She also claims to find support for her view of bloggers in the proceedings of the Euston Manifesto launch, where, she complains, women were very little in evidence, and such women as were involved were present because the men allowed them to be. That is, having failed to find anything dismissive or neglectful of women in the manifesto itself (because it isn’t there to be found), she decides that the women involved in the launch don’t actually count, they’re not genuine political participants. This view of the formidable women who, for example, chair the Euston Manifesto Group, design its material and jointly manage its website can be attributed in part, perhaps, to Ms Bennett’s ignorance; but she does seem to assume that women are either targets or tokens, either the victims of coarse masculine stereotyping or allowed to take part in important activities because the big boys sometimes give them permission to do so. If this picture of women in politics as passive little girls had been presented by someone other than Ms Bennett — had it been voiced, for example, by a MAN — it might very well have produced some exceptionally coarse and dismissive and deeply stereotyping responses from the women in question.

Eve Garrard is a moral philosopher with a visiting position at the University of Manchester

The manifesto, which has its public launch today, states a commitment to certain general principles and identifies patterns of left-liberal argument that we think fall short of those principles. So we commend the democratic norms and institutions that typify the liberal democracies, despite their shortcomings, and criticise those on the left who make excuses for undemocratic movements and regimes. We affirm the importance of universal human rights, rejecting the cultural-relativist arguments and double standards by which these values get watered down or inconsistently applied. We express our opposition to terrorism and to indulgently “understanding” (where this means condoning) it because it is thought to be motivated by legitimate grievances. We state an attachment to a broad ideal of equality in all spheres, from gender relations to economic justice. The full text is at www.eustonmanifesto.org

Since it was published in April, the Euston Manifesto has generated an enormous volume of comment, from supportive, through critical, to jolly unfriendly. The abstract generality of its principles is one point of complaint. But we make no claim to have formulated a programme for government; we hope merely to remind people on the liberal-left of the values they ought to be defending. A related point is the suggestion that this wish to remind is needless, since the manifesto’s criticisms don’t apply beyond a tiny section of the far left. But this suggestion isn’t true, as has been amply documented on the blogs.

link to full text of article online

link to original text at normblog

‘They should come out as imperialist and proud of it’, and ‘There is a progressive tradition of support for colonialism, which the Euston manifesto group could champion’ — this is the way Wheatcroft’s article announces itself. The content doesn’t disappoint: he reminds readers that ‘Mill, Macaulay and even Marx made approving noises about British rule in India’ on the way to his intended conclusion: ‘Maybe the Euston group should be less nervous of “leftist colonisers” as a term of abuse.’ It’s a nice piece of wizardry, and ‘dialectical’ at that. Wheatcroft turns the core principles of the Euston Manifesto upside down.

Many of the manifesto’s signatories supported the war in Iraq (though others of them didn’t), and before that military intervention in Afghanistan, and before that the same in Kosovo. On imperialist-type grounds? Why, no.

Imperial: ‘of, relating to, befitting, or suggestive of an empire or an emperor’.

Imperialism: ‘a policy of extending control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires.’

The support for the aforementioned interventions by the people Wheatcroft is talking about was based on human rights and just war considerations, not on empire-building ones. Indeed, the very principles informing that support rule out support for imperialism, even a putatively ‘progressive’ imperialism. Self-determination and political independence for all peoples is one of the basic rights we Eustonians defend.

B.3 of the Euston Manifesto: ‘We hold the fundamental human rights codified in the Universal Declaration to be precisely universal, and binding on all states and political movements, indeed on everyone.’

21 (3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government…’

Chapter 1, Article 1.2 of the UN Charter: ‘… respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples’.

There’s a difference between an imperial project that seeks to build an empire ruled by a superpower, and an internationalist politics that regards human rights as universal and inviolable — and, beyond a certain threshold of human suffering, as rendering the claim to national sovereignty forfeit and justifying outside intervention.

For the rest, it’s true that we in the Euston Manifesto Group don’t begin, as some others on the left do, from the idea that everything America does is bad; and it’s true that we don’t regard being ‘anti-imperialist’ in this sense as a sensible way of aligning oneself in the world; and we do think that pluralist democracies are better forms of polity than tyrannical and totalitarian ones, and that liberal political and social cultures are better than illiberal ones. If that all adds up to being imperialist, then we’re guilty as charged and indeed proud. But it doesn’t. So thanks, Geoffrey, but no thanks.

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester

A fortnight after it charged forth from behind the fetid turrets of the blogosphere into real life, arguments about the Euston Manifesto still ricochet around the worldwide web. Named after the London road where the plotters met in a pub (O’Neill’s), the manifesto is a political movement born out of frustration among sections of the left with the anti-war movement. Prominent bloggers, journalists, activists and academics, including my Guardian colleague Norman Johnson, have already lent it their support.

