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VOLUME 7 (2005), ISSUE 12 (YEARLY), EDITORIAL
REFERRING GOVERNMENTS TO THE COMMUNITY: HENRY DAVID THOREAU REVISITED
PATRICK HUNOUT, MAYA
DAVID & JEAN DEWITT
Patrick
HUNOUT is the President and the Founder of The Social Capital Foundation
Maya
K. DAVID is the Chair of the TISR Editorial Board and a Professor of Sociolinguistics at the
Jean DEWITT is a Professor of Communication at the University of Houston-Downtown, Texas, USA, and a TISR Editorial Board Member.
Dear readers, TSCF’s approach to social reality does not owe anything to the conventional political doctrines, either be they from the “left” or from the “right”, “moderate” or “extreme”. Our approach is original and cannot be reduced to any existing stream or movement unless our own. Skepticism
and disaffection with politics is a reality in most of
our countries. The reason for this, beyond a broad and vague trend to the
weakening of civic engagement, is associated with the fact that
intrinsically the political system does not address the issues that people
consider as the real ones. In the eyes of many, peanut politics disguises
and misplaces the real stakes, and substitutes the goals of the political
class itself to those of the citizens. Hence, the political alternatives
proposed to citizens at polls are aberrant, as they generally consist in
packages none of which really allows change to the previous policymaking, for there is a consensus among politicians
to not change anything nor even raise the real issues at stake. This view,
in our opinion, is somewhat grounded, and the work we do at TSCF pursues
the objective to reformulate the basic issues and alternatives in a more
relevant way. In most economically advanced countries of the world, the political
alternatives tend to reduce themselves to two large streams - the
“liberal” one (in the European sense of the word, associated with the
free enterprise and the reduction of the role of the state) on the one hand, and the “socialist” or “social democrat” one
(associated with a stronger role of the state in the economy and a
redistribution of the available wealth through social welfare and support)
on the other hand.
In most countries where they alternated to the power, they carried forward very similar policies through different methods. While “neo-liberalism” may appear as an ideology favoring, behind the mask of mathematical economics and the exaltation of the “free” individual, the interests of a given social category (mainly the business), in practice “social democracy” supports exactly the same goals, but insists more on softening through regulations, social support and welfare the consequences of profit maximization for the social environment – in the last resort, in the long-term interest of this maximization itself. Whatever political orientation they refer to, governments tend to strengthen governmental power everywhere. In a neo-liberal system such as the US, the authoritarian shift, from the practice of torture to large-scale telephone tapping practices, is quite visible. While economic freedom is all the time more enlarged, civil liberties are restricted in a blatant or surreptitious manner, and police or military means of control are used, both inside and outside the country. The EU itself is nothing but an attempt to construct a
huge supranational state that the Europeans do not need. Since the 1990s,
the cost of this attempt has been enormous in terms of economic growth,
employment and inflation. From this point of view, the rejection in May
2005 of the European Constitution project by the Dutch and the French
voters may be bad news for the European Union, but it may be very good
news for the Europeans – a Constitution project that was nothing but the
completion of a state integration process begun years ago in Maastricht
(1992). People realize that they are being led down the wrong path, and
they react in an instinctive manner by rejecting the orientation imposed
upon them when they have the possibility to express themselves.
The deepest reason for the reinforcement of the governmental power
is that the strategies carried forward by the ruling class intensify
everywhere the problems, weakening the community link and deepening the
social crisis. This is the case notably with the spreading of
individualism and market values, the promotion of multiethnicity and the
development of economic precariousness. In this context, it becomes all
the more necessary to recourse to governmental control to try to alleviate
the consequences of what these strategies contributed to put in place.
Governments tend everywhere to substitute themselves to the community instead of serving it. Some sustain that they simply identify with the community, while others expect the governmental power to “restructure” or even “produce” society. As a matter of fact, if the existence of political elections would suffice to identify the state power with the community, the problem of democracy would be wonderfully solved, and everything would be fine as it is. Things are unfortunately somewhat more complicated. There is a considerable need, even in the so-called democracies, to democratize further not only the political system, but also the legal order, the public administration and the tax system. In the face of this resistance of the political class to address the real issues with which the population is confronted and to dominate society through intimidating or oppressing means, several orientations are possible. One of Henry David Thoreau’s most important works, the essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849), grew out of an overnight stay in prison as a result of his conscientious refusal to pay a poll tax that supported the Mexican War, which to Thoreau represented an effort to extend slavery. Thoreau’s advocacy of civil disobedience as a means for an individual to protest those actions of his government that he considers unjust has had a wide-ranging impact - on the British Labor movement, the passive resistance independence movement led by Gandhi in India, and the non-violent civil-rights movement led by Martin Luther King in the US. It may be difficult in today’s society to gather the social support that
leaders like Gandhi gained in India, but a peaceful lack of cooperation
may still be a very efficient tool. This is the case with people’s
apathy in Europe, with tax evasion in countries like Belgium, where the
spirit is critical; it is also the case with private behaviors each time
these behaviors tend to consolidate family links, trust, friendship,
direct agreements between people, and to protect people’s own cultural
identity. In today’s society, however, the most efficient and
positive way to face the extension and failure of the new imperialism is
to empower society through the creation of social capital. Social capital
includes such social virtues as cooperation, trust, solidarity,
responsiveness and cohesiveness, which are a most powerful cement for a
community, and the most powerful factor for its emancipation. Whenever
such virtues allow society to regulate itself easily and spontaneously, it
frees itself more easily from bureaucratic parasitism and
authoritarianism. It is of course all the more difficult because the New
Leviathan’s policy has spread selfishness and social deviance and has
promoted values that favor them, often with the help of public funds.
