VIA Num. 4 / October'07

Editorial

Joan Guitart

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Is Moral Government Possible?

Nevin Doran Hunter

To govern is to have authority and power over others. To govern justly is to use that authority and power to enhance life, security, and opportunity for the governed. Over the millennia philosophers, scholars, religious leaders, and the practitioners of the business and political arts have pondered on what constitutes just government. Emerging from our human experience there seems to be a consensus belief that just government functions on the basis of tested and verified moral truths, some of which are substantive and some procedural. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the societal framework within which ‘moral government’ is possible and to then suggest some basic principles that should serve as a guide to the exercise of authority and power by a moral government.

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Post-Modern Rorty, some Notes

Àngel Castiñeira

Richard Rorty, one of the most influential North American philosophers of the last few decades, died on 8 June last. Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Stanford University, he was responsible for notable works such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989); Truth, Politics and Post-Modernism (1997); Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (1998); and Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (l991). Rorty, one of the key figures in the revival of North American pragmatism, was inspired by thinkers such as John Dewey and William James. In this article, Castiñeira explains the broad lines and key insights into the evolution of neopragmatic, post-modern and anti-essentialist thought of one of the 20th and 21st century’s most significant thinkers.

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The falsery accuses culprits of the political disaffection

Francesc-Marc Àlvaro

The need to find more or less plausible yet urgent answers to the growing disinterest in politics, to the lack of citizens’ trust in key democratic institutions and to electoral abstention has led us to search for those guilty of what has been called political disaffection, a concept that aims to cover the vast array of attitudes and trends that make up a somewhat complex and repeated phenomenon in the political culture of countries with stable democracies. The main thread of this article, by journalist Francesc-Marc Álvaro, focuses on the need to deconstruct some of the prejudices and stereotypes that go to make up the origins of a mystification that has also led to diagnoses being assumed which point to the more circumstantial aspects of the problem, rather than its structural aspects. The author tackles what he considers to be the falsely accused culprits of this political disaffection: the alleged rupture between political debate and the real interests of citizens, the lack of comprehension and intelligibility of politicians' language, the increased focus on sterile ideological debates to the detriment of effectively handling and resolving problems, the lack of transparency and failing of encouragement to get involved and, finally, the relatively low quality of the people working in politics.

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Scotland: the Slope towards Independence?

Ivan Serrano

The political scientist Ivan Serrano, very familiar with the social and political situation of Scotland, has written a recently presented doctoral thesis that examines and compares the processes of devolution and decentralisation in Scotland and Corsica, respectively. This article not only offers us some elements of analysis to assess the possible scenarios faced by Scotland as a result of the victory of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the elections held last May, but also assesses the ten years of the devolution process promoted by Tony Blair since 1997. According to Serrano, a certain success in implementing institutional changes and in the overall development of this process has, paradoxically and beyond any diagnosis that might be made of the recent electoral results, meant that Labour's vision for the future of Scotland is the one that enjoys most support among the population today.

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Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer: a Catalan Unknown

Marta Pessarrodona

An undoubtedly multifaceted figure who might have been remembered for his huge contribution to various disciplines and for whom it can be claimed –as the author does in the text– that he was historian, Hellenist, journalist, economist, prose writer, amanuensis and politician. However, the truth of the matter is that the life of Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, today, is both forgotten and all-too unfamiliar in certain latitudes. In this article, Marta Pessarrodona describes the figure of an erudite man who was the leader of Acció Catalana Republicana, Minister of the Economy with Azaña and Governor of the Bank of Spain during the dramatic period of the Civil War.

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For a Humanist Policy

Joan Lluís Pérez-Francesch

In this article, the author proposes what might be considered a bona fide paradigmatic change in the world of politics. A transformation towards the recovery and updating of the values of humanism and personalism, with particular emphasis on public action and political struggle in the sense of serving people and the community, rather than the attainment of power per se. This change in approach means, for example, that politics must reflect and define a country-driven project, a collective project rather than tactics or marketing in its strictest sense, more long-term than short-term. According to Pérez-Francesch this change in the way politics is conceived also involves a revival of a more deeply ethical, more transcendent dimension, from particular to general interest, and with a certain spiritual anchoring of politics.

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Concerning historical memory

Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté

The different social, academic and political projects and initiatives concerning historical memory that have been initiated over the last few years have meant that this issue, today, has become one of undeniable importance, subject to numerous public debates. In this text the author reflects on the true meaning of and the opportunities deriving from the encouragement of so-called memory policies. Solé i Sabaté also, and very clearly, alerts us to the hidden dangers in a conception of memory biased in one direction, in other words, where the interpretation of that memory does not take into account its complexity and plurality.

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The centre

Jordi Pujol

We reproduced the editorial published by the President of the Centre d’Estudis Jordi Pujol in the CEJP online newsletter on 15 May 2007. The main thesis of this text refers to the fact that, in Spain, as in France, the difficulty in building and consolidating a political force of the centre is due, among other things, to the inherent limitations of the electoral system. This has led to a de facto situation where the most important nationalist parties in the state, namely CiU and the PNB, particularly over the last two decades, in which polarisation of the PP and the PSOE has gradually established itself, have taken on a role of undeniable political centricity, both with regard to their actions in Spanish politics and also by opting for an ideologically central position.