The Euston Manifesto is a tiny alliance, but one indicative of a broader shifting of intellectual chairs. To their critics they are known as “muscular liberals” — to distinguish them, presumably, from the flabby and weak-willed ones. But there is much that is useful and spirited about their manifesto — the signatories score some eloquent points against the left’s opportunistic flirtation with radical Islam, its lazy anti-Americanism, and its retreat into flaccid relativism. Nor does it make any sense to label them as neoconservatives and apologists for American imperialism. The American neoconservative right and the Eustonian left might have arrived at similar positions, but they did so from vastly different premises and backgrounds.

link to full article online

A response to Natasha Walter

In her piece on the Euston Manifesto, Natasha Walter raises some interesting objections to it and to the group with which it originated. The interest lies less in their content (much of which rests on a mistake about the nature of the document) than in the way in which she deploys them, and what she is trying to do with them.

Walter has two principal criticisms of the manifesto. The first and less substantial one is her complaint that there are too few women among those who produced the document. It’s true that there are considerably more men than women among us, but Walter herself answers her own objection when she acknowledges that it would be silly to expect new political groupings to ‘make a representative showing’ before setting out their views. She’s quite right to say this, since such groups must initially be self-selecting or they’d never get started at all. The Eustonians would very much welcome more women becoming involved, and we hope they do; but short of creating all-women shortlists for co-signatories the main way to get more women involved in the first instance is going to be the same as the main way to get more people involved, period — putting our case as persuasively as we can and getting others to notice and engage with us.

Walter’s second and lengthier objection is to what she regards as a failure to advance the feminist cause within the manifesto itself. She thinks (a) that the document is not concerned enough about the under-representation of women in powerful positions in the UK, and their over-representation in low-paid jobs. And she also thinks (b) that it says too little about the West’s failure to help and protect women threatened with brutality or worse in their own countries. The first of these concerns involves a mistake about the nature of the Euston Manifesto. She disregards what it explicitly says: it’s a broad statement of general principles rather than a presentation of specific policies (see section A paragraph 3). It calls for recognition of human rights (sections B3 and B4); it’s silent about violations of these rights in China, for example, or in Zimbabwe. This doesn’t show a lack of concern about rights violations in these particular countries; it shows that the document is, and is meant to be, operating at a more general level. The same is true for our concern about justice for women. Indeed gender equality is precisely one of the core left-liberal values which we want to protect against contemporary anti-Enlightenment discourse and the general cosying-up to fundamentalism which the manifesto explicitly rejects (sections B4 and B15; section C paragraph 1). A criticism which objects to the omission of specific policies on women’s rights, in a document which does not purport to make detailed policy recommendations about any rights, is a criticism which is in fault-finding rather than fair-minded mode.

As to (b), Walter’s concerns are ones which of course all Eustonians will strongly agree with. Too damn right, we say — we support strong action by the West against human rights abuses, including those against women (section B10, section C passim). How can Walter have failed to notice how central this is to the whole document? Particular failures on the part of the UK government to provide this support have to be judged on their demerits, of course, but again this kind of case-by-case discussion is too specific to be appropriate for a general manifesto. However, the fact that such complaints against the government can plausibly be made by Walter does suggest that worse things are happening to women in cultures which practise genital mutilation or honour killings than the failure to get equal pay or full representation in the Conservative party.

Walter is right to say that many people on the liberal-left have become lethargic about feminism, and she’s right to mention the horror of honour killings in this context. But though the inequalities of pay between men and women in this country are often highly unjust and should be recognized and opposed as such, it does not belittle that injustice to acknowledge that the oppression of women which produces honour killings is seriously worse. It certainly is vital that people here should play their part in addressing domestic issues about women’s rights, but the exclusive focus on problems in the West is an example of those double standards which are one of the manifesto’s targets (section B3, section C paragraphs 6 and 8). Their effect, here as elsewhere, is to produce a curious flattening of the moral landscape, whereby honour killings, lower pay for women in the UK, genital mutilation, and the absence of representative numbers of women in senior civil service posts are all treated as being morally on a par, the occasion for equal moral outrage. The implication of this is that we have enough to do, morally speaking, about women’s rights here at home, so there’s no need for us to consider the failures of other cultures and polities in this respect. But this is simply to abandon the cause of women elsewhere. It seems unlikely that Walter really endorses this. But perhaps she has to pretend to, in order to focus her criticism about women’s rights where she is really determined to place it, namely here in the UK, and on the signatories of the manifesto.

