Praxis International

75

COMMENT

COMMENT*
E. P. Thompson I I welcome Arato and Cohens stance, which is one of implicit optimism. They are warning the actors in social movements (including the peace movement and the Greens) as to the dangers which would ensue if these movements were to press the demand for the autonomy of civil society (sometimes defined as society tout court) from the state to the point at which the very integument of democratic society (representative institutions and the law) was itself threatened. But they issue these warnings from an affirmative stance: that these movements could and should contribute to a dualistic strategy for democratizationa project which they endorse and which they presume to be historically present as possibility. I would be happy if they are right. Indeed, in moments of optimism I have thought that, if the immediate project of the peace movement should be successful, then, in fifteen or twenty years time, the Arato-Cohen project might commence. But my own stance today is that of a darker pessimism. I cannot see the strategy of the Western peace movement as an affirmative one of opening new spaces for social autonomy but, rather, as a stubborn movement of resistance to the enhanced powers of the militarised security state. Its methods, which may include non-violent refusal of the improper demands of the state, stem from the necessities of present emergencies and not from an affirmative social theory of societal transformation. It is true that, in the event of our resistance being successful, there would be significant new social openings. But this would be a half-unintended consequence. It would arise because of the specific character of state power today, which had encountered an immovable object in popular will and had been subjected to a salutary check. And in that moment of check new democratic opportunities would open up. I have explained the occasions for pessimism sufficiently in other writings. What is inadequate in Arato and Cohens presentation is an altogether too optimistic account of the history and present situation of a highlytheoreticised notion of Western democratic institutions. Their account notes some aspects of a current malaisethe decline in vigour of the representative process, the growth of corporatist manipulation, the disintegration of political projects into the special pleading of interest groupsbut it does not even acknowledge the deeper malaise of the growth in the powers of the unaccountable security state.
* Response to A. Arato and J. Cohen, Social Movements, Civil Society and the Problem of Sovereignty, Praxis International 4, No. 3 (1984): 266-283.

Praxis International 5:1 April 1985

0260-8448$ 2.00

76

Praxis International

They write: Historically speaking, from the nineteenth century on, civil society came to mean empirically the domain of interaction protected from state interference and defined negatively by the set of civil rights institutionalized in constitutions and by formal law. And they give us as examples the private sphere of the family, the rights of voluntary association, free press and assembly, as well as the market economy. But civil society has of course a longer ancestry than that, and these rights rested upon ulterior rights which had been won from absolutism in contests which (in some nations) had lasted from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries: for example, rights of the citizen to due legal process, freedom from arbitrary arrest, limitations upon sovereignty of various kinds, rights of religious conscience. In eighteenth century England the freeborn Englishman cherished among other such rights, habeas corpus, trial by jury, the sanctity of his home, the privacy of the posts, the subjection of the military (in case of civil disturbance) to the civil magistracy. And the English gentry, whose lazy but lucid theorist was John Locke, concerned themselves even more with limitations upon sovereignty: the sanctity of property-rights (the supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent), the prohibition of any standing army in time of peace, the independence of the judiciary, the prohibition of the sovereign from raising revenue except through parliament. They even cherished the notion that power rested upon an original compact between sovereign and people, and if sovereignty betrayed its side of the compact then it placed itself in a state of war against the people, government is dissolved, and the people are at liberty to provide for themselves by erecting a new legislativeas the American colonists were in due course to remember. These theories rested, of course, upon an equation of the people with the gentry and the men of some property only, and they were honoured as much in the breach as in the observance. But the premises of Whiggish natural right could beand, with the French Revolution and Thomas Paine, were extended further into far wider constituencies. Each nation has a different history. And these Wiggish rights, which reappear in some nations in more elaborate forms as constitutions or legal codes, are of great relevance to the question of civil society today. By Whiggish rights I mean the notion that a certain irreduceable sovereignty resides in the citizen or subject: it is not a question of whether the state is sovereign or not, but of the limitations imposed upon any such sovereignty. I wish that Arato and Cohen had examined these premises more closely. They are relevant for three reasons. First, they predicate a stance (which I will call the Whig stance) which consciously seeks to set the firmest limits upon the power of the state. In theory it is proposed that the source of authority lies in the citizen and that only so much power is ceded to the state (or executive) as is essential for the protection of the property, life, or liberty of the citizen. In my view it is this Whig stance which is reviving strongly in some contemporary social movements: in new conditions citizens are questioning, not the necessity for some forms of sovereignty, but the presumption and the improper exercise of sovereignty. The question is not whether there shall be a sovereign authority or not, but

