Europe's New Axis of Governing through Crime

France's President Nikolas Sarkozy and Italy's Premier, Silvio Berlusconi, took new rhetorical steps today to define a new alliance based on populist campaigns against despised minorities in the name of national security. The two leaders, both facing growing opposition at home over their failed economic policies have used aggressive campaigns of arrest and deportation against the nomadic Roma population to shore up their popularity with anxious voters. The Roma are citizens protected both by the European Union agreements and the European Charter of Human Rights. Despite strong outcries from human rights groups, the deportations of the Roma had received tepid responses from European Union officials (see my earlier post on this) until yesterday. Then, in a dramatic statement that seemed to contradict her earlier conciliatory remarks, European Commission commissioner Viviane Redding called France's deportations "a disgrace", and explicitly compared them to the deportations of Jews carried out by the Nazi allied Vichy regime (read Katrin Beinhold and Stephen Castle's reporting in the NYTimes). The intervening event was the publication of a leaked French memo contradicting earlier assurances by France that it was not singling out the Roma.

Today French President Sarkozy lashed out at the Commission (read the coverage from Matthew Saltmarsh and Katrin Beihold in the NYtimes), wrapping himself in French sovereignty and in the imperatives of providing security from crime.

Mr. Sarkozy called those remarks by the commissioner, Viviane Reding, an insult, and said they were “excessive” and “humiliating.” He also defended France’s right to carry out the removals, which have drawn criticism from human-rights groups and international organizations, as a matter of security.

“I am head of state,” Mr. Sarkozy told a press conference at a European summit meeting in Brussels. “I cannot let my nation be insulted. All the heads of state of government were shocked by the outrageous comments by Madame Reding.”

Sarkozy's defense relies on the stamp of approval applied by French national courts to the deportations, and his duty as head of state to put his citizen's security ahead of any other imperatives.

Mr. Sarkozy, whose government has vigorously defended the deportation policy, said Thursday that all expulsions to date had been carried out under French law and following decisions by judges without any “targeting” of specific groups.

But this logic completely ignores the whole point of having a European human rights charter. No doubt Vichy deportations of Jews would have been approved by Vichy courts if anyone had been permitted to challenge them and undoubtedly the Vichy government felt that removing Jews was in their security interest.

Italian Premier Sylvio Berlusconi, whose government has also conducted a deportation campaign against the Roma, defended the French actions as well. Of course if you need to rely on the notoriously scandal plagued Berlusconi to come to your rescue, you are hitting rock bottom.

Nightmare on Elm Street: The Real Killers Beneath California's Safe Suburban Streets

In the 1970s Californian's were terrified by what seemed like an endless array of serial killers busy breaking into their homes, or snatching their loved ones of streets. There was the Zodiac Killer, the Hillside Strangler, and the Trial Side Killer, the Sacramento Vampire, and no less than three Freeway Killers. All told more than 160 victims were killed by some 15 distinct serial killers (either acting alone or with accomplices). While the trend peaked in the 1980s, and like homicides generally has gone way down, the legacy of those "fear years" is California's massive prison population (more than 6x its levels in the 1970s) and chronically overcrowded prisons which threaten to bankrupt the state. Despite the crippling financial costs and the ongoing human rights crisis, any politician that seeks to release prisoners, or question the need to send so many away for so long, runs into a wall of fear that sees in any early release or effort to solve problems in the community another potential serial killer on the streets.

I believe this fear is anchored in the unquiet memories of the 1970s and 1980s. Those memories are unquiet largely because they continue to be fed by a media industry that has has been enriched by serial killer fantasies for decades, and a political class that is itself addicted governing through the fear of strangers produced by these "memories" (and easily transferred to immigrants, Muslims, or anyone else that seems different). That "stranger danger" complex was facilitated by another fact of California in the 1970s. Decades of efforts to build up the state's infrastructures had made California a gleaming technical powerhouse in the late 1970s when I moved there to go to college. With solid infrastructure and multiple engines of economic growth, Californians could afford to indulge in that most ancient and entertaining fear of the "bogey man." No more

The terrible fire ball that ripped through the San Francisco suburb of San Bruno on Thursday night this past week, killing at least four, and totally destroying dozens of nice suburban homes, was another reminder that California and all of America is today stalked by infrastructure failure. According to Adam Nogourney and Malia Wollan's reporting in the NYTimes, the gas pipes that exploded Thursday were probably installed in 1948. In much of the rest of nation, basic water and energy piping was laid in the early 20th or even late 19th century. After decades of pretending we were a technological leader, America is waking up to the fact that our decaying infrastructures are a danger to economic growth, and increasingly, to our lives. The failed levees of New Orleans, the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis a couple of years ago, similar pipe explosions in New York, these are the serial killers of the 21st century.