That there is an element of pretence in Walter’s feminist critique of the manifesto is indicated by her silence about the neglect of women’s rights by other groups and individuals such as RESPECT, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and Ken Livingstone’s friend Sheikh al-Qaradawi. (This has been forcefully pointed out by other members of the Euston Manifesto Group in the comments to Walter’s piece on the Comment is Free site). Yes, she is right to complain of a lethargy about feminism on the liberal-left; unfortunately she herself demonstrates a version of it notable for its selectivity. It’s hard not to believe that she focuses on a supposed neglect of women’s rights in the Euston Manifesto as a stick for beating a political group to which she objects on other, undisclosed, grounds. It would have been better and more constructive if she’d addressed the real source of her disagreement with the manifesto, whatever it is, rather than focusing on a non-existent failure to recognize the rights of women.

It’s an essential part of the Eustonian case that we should take the horrors perpetrated against women (and others) seriously. But we should do so with something a bit less narcissistic than conscience-stricken navel-gazing about Western inadequacies, and a bit more productive than writing indulgent articles about Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

Finally, a minor but revealing point to note about Walter’s piece is its ostentatiously patronizing tone — ‘I couldn’t suppress a little smile’, ‘I told myself not to mock’, ‘they all have their hearts in the right place, I thought’. This is a pity — we’d all be better spending our time trying to sort out the truth on the topics in hand rather than engaging in these little positional manoeuvres.

Eve Garrard is a moral philosopher with a visiting position at the University of Manchester

You will have to read the Euston Manifesto in full for yourself. Likewise the churning arguments that are developing about it on commentisfree.com and other weblogs. But there are two big things you need to know as the debate on this latest leftwing prescription begins to move into the mainstream press. The first is that the authors’ main purpose is to rescue what remains of the British left from an obsession with the Iraq invasion and American imperialism and to shake it out of apologising for violent Islamists. The second is that the document is a cry of pain.

link to full article

Mind the Gap at Euston

‘Mind the Gap!’ warns the recorded voice, saving the alighting London tube passenger from plunging down the space between carriage and platform. The Euston Manifesto Group may need something similar. Our manifesto has attracted comment from left (Martin Kettle in The Guardian, Will Hutton in The Observer) and right (the neo-conservative William Kristol in The Weekly Standard), but a gap has opened up between some widespread perceptions of it (that we are ‘pro-war’, ‘ageing journalists’, and, oddly, both ‘old-time socialists’ and ‘Blairites’) and a much more interesting reality.

First, Euston is not a ‘pro-war Manifesto’ as the New Statesman (17 April) misleadingly, and perhaps mischievously, claimed. Many of the authors of the manifesto, including myself, and many signers (such as Michael Walzer), opposed the war. I addressed school-student walk-outs and teach-ins, blocked roads and train-tracks. I wanted more inspectors, coercive containment, and solidarity with Iraqi democrats. The banners we held up said ‘No to war, No to Saddam’ and ‘Regime Change from Below’. We had been waving those banners since the 1980s when we fought with Saddam’s goons outside Iraqi embassies.

The correctness of our anti-war position may be doubted. Personally, and overall, I still think I was right about that war, at that time, with that coalition. Time will tell. But how anyone can simply mock the position of the pro-war left and demand from it an apology after the removal of Saddam and the Ba’ath, the return of the refugees, the reflooding of the marsh-lands, the opening of the mass graves, the burgeoning of a free press, the purple-fingered joy, the new constitution, the rise of a free trade union movement — well, it is beyond me. But the fierce anger many of us who had opposed the war felt at the spectacle of that anti-war left can’t be doubted. Boy, was it real. The shame of it. The cheering on of fascists, the talk of Bush as ‘the real terrorist’, the indifference to the democracy aborning in Iraq, the sneering at tortured and murdered Iraqi trade unionists, the alliances with radical Islamists, the hoisting of George Galloway to the leading table, the indulgence of 9/11 conspiracy theories, the inchoate anti-Americanism.

Out of our shared fury at such a disgrace — and our shared and fierce commitment to democratic and egalitarian and liberal values — we fashioned an alliance with the pro-war left in which Norman Geras stood for many as the most articulate and inspiring figure. Immediately we allied for the new Iraq. For a year we explored the idea of a renewal of the progressive left. The reaction to the Euston Manifesto — 200,000 hits on Google within days, reported Will Hutton — suggests we have found a niche-market: half the liberal-left.

Second, as should now be clear, the Euston Manifesto was not the work of journalists sitting in a pub. Those journalists form part of a very loose political network that has coalesced around, amongst others, Harry’s Place, normblog, Labour Friends of Iraq, Engage, Unite Against Terror, Democratiya. This network is able and keen to take on the negativist reactionary-anti-imperialist left in a way the Labour Party and the Broad Lefts have either not wanted to, or have been frightened to.

