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We have put together this issue of Soundings at a time
when ethnic hatred is again devastating regions and blighting lives in
what was once, with care and difficulty, held together as Yugoslavia.
And at a time, too, when NATO, on a mission of bringing to an end such
violence across lines of difference, is pursuing its aims by bombing.
The contrast between what we are trying to say here in this issue of Soundings
and what is being done today in Europe - and in part in our name - is
shocking.
The second half of this issue is devoted to the exploration of 'transversal
politics', defined by Cynthia Cockburn and Lynette Hunter in their introduction
as 'the practice of creatively crossing (and re-drawing) the borders that
mark significant politicised differences'. How different from the ethnic
cleansings of Milosevic, from the failure of 'the West' to see beyond
the politics of partition, and from the violence which is asserted by
both to be the only road to a solution. As Nira Yuval-Davis explains,
transversal politics is an attempt to find a way of doing things which
is neither the imposition of a single universal which refuses to recognise
that there really are 'differences', nor the retreat into those differences
as tightly-bound, exclusivist and essentialist identities. Neither Milosevic
nor 'the Allies' in their various guises - which seem always to imagine
the world in terms of drawing lines, dividing, allocating - remotely begin
to recognise either these complexities or the political possibilities
to which they might, just, give rise. And while in ex-Yugoslavia all sides
pursue their aims by physical violence of various kinds, transversal politics
experiments with talking, creative writing, theatre, joint projects. It
would be naïve to argue, even to imagine, that the latter kind of politics
could be simply transferred to the situation in the Balkans today. (Although
it might be noted that one of the groups which contributes to the project
of transversal politics is based in Bosnia, and brings together women
of Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Serb, Bosnian Croat and mixed backgrounds -
see also Cynthia Cockburn's photo-essay in Soundings 3.) But juxtaposing
the two approaches throws into stark clarity the restricted terms in which
'our leaders' imagine the possibilities of international politics. And
how can Blair condemn bombings in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho, and Clinton
the shootings in the Columbine school, when they themselves are 'solving'
things through violence?
The contributors to the transversal politics discussion would themselves
not argue that they have a 'solution' to the difficulties of doing politics,
of talking across differences. They recognise quite explicitly that this
is tentative, experimental (although it is also suggested that some aspects
of recent years' political dialogue in Northern Ireland - and granted
the difficulties in which it is presently mired - 'have reflected the
beginning of a shift in 'establishment politics' too towards transversal
politics'). And this tone of exploration, of the recognition of difficulties,
of the recognition and examination of failures, is again in shocking contrast
to the performances we are forced to witness on what is called the world
stage. Pragna Patel presents an account of her involvement in Southall
Black Sisters which faces up to the difficulties which have been encountered,
which tries to learn from failures, and which sees self-reflexivity as
part of the very process of politics. Compare that with the assertive
strutting of Robin Cook; the macho posturing, the refusal to admit the
slightest doubt.
The danger of writing like this about experiments such as transversal
politics is that they can come to seem almost bland or idealistic - that
they may be arguing that if only we were nice to each other, and kept
on talking, then all would be well. This is not how it is. As Nira Yuval-Davis
argues, transversal politics does not assume that each and every conflict
of interest is reconcilable. And here again the contrast with 'formal
politics' is revealing. For while in Kosovo the Blair government interprets
antagonisms as running so deep that they can only be solved by military
intervention, back home here in Blighty his vision is of a politics which
refuses to recognise real conflicts of interest at all - 'a politics without
adversaries' as Chantal Mouffe put it in an earlier issue of this journal.1
If anything is bland and idealistic, it is this. And while New Labour
scatters the word 'community' through its documents and its pronouncements
without a thought for the complexities and conflicts which it is thereby
covering up, transversal politics declares itself perennially sceptical
about the term. It is precisely New Labour's bland official use of 'community'
and 'multiculturalism' which can refuse to recognise, and in that lack
of recognition thereby reinforce, the processes of marginalisation and
oppression which cross-cut such unproblematised 'identities' .