But Hollywood is unlikely to embrace infrastructure danger, not while they can keep trotting out versions of the Charles Manson to scare us. Nor is the current political generation, which learned to wield power by invoking fear of other people, likely to mobilize the population behind the need to redirect our public and private spending toward renewing our infrastructure. That is why President Obama's sporadic efforts to get the country focused on infrastructure investment are so important and so insufficient. His call in his speeches last week for an infrastructure bank to fund a new generation of public and private investment may have made good policy wonk sense, but it didn't grab Americans by their fear. He also missed his chance in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago to stand in front of the levees that failed in 2005 and tell Americans, these are the killers that could take your children away next week, next month, or next year. He should fly to San Bruno, and along with Governor Schwarzenegger--who has tried as well to raise the alarm about infrastructure during his terms in office--(perhaps made up for the occasion in his old Terminator make up) to stand in front of those obliterated houses and tell Americans that the nightmare of the future is here today.

Europe's War on the Roma

The latest target of "governing through crime" tendencies among politicians in the Euro Zone is the Roma. Often called "gypsies" the Roma have roots in Romania but are often citizens of the country in which they live, as well as of the European Union. Despite their legal status as citizens, the Roma increasingly find themselves subject to arrests and expulsions as if they were undocumented aliens with no legal rights. The Roma are often stigmatized as criminals, and accused of involvement in all kinds of scams and illegal activities, a stigma that goes back decades if not century. Along with Jews, the Roma were one of the ethnic groups targeted to genocidal extermination by the Nazis. Today, they are to be found in almost every large city in Europe. Economically marginal almost everywhere, the Roma are described as "nomadic" despite evidence that their irregular habitats are mostly the result of extreme poverty.

This summer President Sarkozy of France has made a major public campaign of expelling the Roma from France, irrespective of their French or EU citizenship. A series of sometimes violent round-ups, reminiscent of Jews being deported during the Vichy period, has generated considerable backlash from human rights organizations and activists throughout Europe. According to Elisabetta Povoledo's reporting in the NYTimes, Italy is also targeting the Roma, dismantling long established "camps" and expelling the Roma from Italian cities.

Public debate on the issue often has racist and xenophobic overtones.

“There has been growing rancor against Roma and Sinti, in part because the media has hyped this issue, and in part because the government uses it as a means of gaining consensus,” according to Lorenzo Monasta, the president of Osservazione, a research center in Trieste that monitors discrimination against Roma and Sinti.

The critics say recent federal laws have also made life more difficult for Roma and Sinti here, even though more than half are Italian or European Union citizens. In 2007, the government passed a decree allowing European Union citizens to be expelled after three months if they lacked the means to support themselves. Then in 2008 a decree granted the authorities new powers to expel European Union citizens for reasons of public safety.

The public campaigns against the Roma have all the features of governing through crime in the US. Led by politicians facing significant policy and political resistance in their own countries (Sarkozy and Berlusconi), the campaigns involve removal of elements of society with little regard proving any actual legal guilt, but all done in the name of security and public safety. That these campaigns could unfold only sixty odd years since the Nazi genocide against the Roma, and in countries at the heart of the supposedly human rights cherishing European Union, is extremely troubling.

Governing Palestine through Crime

To appreciate the perniciousness of governing through crime in advanced liberal societies like the US and the UK, where politicians invoke crime fear for their own advantage in societies with abundant mechanisms of regulation, one has to appreciate why establishing a capacity to govern violence as crime is an essential part of the state building project for new states or those undergoing transitional reconstruction of authority. Today Palestine is an example of the former and Iraq, of the latter.

The news as reported by Avi Issacharoff in Haaretz that the Palestinian Authority has arrested two suspects in the murder of four Israeli settlers on Tuesday is very good news for anyone who wants to see Palestinian sovereignty established in real terms in our lifetimes. Hamas which openly took responsibility for the gangland style drive-by shootings, chose its targets well to emphasize its narrative of challenge to PA authority (as much or more than Israel's) by killing residents of a provocatively located West Bank settlement placed well into concentration of Palestinian population and land which must be Palestine under any realistic two state solution. "One settler, one bullet," is an old anti-colonial chant from South Africa, Algeria and other sites of violence as resistance to colonization. But if Hamas can define the murder of unarmed civilians as resistance because they are settlers, that assumes away the claim of the PA to civil authority over the West Bank, including the site of those settlements. In short Hamas and the settlers are in perfect agreement that any claim to PA governance over their space, even an evolving one, is a fiction.

