Euston Manifesto Blog

The Westminster Hour: The Euston Manifesto

04Jun06 – 12:00 pm

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British history resounds with the titles of great and stirring statements of political belief—from Magna Carta to the Tamworth Manifesto to the People’s Charter to the Euston Manifesto.

The Euston Manifesto?

Well, the authors of that last document at least hope that it too will be remembered for many years to come. The Euston manifesto is so-called because it was conceived in a pub on the Euston Road nearby the London railway station of the same name.

The three thousand word manifesto is an attempt by some writers and thinkers on the Left to develop a set of unifying principles for the Left for the 21st century. What they’ve actually done is re-expose a lot of the divisions on the Left—especially over the Iraq war. Most of the authors of this manifesto supported the invasion to remove Saddam Hussein. They argue that the Left shouldn’t define itself by anti-Americanism, but by a commitment to campaigning for global equality and championing human rights against tyranny.

They’ve certainly succeed in sparking a lively debate—especially on the internet where a lot of inflamed language is flowing between the manifesto’s supporters and its detractors.

David Wilby now explores how this manifesto has highlighted the struggle for the soul of the Left.

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Platform Thirteen

02Jun06 – 1:56 pm

Eve Garrard points out that Catherine Bennett is rather more sexist than the “blogger blokes” she criticises.
In her piece on bloggers in the Guardian yesterday, Catherine Bennett is struck all of a heap by the fact that men will be boys, in the blogosphere as elsewhere. She finds them coarse, even gross, and trivial and lumpen, especially in their attitudes to women, which are sexist and patronizing and dismissive and leering. We all have to admit that there’s some truth in what she says, though it applies less to the political bloggers in whom she’s interested than to some of the commenters who infest their comments boxes (and also, incidentally, the comments boxes, immoderate and unmoderated, of her own employer’s blog). But as many many people have already pointed out, a propensity to draw on crude and dismissive stereotypes is not a peculiarly male characteristic, it’s a peculiarly human one—women do it too, and Ms Bennett’s own piece includes some fine examples of this unlovely trait.

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

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Platform Twelve

31May06 – 4:19 pm

Norman Geras tackles an unfortunately common approach to the text, as exemplified by David Clark in the New Statesman.

A recent article critical of the Euston Manifesto is worth noticing for the principle of textual interpretation it makes use of: the principle, namely, that if the item before you—here, a document—doesn’t actually say what you need it to say for your critical purposes, never mind, invent something. The article is by David Clark and appears in the current issue of the New Statesman (where you’ll get one free hit). Clark starts off in not unfriendly terms:

There is… much in the manifesto with which to agree. Its belief in the intrinsic value of democracy reflects the left’s most enduring achievements. Its call for a humanitarian foreign policy is in the best traditions of internationalism. Even its scathing criticism of sections of the anti-war left for abandoning these values in favour of a vulgar anti-imperialism is substantially justified. Western guilt and the doctrine that my enemy’s enemy is my friend have produced some truly ugly sentiments.

So what’s the ‘but’. The ‘but’ is that like the early American neoconservatives we are leftists who condemn the stance of others on the left—‘a journey that led most of them [the neocons] eventually to abandon the left for good’. And Clark goes on:

The question is whether supporters of the Euston Manifesto are destined to follow a similar trajectory. There are good reasons for suspecting that they might.

That’s the first step: our imagined future is a mark against us. The next step is the ‘irresistible logic’ underlying a defence of liberal principles (glossed, this, by Clark in war-of-civilizations terms, though these aren’t the terms of the manifesto itself). For that defence ‘sits uneasily with a tough critique of [the West’s] economic and social structures, and the tension is hard to sustain’.

The neoconservatives resolved this contradiction by dispensing with the critique, and there are clues in the Euston Manifesto that point the same way.

OK, you still with it? Our future is against us, us Eustonians, even though it hasn’t happened yet, and so is the logical tension Clark has proposed—though, strangely, the same tension is not held to threaten his own political future. Anyway, what are the clues that we Eustonians will go, in Clark’s imagined future, the way of the American neocons? These:

There are vague and slightly ritualistic expressions of concern about social injustice and global inequality, but nowhere are they confronted with the kind of passion that is devoted to attacking those considered guilty of appeasing terrorism by criticising western policy—nor is any attempt made to identify their cause.

The Euston Manifesto sees the inequality generated by globalisation as some sort of inexplicable mishap; genuine progressives are clear that its origins lie in the uneven distribution of global power that underpins the free-market policies of the Washington consensus. The manifesto’s failure to grapple with this problem, or even acknowledge that it exists, robs it of whatever radical potential it may have contained.

Got that? What we do say about social injustice and global inequality is ritualistic and it’s not passionate enough, according to David Clark, arbiter of passion levels. And what we don’t say, entirely passionless because we don’t say it—that global inequalities are ‘some sort of inexplicable mishap’—this suffices for him to know where the manifesto and its supporters are going.