Praxis International

77

what limits shall be set upon it and how these may be set. Second, these Whiggish rights remind one very forcibly of precisely those civil rights which immediately exercise those who are struggling for civil society in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. When Gyrgy Konrd celebrates anti-politics he is not supposing that society can be conducted without any state: he is asserting that citizens must construct a civil society despite the state, and must render unto Caesar a great deal less than Caesar will always demand. The third reason is more sombre. They are precisely these fundamental Whiggish rights which are now most threatened by the modern security state. In my own country this reversal appears the more remarkable in that Britain has always boasted a rhetoric of precisely such liberties. Moreover this reversal has entailed a reversal also in the stance of political theorists and actors. Today it is the Left (and sometimes even groups who suppose themselves to be revolutionaries) who are seeking to maintain ancient and threatened defences of the individual against the state (for example, habeas corpus, the integrity and rights of the jury, the subordination of military and police to the civil power), whereas it is the self-styled traditionalists and conservatives who are busy modernizing the machinery of the state and pulling these ancient liberties down. This process has gone rather far, although so long as the second tier of civil rights (the nineteenth century institutions listed by Arato and Cohen) survive I do not know that it cannot be reversed. In any event the case of Britain in the 1980s may be no more typical of the general case of Western democracy than were the cases of Germany and Italy in the 1930s. It is clear that British society is going through a post-imperial crisis, in which economic decline combined with absurd military priorities (Polaris and Trident nuclear weapons, the Falklands War) are placing inherited democratic structures under extreme strain. But what may prove to be universal in the British predicament is the role of national security in the degenerative process. In 1984 we have already seen in England the imprisonment of a civil servant (Sarah Tisdall) under the Official Secrets Acts for revealing to the press a document which government clearly wished to conceal, not from any enemy but from the British public; an officer of the security services (Michael Bettaney) imprisoned for twenty-three years for unknown offences against national security, after a trial which took place in camera and before a vetted jury; and at the moment of writing a senior civil servant (Clive Ponting) is awaiting trial under the same Acts for the alleged offence of passing to a parliamentary committee documents about the sinking of the General Belgrano without the authority of the Minister of Defence. We have also witnessed a most remarkable judgement in the Court of Appeal before the Lord Chief Justice which revised the concept of sovereignty itself and which set the paramountcy of national security above any Whiggish or representative limitation upon sovereign power whatsoever. This case arose out of the action of the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, in depriving six thousand civilian workers at the communications-interception institution, GCHQ Cheltenham, of their trade union rights. This action, which over-ruled

78

Praxis International

statutory rights to trade union membership, was taken under the pretext of the exercise of the Royal Prerogative. In upholding Mrs Thatchers actions, the Lord Chief Justice declared that it was the duty of the courts to endorse any action taken under the Royal Prerogative which could truly be said to have been taken in the interests of national security to protect this country from its enemies or potential enemies. Moreover, the courts were not entitled to enquire into such actions since the ministers were the sole judges of what the national security required. All that was necessary, in the exercise of the Prerogative (by which ministers may over-rule constitutional law) is that ministers should indicate a bona fide belief that national security required these measures. (Times Law Report, 7 August 1984). If this judgement should stand, the state will have regained in Britain an extent of sovereignty which it lost as long ago as 1688 when, in the Bill of Rights, the pretended Power of Suspending of Laws by Regall Authority without consent of Parliament was explicitly disallowed. Arato and Cohen presume a model in which sovereignty is located in the state: sovereign powers are clearly defined and are subject to constitutional or legal limitations: and in which government is confined to certain executive powers (economic steering, control of the armed forces and police, foreign relations etc.), but these are subject to public enquiry and some accountability at law. But the modern security state pretends to a more far-reaching concept of sovereignty. Ultimate power is secreted within the security organs of the state which are subject to no parliamentary accountability and which are protected from any public enquiry by Secrets Acts. These organs alone are empowered to define what is national security. The tendency is to award to these organs an ultimate executive authority under one fiction or another (in the case of Britain under the fiction of the Royal Prerogative) which can not only by-pass the secondary tier of civil society (representative institutions etc.) but also the primary Whiggish infrastructure of the rights of the subject and the rule of law. Ironically, as the post-Stalinist Communist states are beginning to construct some fragile infrastructure of Whiggish legal forms these same forms are being eroded in the free West. It has been the argument of some of us in the peace movement that this situation is not just the product of contingencies but is indicative of a deep process arising from the mutually reinforcing security postures of the two blocs: that is, from the Cold War itself. So long as these blocs confront each other in a state of declared ideological and security war, the image of an enemy Other becomes necessary not only in external relations but also for internal ideological and social control. Ruling groups on both sides need the continual exacerbation of the Cold War as a means of regulating internal political life. And for this reason the peace movement has no alternative but to refuse the improper claims of the security state, since at the same time it is defending the very fundaments of civil society itselffundaments which are unlikely to survive another two or three decades of Cold War confrontation. Thus our refusals do not signify new and expansionist claims for the autonomy of civil society but simply the defence of whatever protections of the citizen from the claims of overmighty sovereignty we have inherited from the past.