These issues of the complexities of identities and differences are ones
which have formed a continuing strand of reflection and debate within
the pages of Soundings. Andreas Hess presented a position statement in
issue 11; the theme of Windrush Echoes (issue 10) explored the negotiation
of certain black and white identities in post-war Britain; the proposals
for new forms of social settlement and public sector provision (The Public
Good, issue 4) confronted issues of difference in the context of demands
for 'universal' provision. The dismal horrors of the daily living-out
of antagonisms are brought home in this current issue by Nick Jeffrey's
detailed and thoughtful account of Stephen Lawrence's London.
It may indeed be that this question of what Bruno Latour calls 'coexistence'
is now more centrally on the agenda (or should be) than it has been heretofore.
In his opening article for this issue, Latour argues that a key problem
for any serious left party must be 'to explore coexistence between totally
heterogeneous forms of people, times, cultures, epochs and entities';
that we must remodel the project of modernity away from the old universalisms
and towards 'the new obligations of coexistence'. Once again, and as with
the project of transversal politics, the aim must be - he argues - to
reject both the more obvious, and opposed, alternatives on offer and strike
out for something different. In this case the formulation is that we must
reject both the current form of globalisation ('that is, in effect, Americanisation')
and the reactive retreat into new localisms. Throughout his article, Latour
is arguing for a reestablishment, and redefinition, of the differentiation
between Left and Right (again, a proposition which clearly distinguishes
this issue of Soundings from any form of Third Way politics); and key
to this redifferentiation, he proposes, must be an exploration by the
Left of the connections, rather than the oppositions, between locality
and globality.
In this refusal to take as given currently dominant forms of economic
globalisation Latour is also reflecting another of the continuing themes
of this journal. And he is doing so too when he explores the basis on
which such globalisation is justified. His fierce arguments against the
division between a realm of (incontravertible, uncontestable) Science
and a realm of Politics, and the imagination of economics as a Science,
lying within the former realm (and being thus incontravertible too), precisely
agrees with and develops the arguments we made in the Editorial to Soundings
10.2 It is this removal of the economic from the realm of the political
which enables the current form of globalisation to be presented to us
as an inevitability. Economics must be brought back into the realm of
the political; we must, in Latour's words, collectively appropriate the
means of calculation.
One element which Latour brings to all these proposals which is rather
newer to the pages of Soundings is that this task of reinventing modernity
(which would be quite different from the 'modernising' proposed by Blair
- the very difference itself undermining Blair's project by demonstrating
that there is more than one way to 'modernise' ) is a task particularly
appropriate to the Left in Europe. It is a proposal for a European Left,
to set against a future of a world of untrammelled Americanisation (presumably
aided by Blair), which is both extraordinarily attractive and, given what
is happening in the south-eastern part of this continent, extraordinarily
brave.
And not just 'far away' in 'the Balkans'. The crime against Stephen Lawrence
was one among many; the London bombings shattered streets which in one
way or another stood for some kind of coexistence. Latour argues that
we are moving from an era when 'succession' most marked our political
imaginations to one in which issues of simultaneous coexistence are more
prominent. A move, he says, from time to space. Perhaps another way of
putting that is to say that we have moved from an assumption that there
was one grand History going on, to a recognition that there are in fact
many. It could be argued that a real recognition of space throws into
relief the existence of those multiplicities. Space in that sense is about
simultaneity: co-existence.
It is also, of course, in part, the changing spatialities of our times
which have made the potentialities and the problems of such coexisting
multiplicities acute political issues in today's Europe. The combination
of ethnic diversity and economic dereliction (two different aspects of
two rather different periods of 'globalisation') in certain boroughs of
south London is what Nick Jeffrey documents in his article. In contrast
it has been pointed out by many a commentator that the bombs in Brixton,
Brick Lane and Old Compton Street picked out with unnerving geographical
precision locations which could each be seen, in different ways, as having
a confidence in asserting a non-exclusive difference.
The women's projects in Bosnia, Israel, and Northern Ireland, in Southall,
in Eritrea, and in all the other initiatives documented with such life
under the theme of 'transversal politics' demonstrate, if cautiously,
the necessity and possibility of continuing to assert such confidence.
They also demonstrate that for new ways of 'doing politics' we must look
somewhere else than Millbank and other such places; somewhere else than
the excited small circles of advisors and journalists who - creating that
self-referential circuit of debate, which so rarely questions its own
terms or recognises just how tame and conservative it really is - occupy
so much of our broadsheets, airwaves and television screens. In Soundings
we have always recognised that 'the political' is far more than this.
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