The emerging network is global — the online statement ‘Unite Against Terror’ was translated into 13 languages and signed by people from over 40 countries. Democratic leftists from around the world are getting in touch all the time. Seventy percent of Democratiya’s online readers live outside the UK.

Moreover — again, mind the gap! — this network is not just living out a spectral half-life in hyperspace. It is defeating the academic intifada in the AUT as quick as you could say ‘better arguments, better organizers’. It is winning practical solidarity with Iraqi trade unionists threatened by the fascists of the so-called ‘resistance’. It is speaking up and down the country to Labour Parties that are desperate for the ‘beef’ of real political discussion. It is creating new journals that link democratic left intellectuals across the globe.

The American leftist and Dissent writer Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism and a signer of Euston, called the online journal Democratiya ‘a voice from the lost continent of modern politics — the anti-totalitarian and internationalist left’ — and claimed that ‘the world keenly needs this journal’.

To reduce this political moment — perhaps we will look back and say it is when the shape of a post-Blair democratic left came blinking into the light — to a few familiar names from the pro-war wing of the UK press is absurd. But convenient for those who have pinned their sails to the mast of Galloway and Pilger and Gott and ‘Blair’s Bombs’.

The third misperception of the Euston Manifesto is of a different character and it concerns our stance towards global capitalism. Martin Kettle in a largely fair-minded and thoughtful critique, claimed that Euston was anti-capitalist and therefore living in the past, trying to rescue the dodo of socialism. Others have labelled the manifesto ‘Blairite’ and a betrayal of the left. Again, a new reality is being missed. Old categories are being clamped down atop the Euston manifesto in ways that distort its meaning.

Martin Kettle asserts that we ‘concentrate exclusively on the threat from corporations, while ignoring the massive benefits from globalisation within our lifetime to billions of historically impoverished people in Asia whom state socialism has failed’. Not true. The manifesto says:

We stand for global economic development-as-freedom and against structural economic oppression and environmental degradation. The current expansion of global markets and free trade must not be allowed to serve the narrow interests of a small corporate elite in the developed world and their associates in developing countries. The benefits of large-scale development through the expansion of global trade ought to be distributed as widely as possible in order to serve the social and economic interests of workers, farmers and consumers in all countries. Globalization must mean global social integration and a commitment to social justice. We support radical reform of the major institutions of global economic governance (World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank) to achieve these goals, and we support fair trade, more aid, debt cancellation and the campaign to Make Poverty History. Development can bring growth in life-expectancy and in the enjoyment of life, easing burdensome labour and shortening the working day. It can bring freedom to youth, possibilities of exploration to those of middle years, and security to old age. It enlarges horizons and the opportunities for travel, and helps make strangers into friends. Global development must be pursued in a manner consistent with environmentally sustainable growth.

How did Kettle miss our open acknowledgement of ‘the benefits of large-scale development through the expansion of global trade’? How could he mistake our call for an alternative globalization — ‘global social integration and a commitment to social justice’ — for anti-globalization?

The Euston Manifesto Group has no agreed economic programme but as the first phrase (‘development-as-freedom’) should have made clear, the paradigm-altering work of the Nobel economist, Amartya Sen, is thought by many of us to be an important signpost. It cuts through sterile debates for and against markets and, like the work of John Kay, explores how markets can work best and for the ends of social justice, when embedded in humane social and cultural contexts marked by freedom and democracy.

What the manifesto added to that, I think, was a restatement of the idea that the working class organized in global democratic free trade unions remains the most important context of all. Sen argues that ‘a process of expanding the real freedom that people enjoy… requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or over-activity of repressive states’. In similar terms Gordon Brown has argued that we must ‘tackle injustices that breed resentment [and] show by the empowerment of poor countries through debt relief, aid, and support for education healthcare and economic development that globalisation comes to be seen not as a cause of injustice and poverty but a force for social justice on a global scale.’ Without strong free trade unions organizing from below those goals will not be secured.

Yes, global capitalism has not created a world in which workers have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’. But our world remains inhuman. Max Shachtman expressed the thought in the late 1950s that ‘capitalism is… increasingly incapable of coping with the basic problems of society, of maintaining economic and political order’. Alongside its surging productivity and ceaseless innovation — the growth in wealth, income and life-expectancy is indisputable — a voracious and out-of-control economic system threatens to eat up the resources of the planet, churn up communities, exclude the ‘redundant’, corrode social institutions, and overwhelm representative democracy. Many fear that everything it touches — and it touches everything — is being turned into a commodity to be bought and sold, priced but devalued. We feel cheapened by that. And we feel insecure and harried — at the mercy of forces we have created.