If the PA has indeed succeeded in bringing the killers to criminal justice, especially if can do so without violating the human rights of the accused or other suspects (and we need to know more about their arrests of Hamas supporters) they will have gone a long way to establishing their sovereign authority over the West Bank including Hebron (especially given the fact that Israel retains major security control over that sector even before the attack Tuesday). In the context of potential civil war, criminal violence is a stabilizing way for a state to interpret acts of lethal violence. By effectively responding to Hamas' violence as crime, the PA makes itself a real state. In contrast, the embrace of crime by politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, managing the prolonged crises of advanced liberal welfare states risked degenerating the self regulating capacity of well developed civil societies for short term political gain.

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PS. I talk about governing through crime in the US and in Israel/Palestine with the very interesting politics blogger George Kenney in a podcasted conversation over at Electric Politics

On The President's Carpet: Fear itself

Four quotations from great Presidents, two (possibly three) of them, "martyred" in office, and one martyred civil rights leader who in a slightly different universe might have ended up a President, adorn the new carpet in the oval office (at least three of the quotes also appeared in his November 8, 2008 victory speech in Chicago). Bipartisan? Sure, but more importantly, great quotes all. I would take any one of them; and in the right spirit, anyone half clever in either the liberal or conservative camp could riff on them all to state their greatest convictions. According to Sheryl Stolberg blogging at the NYTimes the five quotes are:

"The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself” – President Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Towards Justice” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“Government of the People, By the People, For the People” – President Abraham Lincoln

“No Problem of Human Destiny Is Beyond Human Beings” – President John F. Kennedy

“The Welfare of Each of Us Is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the Welfare of All of Us” – President Theodore Roosevelt

I'll take my own guess that President Obama spends a lot of time over the next few months looking at the FDR fear quote. Fear is on the land, and all of us feel it. Problems are deep, no doubt, but never as deep as the metaphors they live by, and this is a 1933 year where the President and his speeches are carrying the weight of our historic imagination of what Roosevelt accomplished beginning with that epic first inauguration speech in the stomach clenching drop days of the Great Depression (both those who fear what Obama is trying to accomplish and those who fear he's not doing enough to accomplish it). In that speech, FDR not only addressed that fear in a positive and a programmatic sense, he named it and defined fear as part of the problem. But when he reads that quote, which has a lot to say to today's problems, I hope the President is reading it through two other "fear years," 1941, and 1968.

In his 1941 State of the Union, FDR came back to fear in another epic speech, when stated his famed four freedoms, one of them being "freedom from fear." In a speech premised on making Congress and the nation feel real fear at the prospect of what a rapid fascist victory in Europe would do the world, Roosevelt spelled out a freedom from fear as part what preventing that victory could mean. Against him was the very real and recent history of the oversold war and misguided peace of the first world war which compounded the fear for many who feared government as much as anything else. FDR was claiming new powers to govern through fear, but he was also making freedom from fear part of the meaning of victory; a standard his administration could be evaluated by and a way to balance the increased power of government with new rights for citizens in the US (and implicitly the world).

I hope his eye next moves to the 1965 quote of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and then skips ahead three years to 1968. That was a fear year too. Raging war in Vietnam, violent repression of domestic protesters by racist police forces and rising homicide rates haunted a country in a panic. The economy was still very healthy by contemporary standards, but many of its long term problems, especially the underfunding of government entitlement and policies, were well under way. King's words in 1965 seem to anticipate the tragedy that would befall him personally and the nation in 1968. The dangers were quite real on his march from Selma that day in 1965, but the prospects of both the civil rights cause and the Johnson Administration's related "Great Society," seemed promising that year (much as Obama's did after his election). Less than three years later both Johnson's and King's projects would be in ruins. Johnson withdrew from the Presidential race, and King was murdered. Their common cause of linking racial discrimination and persistent poverty in both the North and South was on its way to being crushed by a politics of fear that neither of them succeeded in heading off.

History has vindicated both of them for the real and permanent gains they accomplished for American society, but the fear that defeated them still remains. Crime rates are at historic lows in most of the country, but many Americans, independent voters in swing states especially, continue to understand the real fears of 2010 through the crime and race tinted lenses of 1968 (consider the ongoing moral panics about immigrants and crime in both Arizona and California). That year a politics of fear won, with Richard Nixon's "law and order" campaign, that created no source of limitation or accountability of the sort FDR offered for his economic and political wars on Depression and later fascism. While the political primacy of violent crime has waxed and waned in Presidential politics ever since 1968 (it almost never goes away at the state level), the metaphors of the war on crime,--- the abandoned victim, the overwhelmed police officer, the leaky prisons, ---- continue to shape how citizens imagine the political. Despite four decades of laws that have made crime victims and police into sacred cows (as the phony "ground zero" controversy and last summers "beer summit" demonstrate), and made our prisons into high security human warehouses, no one feels any safer.