Massimo Pendenza’s bibliographical article explores the varieties of approaches of the concept of social capital in Italy - a country where the blatant differences of economic development between the North and the South have been explained by Putnam, Leonardi and Nanetti (1993) through the lack of civil culture (in other words: of social capital) in Southern Italy. The article by Medhat Endrawes and
Kennan Matawie investigates the relationship between professional
commitment and the cultural dimension of individualism/collectivism in two
countries i.e. Australia and Egypt. It extends prior research and supports
the results of Hofstede’s (1980) cultural theory. Their analysis shows
that collectivism is higher in Egypt than in Australia, while
individualism is lower. Professional commitment is higher in a
collectivist society such as Egypt and lower in an individualist society
such as Australia.
The article by José Atilano Pena-Lopez and José Manuel
Sanchez-Santos seeks to define the boundaries of the notion of social
capital and to analyse its apparent identity with the existence of
associative networks. As a starting point, the authors remind us of the moral and consensus dimension of social capital, directly
translatable to the generation of trust. In a second stage, they discuss
the role of the associative activity in the generation of social
confidence, and they verify the existence of a bond between the extension
of horizontal associative networks and the generation of this form of
capital.
Przemyslaw Gadomsky and Anna Gabryjelska show that the emancipation of national societies from dictatorships and authoritarian structures does not result in a decrease in social capital. Their article presents results of an analysis of social capital dynamics in Poland in terms of horizontal association, social integration, civil and political liberty, legal and governance aspects. Their research shows that social capital has not been eroded during the Polish democratic transition process. In fact, between 1992 and 2002, all-but one social capital indicators were slowly, albeit consistently increasing. Finally, Loren Demerath’s article raises the important issue of impact of social capital on the quality of life, which includes the pleasure we have in living together. He presents an analysis of in-depth interviews of Americans and Ecuadorians, which show strong, consistent patterns where both Americans and Ecuadorians enjoy the order, and ease of life in America, but prefer the social life and emphasis on relationships in Ecuador. The irony noted by some researchers that individuals tend to have poorer social lives in richer societies is explained by the author as follows: as some societies are able to develop institutions that facilitate individual achievement such as public education, democracy, open market regulation, and transparent judiciary systems, there is less of a need for individuals to develop and maintain their own “private social capital” in the form of informal, personal relationships, as they rely instead on their formal relationships within those institutions. Furthermore, as a result of the lower importance of personal relationships in such societies, individuals in such societies spend less time and energy interacting with each other. They are therefore often deprived of a major source of fulfillment, that which is gained through the individual-level pursuit of non-institutionalized social capital. Later publications drawn from the Malta conference will enhance the role of social capital in social democratization through the restoration of the community link. It appears that raising the level of social capital improves social cohesion and coordination, consolidates collective mental health and facilitates public decision-making. In the long run, the development of social capital may thus powerfully contribute to achieving the old objective of socialism: reabsorbing the state within society. In addition, we publish two articles drawn from other sources, which discuss various aspects of social cohesion and stratification that may be of interest for social capital as well. Ken Roberts investigates three different ex-communist countries, Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine, and argues that in the younger generation of these countries, who were formerly expected to be classless, a new social stratification has developed and an increasing middle-class group has formed which is inclined towards Western ideologies and politics. In contrast, in a highly stratified society such as
rural India, Kirk Johnson and Mike Karlberg show that the system of social
stratification has been challenged by contemporary culture. This is
because migration, education, mass media, and consumerism among others,
have created an environment where the lower caste is able to compete with
the higher caste. Johnson and Karlberg posit that education has played an
important role in the shift of power and roles. As a result, exogamous
marriages have become more common and spouses gravitate towards each
other’s social status.
Copyright © The Social Capital Foundation 2003, All Rights Reserved
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