Praxis International

79

Of course it may be true that (as often happens in history) new and affirmative claims are being nurtured within the conservative defence of lost rights. But at this moment we are in a stance of defending ancient right. And Arato and Cohen are somewhat too officious in their reminders as to the allegiance which should be owing to sovereignty: for, in my own reading of history, every right in the past has been gained only after a preliminary struggle which has involved the assertion of these claims in defiance of the law, as may now be evidenced from the contests for civil rights in East Europe also. These considerations do not rule out of order the questions raised by Arato and Cohen in their interesting essay. Their questions are proper, but Arato and Cohen have proposed them in too complacent a way. They appear to propose that (in the West) sovereignty might be threatened by romantic social movements (Greens, peace movements, ecological defences, movements for local or industrial autonomy), whereas sovereignty itself is gestured towards as if it were a settled state of representative institutions and of formal law which itself constitutes no threat. I and many of my friends in the peace movement consider that the sovereignty of the national security state itself constitutes a threat to civil society. The state appears to us as the aggressor. And in any case, no analysis will be adequate to this moment which does not hold both parties to this new set of political relations steadily in view. To qualify themselves as analysts of this moment Arato and Cohen must ask questions of the security state at least as sharp as those which they ask of social movements. These questions were asked long ago by W.B. Yeats: What if the Church and the State Are the mob that howls at the door! This might be reworked, in the terms of the 1980s as What if the Parliament and Law Are the thugs who hammer at the door? And indeed, if we consider the predicament into which the regulation of the centralised media of communication is now bringing the second tier of the institutions of civil society, we might well add: What if freedoms of press and air Are the Index of the Inquisitor? II The questions raised by Arato and Cohen about sovereignty/society are valuable and I thank them. I cannot read with the same patience their passages on the Western peace movement. What intellectual procedures are being followed? This is not the first time that I have noted that competent social analysts appear to abandon the elementary procedures of their discipline when the peace movement comes under consideration. The movement is viewed at a great distance and through mists of prejudice; there is no evidence that any texts (whether of strategy or of theory) have been studied with careor that the improvised forms of