Nixon may have been the winner that year, but what he found out, and what every chief executive of both parties since has had to live with, and seen their presidencies damaged (if not destroyed) by, is that this "no limits" power of fear makes the nation less and less possible to govern. Its a sometimes great election politics, but its a lousy governing politics. Instead of preparing the public for significant challenges in rebuilding failed institutions, the politics of fear creates a constant cycle of demands for emotions and circuses, most of them premised on crime or crime like immorality; in which bad guys are defined and demonized, investigations pursued, heavy punishments threatened and sometimes delivered. It was a fear based politics of crime that swept Nixon himself away, and almost brought down Reagan and Clinton for violating federal laws. Its the same fear based citizenship that has produced a constant and unmeetable demand for Obama to show emotions like anger in responding to economic and environmental crisis, and to deliver harsh judgments and punishments to wrongdoers, and at the same time is constantly ready to accuse the President himself of being a friend or ally of terrorists.

The President at this point can decide to try to produce the kind of political rhetoric that might neutralize by embracing this crime based fear discourse. Bill Clinton chose that path with his harsh crime laws, V-Chip and school uniform proposals; and with the help of Newt Gingrich's errors he saved his presidency, --- kind of ---, but he accomplished nothing that he would want to share with King and Johnson if he should ever run into them in the next life. I don't personally think President Obama would be particularly good at this approach, even if he was craven enough to embrace it.

The other path is to make a new commitment to freedom as FDR did in 1941, but from fear of the kind that stalks us in 2010: economic disasters, infrastructure failures, terrorism and global human rights disasters (like Pakistan, Palestine and Kashmir) and our dependence on fossil fuels. In the face of those on the right that accuse him of subverting freedom in exactly the same ways that FDR's enemies attacked him, President Obama needs to explain exactly what freedoms his policies will create for Americans, beginning with freedom from fear.

President Obama got a start in his Xavier University speech in New Orleans when he began to talk about what it would take to make American cities resilient enough to respond effectively to something like Hurricane Katrina. He could have said more about the failures revealed that day (and since) at all levels of government, especially the federal governments failed levee system. He might also have said something about the failure of Louisiana's policies of mass incarceration which have produced one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet but could not make its citizens safe.

As the administration tries to re-narrate their legislative accomplishments thus far in the short window before the mid-term election, the President needs to point to how his medical reforms and Wall street reforms form a part of a more comprehensive strategy to make Americans safer in their homes from all of these threats, and what he still needs Congress to do to achieve that. But the positive story will not cut through the toxic atmosphere (look how little coverage his Katrina speech got) if he does not address the fear issue directly. With the capacity to plumb complex and toxic features of our culture, as he showed as a candidate in his Philadelphia speech on race, President Obama needs to speak directly to Americans about the real costs of painting the threats of 2010 in the race baiting and crime fear centered mentalities of 1968, as is so clearly being done about immigrants, about Muslim Americans, and about him. Like war in Iraq, Obama may not ever be able to declare an end to the war on crime, but he can and must declare an end to its metaphors.

Honoring Victims: The New York Mosque Controversy Highlights the Power of Victims

If opponents of the proposal to build a Muslim community center a few blocks from the so called "ground zero" site where the World Trade Center stood until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 are to be believed, they are not so much anti-Muslim ans pro-victim. There are argument is that since some family members of 9/11 victims are upset at the prospect of a visible Muslim center so close to where their loved ones were killed by terrorists acting in the name of Islam. Thus according to Michael Barbaro's reporting in the NYTimes, powerful New York Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver has urged consideration of relocating the center to avoid offending the victims:

Breaking his silence on the issue, the speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Democrat whose district includes ground zero, said the organizers’ honorable goal of healing post-Sept. 11 wounds and building bridges among faiths had instead provoked bitter fighting and raw emotions that could not be ignored.

“I think the sponsors,” Mr. Silver said at City Hall, “should take into very serious consideration the kind of turmoil that’s been created and look to compromise.”

As many criminologists have observed, crime victims have become privileged symbols of ordinary citizens with greatly expanded influence over the criminal justice system (see David Garland, The Culture of Control, p. 11). In Chapter 3 of Governing through Crime, I describe crime victims as "idealized citizen subjects" whose needs come to define the governable interests of the whole community.