There’s only one small drawback to the whole production: that the people who produced the Euston Manifesto think inequality and the maldistribution of power, whether nationally or globally, are merely contingent and inexplicable, with no structural basis in the economic relations of contemporary societies, is a fiction of Clark’s making. It comes from the sucking it out of your thumb school of textual analysis. Not a great school.

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

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Launch Thank-You

26May06 – 6:50 am

The official real-world launch of the Euston Manifesto took place on 25May06 in London and was a huge success. Thank you to all (250) of you who came and generously gave. You made it the event it was, but there wouldn’t have been an event to invite you to if it hadn’t been for the brilliant organisational skills and hard work of the launch team.

Thanks to Jane Ashworth, Kate Waterfield, Dan Johnson, Peter Stapleton, Brian Brivati, Roger McCarthy, Bevan, Philip Spencer, Alexandra Simonon, Andrew Regan, David T, Anthony Cox, Gabbi, Paul Evans, Neil Denny, Richard Sanderson, David Herman, and all those recording the event in various media: Paul Christopher, Tim Sewell, Philip Wolmuth, and David Herman. Special thanks should go to the fine speakers: Norman Geras, Shalom Lappin, Eve Garrard, and Alan Johnson, and to the chair—Nick Cohen.

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Platform Eleven

25May06 – 10:06 am

Norman Geras deals with the common misbelief that the Euston Manifesto is a “pro-war” document.
Read More »

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Blueprint Magazine: European Wake-Up

25May06 – 3:29 am

[Blueprint is the magazine of the US Democratic Leadership Council]

There are cracks in the façade of European leftism that should give us all some hope. They come in the form of editorialists, academics, activists, and bloggers who’ve pretty much had it with the reflexive anti-globalism, anti-Americanism, and anti-interventionism of the 1968 generation in Europe. Some of the new voices are youngish journalists in rebellion against the dogmatism of their elders, who often exercise iron control—and sometimes enforce ideological unanimity—over certain key media like Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and the BBC.

Perhaps the most noticeable fissure in the masonry of group-think is a new initiative promoted by old British leftist Norman Geras, who supports the war in Iraq and democratization in the Middle East. Together with a young columnist named Nick Cohen, Geras is leading a new movement dubbed the Euston Manifesto—because it was conceived during several meetings in a pub near London’s Euston Station. The manifesto is posted on the Internet and is open for anyone to sign. Within a month of going up in early spring, it had attracted hundreds of signatures, quickly becoming an intellectual and ideological home for many disillusioned European leftists who are looking for a sensible progressive movement to join. That has to warm an American progressive’s heart.

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The Guardian: The Path Out Of Denial

25May06 – 2:37 am

Was the Euston Manifesto written, as some wags now say, in a pub? Well, no. Would you want beer spilt over your manifesto? Would you want it smelling of smoke? The document was mooted in one pub and discussed in another. But it was written where things get written these days, on computers. And this, in a sense, is also where it came from—out of the blogosphere and into the world.

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

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Sunday Herald: Brian McNair

21May06 – 1:22 am

An old communist confesses: the class war is over and even Rupert Murdoch makes sense … what do lefties do now?

EVERYONE remembers where they were the first time they found themselves agreeing with Rupert Murdoch. I was at my desk, circa-1995, reading a speech he had given on the global impact of new technologies. These, he said, were proving “an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere”. Fax machines, direct dial telephones, primitive e-mail (this was before the internet really got going) were eroding state control over media and culture, all over the world. As a result, “the Bosnian Serbs cannot hide their atrocities from the probing eyes of BBC, CNN and Sky News cameras … the extraordinary living standards provided by free-enterprise capitalism cannot be kept secret”.

Before that moment the only thing I had in common with Murdoch, apart from our Scottish heritage, was the fact that we both kept busts of Lenin on our desks as students. He abandoned any attachment to Marxism in order to become a master of the media universe. I left the Communist Party at the age of 26, but continued to see myself as a man of the left. What else could you be in the west of Scotland during the Thatcher years? This was Red Clydeside, my city, the place where tanks once parked in George Square to prevent Bolshevik-inspired revolution. We were proletarian in our hearts, even if now we went to universities and became academics and teachers and social workers. We had read our Marx, and some of us our Stalin, and so knew that capitalism was doomed to collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. We admired the Cuban revolution, and defended the Soviet Union even as Gorbachev was telling us how much the whole sorry experiment stank of stagnation and decay.

link to full text of article online

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Mobile Phone Appeal To Support Iraqi Trade Unions

19May06 – 10:20 am

The TUC has launched an appeal for unions and their members to pass on their used mobile phones to the Iraqi trade union movement. You can help too, by passing on your old phones and/or chargers.

Unions representing workers in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan face incredible challenges in defending working people and rebuilding democracy. One of their requests for solidarity from British trade unionists is the provision of mobile phones—crucial for any union organiser these days, but especially in Iraq where travel can be dangerous and landlines aren’t sufficiently reliable or widespread.