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Liberal Ideas and Renewing Politics

Monique Canto-Sperber

Monique Canto-Sperber, moral and political philosopher (L’inquiétude morale et la vie humaine, 2001), is a member of the CNRS and of the Centre de Recherches Politiques Raymond Aron of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Although she has sometimes been considered as being akin to the more social-democratic positions of Dominique Strauss-Khan and Michel Rocard, Canto-Sperber has dedicated a significant part of her most recent work to renewing and defining a social-liberal line of thought based on political theory. In this respect, Canto-Sperber is the author of work such as Le socialisme libéral. Une anthologie: Europe-Etats-Unis (2003), Les règles de la liberté (2003) and Faut-il sauver le libéralisme? (2006). In this article, she talks about what she considers to be the essence of a social-liberal movement and point of view: the conflation between the active defence of individual freedom and the awareness that it is in a community, within a cohesive society, that personal autonomy can be made manifest.

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The Complicated and Exciting Future of Liberalism

Antonio Garrigues Walker

Liberalism has been capable of adapting to the major transformations of past and present with much more speed and efficiency than socialism or conservatism, both of which have often limited themselves to taking on the liberal ideas that have convinced them most at any particular time, to define and apply to certain public proposals and policies. This is just one of the conclusions that the author defends in an article with a marked tone of assessment and the summarising of his own life and experiences in the political arena. Today, liberalism is a trend of thought that is capable of providing suitable responses at a time when dogmatic pretexts are lacking. However, the ideological triumph of liberalism has never been translated, not even today, into perceptible political profit on the part of political parties of a reformist, liberal or centrist nature. There are various ways of providing an explanation, more or less reasoned, for this phenomenon and Garrigues Walker deals with each one explicitly. In the case of Spain, however, the problem is more complex, with certain singularities that the author outlines in detail, such as the country's difficulty in overcoming a political debate that is couched exclusively within left-right dialectics, resulting in the political centre, rather than being a position in its own right, representing a particularly unstable point of balance

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Tony Blair: Ten Years of New Labour

Montserrat Guibernau

This new article by Montserrat Guibernau can be considered as the second part, or continuation, of the article she published in VIA 01 entitled Tony Blair: Leadership as Vocation. On that occasion the author focused on the figure of one of the undeniable leaders of the last decade in Europe. In this new text she weighs up and reviews in detail the broad lines established by New Labour and on which it based itself, the origins of which lie in the Third Way, as outlined by Anthony Giddens, author of Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (1994) and The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1998). Although she states that, sometimes, New Labour appeared merely to be doing the opposite to what Old Labour would have done, Guibernau also assures us that one of its leading contributions and most genuine and evident consequences seems to have been the relocating of the political centre in Great Britain, thereby also forcing a highly significant transformation within the Conservative Party.

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Centrism in France or the Failure of a Success

Nicolas Sauger

The establishment and adoption of a clearly centrist strategy on the part of the UDF in France has been progressive and its main raison d'être, today and at the hand of François Bayrou, is two-fold: one the one hand, to construct an option that rejects the previous majority-focused, bipolar logic and, on the other hand, to have a means to attain the presidency with their own strategy. Nicolas Sauger, an expert on how centrism has evolved in France, also explains the ambivalences, the two souls, of the UDF, expressed today in the New Centre of Hervé Morin and in the Democratic Movement of Bayrou himself, along with the contradictions and internal difficulties, many of them already present in the initial phases of this long and tumultuous process towards defining an autonomous centrist project. A path that has resulted in the UDF suffering, on a number of occasions over the last few years, from significant desertions among its ranks, especially towards the UMP of Jacques Chirac, firstly, and subsequently of Nicolas Sarkozy.

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The Life, Glory, Passion, Death –and Difficult Resurrection– of Centrism in Italy

Alfio Mastropaolo

The process of establishing a new centre-left force in Italy is becoming one of the dominant factor of the post-Berlusconi era. After a period dominated by an increase in polarisation and dualism, the intention of the Margherita and the DS to create the Democratic Party is a response to an attempt, expressed by Prodi on several occasions, to return to the path of true political centrality. A centrality that has its very distant roots in the Italian case, and in which both liberal and socialist thought, and most particularly Christian Democrat thought, have played a historical role and had a very decisive influence. The fundamental reasons for this process, therefore, do not lie in immediate political strategy nor are they a consequence of the needs imposed by the current electoral system; quite the opposite, in fact. In order to understand a number of events in modern day Italy, and also to predict their potential for success, we must bear in mind the historical facts and dynamics that have marked out the broad lines of Italian political culture. The author of this very extensive but necessary article explains the origins and the complex evolution of centrist thought in Italy.

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Dins dels límits de la memòria (Avishai Margalit entrevistat per Ginacarlo Bosseti)

Giancarlo Bosseti

Massa memòria o massa poca? Hrant Dink va ser assassinat perquè va escriure en record del genocidi armeni. El premi Nobel Orhan Pamuk va ser obligat a deixar Turquia i amenaçat per la mateixa raó. A Sud-àfrica, els ritus de memòria i reconciliació, ritus que faciliten el perdó, eren –i encara són– necessaris. Quan es debat sobre l’ètica de la memòria, no només hi ha culpa per l’oblit i lloança per la memòria, també hi ha culpa i lloança en l’altre sentit: a vegades destruir un arxiu pot semblar just, molt sovint no ho és. Per tal de debatre la faceta ètica i moral de la memòria i l’oblit, hem entrevistat Avishai Margalit, autor de The Ethics of Memory (Ètica de la memòria).

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