The New York controversy is significant in this respect because it shows deference by politicians to victim wishes on an issue that does not involve directly the perpetrators of crimes or indeed any issue of criminal punishment or law enforcement. No one claims the proponents of the Muslim center are linked to the 9/11 plotters (except for some truly deranged bloggers). Instead like Assembly leader Silver, they construct victim feelings as something that must be honored regardless of their objective foundations.

Thankfully Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who unlike Silver and the rest does not depend on re-election for earning a living, has identified the dangerous precedent this kind of capitulation of community (and indeed national interest) to the pure emotions of victims would set:

Mr. Bloomberg, flanked by the center’s developer and the wife of its imam, said he understood the impulse to find a different location, in the hope of ending the controversy.

“But it won’t,” the mayor said. “The question will then become, ‘How big should the ‘no-mosque zone’ around the World Trade Center be?’ ”

He added: “There is already a mosque four blocks away. Should it, too, be moved? This is a test of our commitment to American values. We must have the courage of our convictions. We must do what is right, not what is easy.”

The September 11, 2001 terror attacks were an extraordinary crime. Understandably, the victims have received extraordinary solicitude, including a US taxpayer funded compensation package worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each survivor. Honoring victims by seeking to address their financial and psychological wounds is appropriate, ceding our democratic values and procedures to their emotional dictates is not.

The Mistempered Weapons of the Criminal Law

Verona in 1595.
Knife Crime.
Gang violence.
Stabbings.
Social disorder.
Celebrity politicians.
Disaffected youth.
Teenage suicide...
and love.

I'm living and working in Edinburgh Scotland this year and arrived in time to enjoy the annual "Fringe Festival" which presents an international collection of innovative plays and performances, generally by new groups. Yesterday we saw a stunning version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, by the secondary school students of Kidbrooke School in Association with Greenwich Theatre, and directed by Lucy Cuthbertson. This production staged the classic in contemporary urban context (based on South London but familiar to anyone who has been to LA, Oakland, or Chicago as well). The Capulets and Montagues were tracksuit and hoodie wearing gang-bangers, who rode around on a the small "Y" handled trick bikes favored by many urban teens. Their knife wielding ambushes on each other were marked on stage by the accumulation of flowers stuck in the chain linked fence, in the style of informal memorials one often sees in cities in the US and the UK, and in photo montages of the dead, depicting them as young children, or in happier times.

One of the most striking characterizations was that of the Prince, here portrayed as a telegenic suit wearing female celebrity politician (vaguely Sarah Palin). She invariably appeared flanked by police officers at a lectern speaking to a televised press conference. Her speeches, although written by Shakespeare himself, really could have come from modern "governing through crime" politicians. The response to the tit for tat gang murders of Capulets and Montagues is to threaten yet more violence in the name of peace. Constructing the gang warfare as an assault on the "peace of the city," she threatens to take the life of anyone engaged in violence. Later, when Romeo kills Tybalt, who has killed Romeo's cousin Mercutio, the Prince banishes him for life, on pain of death should he return to Verona.

But as everyone knows, these threats to "get tough" with those who engage in gang violence, do not work. The violence, then and now, is largely based on perceptions of honor that loom larger, at least in the eyes of the youthful protagonists, than the abstract threat of punishment at the hands of a powerful state. Having watched their closest friends and cousins struck down in sudden attacks, and expecting to end up in the same way, the participants are unlikely to be deterred by the remote chance of being caught and convicted by an invariably slower state security apparatus. Better to live in honor and enjoy the esteem of their fellows at hard drinking celebrations, like the feast held by the Capulets, at which Romeo in disguise first sees Juliet.

As will be familiar to almost everyone (plot spoiler warning), the peace is only restored to Verona when the Capulets and Montagues unite in the presence of the bodies of Romeo and Juliet, by the common realization that their quest for honor has deprived them of what they loved most, their children. It is in the context of confronting the emotion of real loss that the Prince's admonition to "lay down your mistempered weapons" is finally heard and responded to with action.

The ending seems to question whether we gain anything from political authority at all. But could not the Prince have used her high office to bring the Capulets and Montagues together earlier? Each had already lost much loved family members. Could a restorative justice circle, convened but not dominated by the Prince, have saved Romeo and Juliet? We will never know of course. With great insight about our current politics, the Kidbrooke School production has the Prince's final words broadcast as if at yet another press conference, while police officers in CSI like protective coveralls zip the corpses of the young lovers into black body bags as they smile and joke.