80

Praxis International

organisation of the movement have been understoodand partisan assumptions are smuggled in as if they were data of objective science. I acknowledge the difficulty. Like every social movement which (as a social historian) I have studied, the peace movement is made up of a plurality of voices and influences, some of which are directly contradictory. How then can one identify the authentic or the typical? Yet Arato and Cohen have taken a paragraph from a text of my own to develop their argument around. May I therefore assume that they are engaged in a discourse (or polemic) with my own political and theoretical positions? But in that case not only courtesy but also the normal procedures of intellectual discourse would suggest that they took steps to find out what these positions are. Yet I cannot find evidence in their essay that this precaution has been taken. I cannot therefore enter serious debate with Arato and Cohen since debate has not yet been started. Even the text of my own which they purport to address they have paraphrased in such a way as to change my meaning. I did not, in this text or in any other, say that the Western peace movement was threatened by falling into a Russian trap. I hope that I do not write such vulgarities. The trap, if there was one (but I did not use the term), was one which had been baited by forty years of the Cold War and by both sides. It is the familiar historical trap, in which one must either be for peace (Soviet-defined) or for freedom (as defined by the Free West), but one may not be for both. The Western peace movement was being drawn, early in 1983, within this immensely compelling ideological field-of-force: the term which I used was sleepwalking into a situation of extraordinary complexity. I warned that if the Western peace movement failed to assert its independence, and appeared to become dependent upon the Soviet game plan in diplomacy, then its support could fall away as rapidly as it arose. And I also noted (alas, prophetically) that this could result, in 1983, in the return to power of both Chancellor Kohl and Mrs Thatcher. Let me set out the argument again. The Western peace movement, by its massive mobilisation of opinion in 1981-2, represented a thaw towards our suppositious enemy, extending far into middle opinion and even influencing ruling groups in the West. It might have swept on to some successes if it had been met with some corresponding that, or opening, in the East. Social forces working for peace and civil rights might then have recognised each other, East and West, and effected a powerful convergence. In fact this process was checked and then reversed with martial law in Poland. At the time of my article, so far from any thaw, the Warsaw powers were freezing the influence of the Western peace movement out: and independent voices in the East were enduring harassment. The old logic of Cold War confrontation was asserting itself, and was provoking a predictable response from ruling groups in the West who were employing every resource of government and media to paint the Western peace movement into a pro-Soviet corner. We may surely take both Soviet and NATO traps for given? It is obviously the ascribed function of Soviet ideological agencies to try to make Western peace movements into auxiliaries of Soviet diplomacy just as it is the

Praxis International

81

ascribed function of NATO agencies to try to make social movements for civil rights in the East into auxiliaries of the free West. That is the name of the Cold War game. This game was played out in 1981-3 to the defeat of both Solidarnosc and the Western peace movement. Solidarnosc pretended to be a domestic movement innocent of any policies on defence or foreign affairs. But effectually it was sucked by NATO publicists into the Cold War field-of-force, and at that time it turned away from any recognition of Western radical or peace movements as potential allies. The Western peace movement supposed itself to be non-aligned, but in the ardour of its duties of refusal of NATO modernization it laid itself open to its opponents caricature of it as a one-sided (i.e., effectually pro-Soviet) movement without any reciprocal strategy for the healing of Europe. If I may simplify the position, one might define three different tendencies within the Western peace movement. 1) There is an avowedly pro-Soviet tendency, which is very much in the minority but which has a certain nuisance-value added to it by the continual scheming and interference provided by manipulative Soviet and World Peace Council agencies. It wastes a lot of our time and provides good copy to our opponents. 2) There is a strong tendency in the majority peace movements (of Britain, the United States, Scandinavia and West Germany) which is informed by non-aligned principles but which proposes a sequence in which Western disarmament and superpower detente must precede a further relaxation of bloc tensions, as a consequence of which it is supposed that the softening of totalitarian regimes in the East will in some way ensue. Therefore they effect a distinction between disarmament and human rights. 3) There is a lesser tendency, now growing in influence, which doubts this sequence and which distrusts any superpower regulation of detente, and which raises the question of the division of Europe directly onto the peace movements agenda, arguing for a healing-process, in which nuclear disarmament and the disarmament of ideologies and security services must go together, and in which movements for peace and for civil rights must recognise each other and seek for a strategy of convergence. I have long been associated with the third position, although I do not doubt the independence and non-aligned intentions of the second. This has, by the way, nothing to do with the question of unilateralism. Unilateral nuclear disarmament has been endorsed by the peace organisation of certain Western countries (especially Britain and Holland) as a consequence of quite different geo-political, moral and strategic arguments: for example, the anti-human character of nuclear weapons, the gross superfluity of weaponry, the need to assert national autonomy vis--vis the USA, the possibility that smaller nations may initiate a process of negotiation by action, etc. All this has been written out by many hands and with authority, and critics of unilateralism should consult the literature before they moralise about it. In Britain and in Holland most supporters of both tendency (2) and (3) above unite in their endorsement of strategies of unilateral refusal of nuclear arms by their own nations. To return to Arato and Cohen: it will be seen that we appear to be

