the minority. Still, we feel much better in complying with the imposed decision, right? This is the practical argument. If we want a functional political system, it helps if people at the very least think they can influence decisions. In democracy this influence is achieved in part though voting.This brings us to the second argument which is an issue of legitimacy. As a citizen of a democratic system, you get to vote and participate in the general political discourse but thus must accept its decisions even when you do not agree. Most people must accept the decisions because they cannot choose their citizenship. If someone cannot choose their citizenship and do not get to vote, then they simply do not live in a democracy. For a political system to be legitimate democracy all citizens must be able to vote. It follows naturally that 1-year olds should be able to vote as well. They were not able to choose their citizenship so for a system to be democratic it must allow them to vote. In addition, minors might not realize their state of oppression but especially when considering teenagers shortly before voting they are very much aware of the fact that decisions are imposed on them while they have few ways to influence them.
Practical Issues of Children Voting
This brings us to the second assumption which is the practical issue of having children vote. To be quite honest I do not think that many children will make voting decisions which are much worse than over voters above 18. The simple reason for this is that while children cannot make informed decisions, they at the very least do not make misinformed decisions. Still, they are more easily manipulated and strategies to gain their votes are likely to not have much to do with actual politics. I am anticipating that the contest to gain children’s votes will quickly devolve into a contest of who has the most attractive party logo. Or maybe who is best able to equip parents with the skills necessary to make their kids vote for the party that they vote for. This would be funny to observe, but not very productive for a democratic system. In any case I think it to be quite obvious why children cannot vote and will not use more of your and my own to time to explain why this is. At what age they can, I do not know, although I am generally in favour of 16. The main reason for this is that with voting cycles being usually every 4 years lowering the voting age to 16 would mean that citizens vote, on average, with 18 for the first time.Solutions
So, what about the children between 0 and 16? For a democratic system to be legitimate they should be able to vote but because of practical reasons they cannot. Here I quickly want to highlight the severity of this issue using the US as an example. Currently, 22% of US citizens cannot vote due to their age. With a life expectancy of 76 years a US citizen will on average miss 5 elections due to age which make up around a fifth of the 19 votes they could have had in their life. Age excludes every fifth US citizen from voting and makes the average citizen miss one fifth of the votes in which they could have participated.There are some ways to address this issue. One could be to give parents the votes of their kids. In the best-case parents will use their own vote on issues they are concerned about and use their kids vote on issues that the kid cares about such as better education, child protection, a liveable climate and so on. In the worst-case parents will simply treat their kids votes as they own giving significant power to large families. As you can probably imagine this is not the best of solutions.
Instead, I want to propose something else. Every time a child misses an election due to their age, they get an extra vote once they old enough to vote. If voting age is 16, a child could miss 4 votes until they can vote for the first time. To make up for this, they can then vote twice in the four elections after they are eligible to vote. This would have several positive effects. First it addresses the tension between maintaining a democratic political system while dealing with the practical issue of children not being able to vote. In addition, it gives young people additional votes which is crucial in aging societies especially in Europe and the US where most voters are now over 50. Furthermore, people tend to vote on issues that affect themselves or are close to them. Consequently, issues such as education, childcare and investment in universities are not very popular in political discourse because only a small share of voters are experiencing or have recently experienced them. Still these issues are crucial for a functional society and putting more focus on these issues by letting people to vote twice for every election they missed could help to improve policy making in these fields. There are still some benefits I left undiscussed here just as there are downsides. There are most certainly also other ways to overcome the tensions between maintaining a democratic system while facing the practical issue that children cannot vote. I will conclude my post here however, so it does not become to long and I invite you to think about this issue yourself.