In many parts of the world basic human needs remain unmet on an appalling scale. Sen reminds us that despite ‘unprecedented increases in overall opulence’, the world ‘denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers — perhaps even the majority of people.’

The democratic left must offer better answers than the easy embrace of the global marketplace and brazen nonchalance at the appalling inequalities it throws up. Humanizing a ‘runaway world’ by tethering the global economy to development and tethering development to freedom and social justice, will marginalize the lure of what Albert Camus called ‘primitive baying at the moon’ and which, in our times, takes the form of Totalitarian Political Islam.

So, like the tube passenger who skips over the gap between carriage and platform, the better to explore the exciting city that lies waiting, it would be good if comment on the Euston Manifesto was more nimble-footed. Jump! There is a lost continent on the other side.

Alan Johnson is Professor of Political Theory at Edge Hill University.

The answer in the discussion was that the Eustonians are not a political party and therefore they do not have to have a policy on everything. Nor do they have to fight for the political centre from within the system — though some of them spend a great deal of their time doing exactly that and are probably signed up to Compass. Others in the group are not Labour Party members or even supporters but they belong to the left, the ‘corpse’ that Martin identifies. I would suggest that while he is right to point out some holes in the document, he misunderstands our intentions as I understand them. Where he talks of a corpse and the importance of the centre, I would say rather that the nature of politics and political debate has changed. As he himself emphasizes, these are different times. The nature of that difference is that party politics and party programmes are only one way in which the national and international conversation about politics can take place at any time. The world is now full of conversations, often shouting matches, taking place virtually. Through these new media tribes of many kinds are formed and take collective actions. The Eustonians are a political representation of this kind of organic development.

Some of the Euston Manifesto Group may disagree with this, but there is also an argument to be made that the progressive consensus, to which I am committed, is not necessarily best served by a Labour Party in power, but rather by the winning of broader political arguments in the policy-making community and in the minds of the general public. Radical political change is made permanent by its incorporation into the operating consensus, whichever party is in power. It is the shape and content of that consensus which determines the quality of life in this country and the influence of this country abroad. Values of liberal internationalism informed by human rights and egalitarianism, the aspiration of eradicating social exclusion at home and fighting terrorism everywhere, can be held and articulated by people from different political backgrounds. The gradual shift from allegiance to a particular party to allegiance to certain core values that has characterized politics over the last few decades means that the nature of coalitions and the content of alliances that can now emerge may surprise us all. The Euston Manifesto represents a step along one of these new roads. For me it should be broad in its appeal.

Martin describes us as the pro-war left. Many of the group were and remain anti-war and have a range of views on the issues discussed in the Manifesto. What unites us is a belief that developments since 9/11 represent part of a broadly based assault on democracy and that this assault has to be challenged, fought and defeated. Things like the Euston Manifesto are small steps in this larger fight. To an extent the Eustonians have accomplished their mission. The volume of debate on the web and the stirrings of coverage in the mainstream media mean that this alternative left position will now resonate as a recognizable one that should be represented more prominently in future. But most of all people who agree with the broad thrust of what we are saying have a sense of being connected to others. Martin Kettle sums up very well what the message of the Euston Manifesto was for me when he writes:

There is a lot to relate to in what the manifesto says here. It is right about the core things — democracy, liberty, universality. But it is also right about the immoral excuses sometimes offered on behalf of reactionary terrorist actions under the “my enemy’s enemy must be my friend” rubric; right too about the disproportionate indignation about unjustifiable acts on the western side as compared with similar acts on the anti-western side; about the susceptibility towards anti-semitism in some discussion of Middle-Eastern issues; about the numbskull dishonesty of the left about its own crimes and failures; and about the need to champion, not scorn, the principle of international humanitarian intervention.

Perhaps, in closing, it is worth making the point that our ambitions and egos were not as grandiose as many of our critics seem to think. In getting together, producing a document and using the resources of the internet to publish it, we did not assume that we would change the world or that the document would be a blueprint for transforming society. We hoped we would provoke debate, create a space for like-minded people to meet virtually and in person, and have some influence on public discussion. In ‘The essay as form’, the usually unreadable Theodor Adorno makes the following point, which captures for me something of what the Euston project is about:

[The essay] starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say. Its concepts are not derived from first principles.

Maybe we should have called our manifesto an ‘essay’!

Brian Brivati is Professor of Contemporary History, Director MA Human Rights and Field Leader BA Human Rights at Kingston University, London.