82

Praxis International

discussing different movements. I do not know from what casual information their notion of the Western peace movement has been picked up. In the draft of their essay (which was written before the end of 1983) I find alarmist references to the possibility of civil-war-like conditions if cruise and Pershing missiles should be introduced, and violent attempts to block their installation. This gossip must have come to them from some such place as the New York Times since it was not a topic of serious concern in the peace movement. On the contrary, I do not know of any historical example of social movements of comparable scope and numbers so self-disciplined and so innocent of violence. In Britain the majority movement even ceded to the women of Greenham Common all authority in demonstrating against the coming of cruise missiles to this base, partly because the women had earned this authority by two years of example, partly because their argument that the feminine presence inhibited state violence seemed good. If we are to generalise about social movements, then we really must get near enough to them to understand what these movements are. In Britain it has been the traditional institutions of the Labour movement (e.g., the mineworkers union) which have become involved in episodes of violence with fellow miners and police, and not the peace movement. (I do not make this point in censure of the mineworkers, who have been subjected to mighty provocations.) If the peace movement is new in some of its forms of expression it is very old in others. It belongs to a long line of alliances which have mobilised public opinion in pressure for such issues as the suffrage, the abolition of slavery and of child labour, civil and religious rights, and as such these movements while autonomous in their organisation and policy-formationpress back into the representative institutions of the nation: the political parties, the trade unions, the churches, the social organisations. In this respect the peace movement has already achieved limited successes: it has overthrown Atlanticist dogma and transformed the policies of major social-democratic parties, is endorsed by lesser parties (nationalist and ecological), by churches and trade unions, has influenced the policies of governments (Holland, Denmark, Greece and, possibly, Spain and Belgium), and appears to be carrying out Arato and Cohens dual strategy with a little effect. III What I cannot accept is Arato and Cohens easy endorsement of the sovereignty of majority rule in matters of defence. It is here that their normative and theoretical levels of analysis, with their empirical weightlessness, may become actively misleading, and turn into abstract fetters upon the mind. For defence (which they leave undefined) is precisely the code-word for statist authoritarianism in the 1980s. It is reasonable enough for social theorists (and even for empirical historians) to agree that in times of war and great national emergency additional powers are granted to the state. Both World Wars have seen the consolidation of statism, and powers once granted in emergency are not easily afterwards taken back.

Praxis International

83

What distinguishes the Cold War era is that it has become possible to build the hypothesis of emergency into the daily routines of the peacetime state. We do not confront any actual enemy: we have suffered no annexations, been issued with no ultimatums, our rulers confer with theirs and our traders trade. What we confront is an hypothesis: in some worst case the Other might be an enemy, or would be an enemy if it were not for nuclear deterrence. The animating spirit of modern statism (a spirit which works in differing ways but with equal virulence on both sides of the Cold War divide) is that of the permanent enemy hypothesis. This supplies, for the authority of the modern state, what the hypothesis of Satan supplied for the authority of the medieval church. It is the need for defence against this hypothesis which legitimates the paramountcy of national security in whose name the Moscow Trust Group is harrassed and the employees at GCHQ Cheltenham are despoiled of their trade union rights. Arato and Cohen would deliver us into bondage if they should deliver us over to the paramountcy of defence. Their arguments here are, in any case, ill-considered. If they will look inside that portmanteau called defence they will find disclosed diverse and complex issues which might occupy a social analyst for years. They will be reminded of a long history of the exercise of individual conscience in relation to the means of war, which itself has its own authoritative literature. They will have to consider (as theologians and moralists have been considering for years) whether the anti-human character of nuclear weaponry does not present the whole problem, in a new light? They will have to consider how far the claims of defence in peacetime do or do not licence (upon the hypothesis of the permanent enemy) the suspension of elements essential to civil society: the invigilation of citizens, the interception of their mail and telephone, the vetting of public servants, the suppression of public informationeven if all these are endorsed by a majority (who have been repeatedly informed that the hypothesis is already hammering at the gates)? They may even have to consider the difficult issue of a nationals obligations to the rule of international law: if the United Nations (or a better UN than we have today) were to denounce and to outlaw their own nation for an aggressive action, where then does fealty lie? For what the permanent enemy hypothesis is leading us to is indeed a modernised feudalism. At a subordinate level certain democratic practices and usages coexist with a superordinate authoritarianism. Paramount sovereignty is located not in any supreme magistrate or office but in the concept of national security (i.e., defence). The custodians of national security the directors of the security services, leading military and civil servantsare not directly accountable to any part of the representative process. Every citizen without exception owes fealty to national security, and a breach of this fealty is the supreme offence known to the law and is visited with its heaviest penalties. It may be true that No state, no civil society. But alas we know well that the converse is not true. The state can get on very well without any civil society. There is a certain suggestion of the permanent enemy hypothesis in Arato and Cohens article which is at odds with their optimistic stance. At crucial