But mobile phones can be expensive to buy in Iraq (and UK phone systems don’t work there yet), so buying new ones could eat up scarce union resources. Instead, the Iraqi trade union movement has identified a way of easily converting old European mobile phones for use in Iraq. So now the TUC Iraq Solidarity Committee has opened an appeal for used mobile phones alongside Labour Friends of Iraq.

Old mobile phones (and their chargers, of course) should be sent to the TUC Aid for Iraq appeal at Congress House, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3LS. Or bring them to the Euston Manifesto Group launch.

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Platform Ten

18May06 – 11:30 am

Norman Geras responds to Daniel Finkelstein’s Times article.

Writing in this newspaper [three] weeks ago, Daniel Finkelstein gave the Euston Manifesto—a document calling for a progressive realignment and which I had a large part in drafting—a mixed review. “Really very good,” he said. “I agree with its sentiments; I think it well written and timely.”

But he also described it as “a gigantic waste of time and energy”. How so? Because, even though it challenges ideas widely held on the Left, the aim of those who produced it is “to save the Left from itself” and that isn’t worth the bother.

There are two things that may be said in response to this. The first is that even for someone who doesn’t regard the Left as the best place to be politically, a more rather than a less healthy Left is surely to be desired.

Finkelstein thinks the manifesto’s “clear statement of principles has been wasted on people who do not agree and never will”. But in politics you don’t know how many will agree with what you have to say until you’ve said it, and there are already signs that what we’ve said in the manifesto—holding firm to democratic principles and universal human rights, not making excuses for tyranny or terrorism, opposing anti-Americanism and not selling short the liberal tradition of freedom of ideas—has found a welcome from a section of left-liberal opinion. How far this will go remains to be seen, of course, but except from a very narrowly partisan view it has to be better for the wellbeing of the polity that those on the “other side” from you are attached to principles of a better rather than a worse kind.

Secondly, for those of us who haven’t given up on the Left, there is more reason still why we shouldn’t want to see democratic and universalist values made light of. We see these values as linked to others that have always been the special concern of the Left. No one else can be relied on to defend them.

Finkelstein writes that the “task of persuading the Left is also unnecessary”: for if the Euston Manifesto had been published by rightwingers, support for it on the Right would have been overwhelming. But that isn’t true of some of the manifesto’s positions—for example, its embrace of broadly egalitarian principles and of trade unions as the “bedrock organisations for the defence of workers’ interests”, and its defence (in Shalom Lappin’s words) of “the integrity of the public domain against the onslaught of privatisation and expropriation that has resulted from the dogmatic pursuit of neoliberal ideas”. Some conservative voices have, in welcoming the manifesto, expressed clear reservations about these aspects of it.

Still, Finkelstein is right about the people on the Left “who do not agree and never will”. For all those leftists who have responded positively to the manifesto there are at least as many who have been dismissive. What is interesting about much of this reaction is the themes it typically combines. In so far as the manifesto says anything true (so critics have said), it deals in well-meaning platitudes; and in so far as we are critical of others on the Left, our criticisms apply to only a small number of people on the very far Left. And yet despite this, the manifesto at once brought down upon itself a hostility from many that it is fair to describe as warm. Why? The document named nobody in particular in identifying some lamentable patterns of argument, evasion and apologia. If the cap doesn’t fit, no need to wear it. I would suggest that at least one of the reasons for the antipathy is that the cap fits rather more heads than just those of the Socialist Workers Party.

If this weren’t so, why is it now as common as it is to hear people on the liberal Left damning universal principles as “arrogant”, “imperialist” or (sotto voce) “Islamophobic”? The attachment to these principles—to democracy, freedom, equality—used to be standard on the Left. But in the opinion pages of the liberal press it has become routine to find journalists and others of would-be progressive outlook telling us that democracy, or liberalism, or Enlightenment values, all possibly suitable in the West, may not be so in other cultural contexts. The right to speak freely—entirely freely, barring only incitement to hatred or violence—is also frequently put in question in the face of religious sensibilities clamorously asserted.

“Understanding” noises about terrorist atrocities—in London or Madrid, but especially Tel Aviv and Haifa—as having their roots in poverty, oppression and injustice are equally common, though these voices are at a loss to explain why there have been movements in the past fighting these evils that didn’t resort to randomly blowing up civilians. Well-known writers—mature people, veterans of the Left—see their way to endorsing the Iraqi so-called resistance despite its murderous methods, or give out lightminded comparisons between the US under George Bush’s leadership and Nazi Germany. That there are such themes being aired by people on the broad liberal Left is a matter of record. It has been documented and criticised repeatedly. Presumably the newspapers carrying comment of this kind wouldn’t be doing so if such comment weren’t finding comfortable accommodation with their readers.

The Euston Manifesto is a response to these political tendencies, and as such is very much on target. That is why it has aroused the interest it has, hostile interest included. We are happy to be restating some important if indeed obvious truths, in not giving up on the future of the Left.

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

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