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Boycotts and the Jordanian Economy
Boycotts in Jordan
As the days in Amman are getting cooler, I find increasingly pleasant to stroll around the city. Small shops, restaurants, and the occasional supermarket are complemented with street vendors and the unmistakable jingle of the pick-up trucks which deliver water and gas. But there is something missing. Something, I could not place my finger on until I was standing in front of a large commercial building with the logos of McDonalds and Starbucks outside. The building, I quickly noticed, was entirely empty. Still, it looked as if it has not been like this for long. I started to pay attention to large chains and discovered that almost all of them had closed. The only thing I could find was a small Carrefour close to where I live which was full of products but no customers in sight. I already had a suspicion what the cause of the closing of so many large chains might be, and it was confirmed in a conversation with a friend. He was born in Jordan, but his family is originally from Palestine, a story that he shares with many people who live in Amman. He explained to me that most of the large chains like McDonalds or Starbucks are being boycotted. McDonalds for instance gave out free meals for IDF soldiers in Israel. My friend also pointed out companies which I did not notice are being boycotted. Pepsi for instance was a widely available product until the end of 2023 where boycotts started to show their impact. Now you will struggle to find it anywhere in Jordan. Pepsi products have been replaced by Matrix, a Jordanian soft drink producer which brings us to the topic I want to discuss today. Boycotts in Jordan have been more effective than I ever thought they could be. By effective I do not mean that companies changed their behaviour because of them, for that Jordan is unfortunately too small of a market. Instead, I mean that Jordanians have done what is within their power. They boycotted companies tied to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land so consistently that they are forced to close shop in Jordan. Something like that would be unimaginable in Europe where boycotts tend to put a small dent into companies’ profits at most. As a consequence of boycotting some international companies, Jordanian consumers have sought alternative products, often Jordanian ones, such as Matrix soft drinks.The Impact of Boycotts on Domestic Markets
There is a lot of theory that explores the ethical, political and economic dimensions of boycotts. Something that I could not find however is how boycotts affect domestic markets not of the boycotted country, but of the one that is doing the boycotting. I think that is a consequence of most of this research being conducted in countries which never experienced boycotts that were so effective that companies had to close shop. I do not want to get in a complex statistical analysis here, mainly because I do not have the skills or data for that, yet. Instead, I want to outline some key factors to consider when discussing the impact of boycotts on domestic markets using Jordan as a case study.The first factor I already touched upon is the substitution of boycotted products with alternative ones. The key question here is, if consumers switch to domestically produced goods or simply to another foreign producer. If the latter is the case, then there will hardly be any change in the domestic markets. If, people do switch to domestic brands, for example with Pepsi being substituted with Matrix, domestic demand for these goods increases. The likely impact of this development would be higher employment, profits which are invested in the domestic markets and higher taxes paid to the Jordanian government. All of these would be positive effects for Jordan. This effect points to two other factors, employment and profits as well as where they are invested. As McDonalds and Starbucks are closing a key question is if enough consumption shifts to other companies so that they employ the equivalent amount of those who lost their jobs at the boycotted companies. If that is not the case than the total disposable income in Jordan decreases which would have negative effects for its economy. The last factor is profits and investment. If boycotted goods are substituted with domestic ones, then profits will stay in the domestic market. A rising demand for these goods will also create an incentive to invest these profits into the domestic market. This again would be coupled with additional employment. These factors are just the surface, and it is hard to guess how big the impact of boycotts on domestic markets is without data and statistical analysis. Still, I found it an interesting facete of boycotts and one that, in my opinion, deserves more attention.
Final Remarks
I want to conclude by pointing you to the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement (BDS). The movement originated in the BLM movement and is now mostly concerned with ending the support of companies which profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. In the recent past it has also been applied to environmental protection and climate justice. Regardless of the cause, you will find plenty of information online, which explain how and why BDS works. Something that I particularly like is that websites and apps often provide short and clear outlines why they think a company should be boycotted and what this company should do if it wants boycotters to buy their products again. In addition, they let you take pictures or scan Barcodes of products in the supermarket to quickly find out if you should buy them or not. It is an easy way to make a small difference, and I invite you to become part of the movement.
World of Youthful Idealism 