84

Praxis International

stages in their argument premises suddenly arrive upon the page which arise from some place outside their argument. Thus the Soviet Union is hypostasised as menacing Western Europe (although itself subject of highly centrifugal tendencies of the peripheries of its Empire), any weakening of NATO or of nuclear armaments would be extremely dangerous and would result in a European power vacuum, and so on. I have heard these assertions very often. They are worst-case assumptions which cannot be disproved, any more than one can disprove the worst-case assumptions (which perform the same function of the permanent enemy hypothesis on the other side) that Western imperialism might seek to invade or to blackmail the East. Indeed, both kinds of blackmail are generally going on, and the Western variety (which has a longer and stronger economic arm) is usually the more successful. One can only propose against them the better-case assumptions which the peace movement must work to fulfil if European civilization is to have any chance of survival into the next century. For example, if Yugoslavia, Austria and Sweden have successfully resisted nuclear blackmail, is there any reason to suppose that Holland or Britain must succumb? Is the Finlandisation of West Europe really more likely, upon the immediate agenda of history, than the Finlandisation of (let us say) Hungary or Poland? And if a bargain (or historic compromise) between the blocs could be struck entailing the Finlandisation of Eastern Europe and the Swedenization of Western Europe, might this not be in the best interests of both? And is it not possible (admittedly, this is the best case of all) that a relaxation of nuclear pressure from West Europe (notably from West Germany) might provide (if accompanied by a vigorous non-aligned diplomacy of a Rapacki type and by the convergence of movements for peace and civil rights) the conditons favouring the relaxation of rule in Eastern Europe and a healing-process in both blocs? This is to hypothesise, as a best case, that the vacuum which might suddenly appear would not be in European power but at the heart of the twinned Cold War ideologies. Deny these of their primum mobile, the permanent enemy hypothesis, and the binding force of both ideologies might fall away, and with this their serviceability as means of internal social control. These are some of the questions which we have, in our section of the Western peace movement, been raising now for five years. (See, for example, END Journal.) We do not know the answers. Our best-case hypotheses may be illusory. But we are finding some wise answering voices in the East who tell us that we can at least explore these strategies together. There can be no excuse for social analysts to come forward in ignorance that these arguments have been presented. Arato and Cohen note (censoriously) that only a viable strategy: economic, cultural and political against the Soviet nuclear weapons (SS-20s) by the Western peace movements could make a significant difference to our predicament. And where have they been this past five years? A founding text of our movement was the END (or Russell) Appeal of April 1980 which clearly called for this common strategy against cruise, Pershing and SS-20s alike within a transcontinental campaign which offers advantage to neither bloc.

Praxis International

85

We have sought to develop, precisely, the cultural and political dimensions of a trans-bloc movement. We have pressed repeatedly, in public and in private ways, against Soviet nuclear forces alsoalthough the majority Western media, as well as Radio Free Europe, have been at pains to censor any reference to our demands upon Soviet militarism. What else are we to do? We cannot easily sit down in front of SS-20 sites nor in front of the new missile sites in the GDR and Czechoslovakia: and any attempt to do so would probably be a provocation which would eagerly be seized upon as propaganda by the organisers of our own security propaganda, and would bring down foul consequences upon our East European friends. But what else, Arato and Cohen, are we to do? If you have been sitting, all these five years, with some viable strategy against SS-20sa strategy which we have overlookedthen it is time that you came out and put this strategy upon the table for public discussion. Or would it turn out to be only the old old strategy of the security state, with its marvellous electoral majorities, which we have already refused: to copulate the SS-20s with the Pershing and the cruise, and to breed upon their foul bodies the next generation of weapons which will burn Europes children?

Praxis International 5:1 April 1985

0260-8448$ 2.00