Politicians and the Past Flashcards
Ernest May, 1973
US policy-makers after 1947 always
tended to worse case analysis when it came to thinking about the USSR
bc of experience of appeasement pre-WW2
decision that West had to grasp the simple fact that whatever their ideological differences, all
totalitarians regimes (Nazi Germany and the USSR alike) exhibited the same
aggressive behaviour abroad and could only be dealt with from a very clear
position of strength
Cox, The uses and abuses of History: The end of the Cold War and Soviet Collapse (2011)
Approached break-up of USSR with trepidation:
rough and ready
agreement among most policy elites in 1989: that whereas the international
system between 1914 and 1945 had been about as explosive as it was possible
for any international system to be, the system that had finally emerged after
1947 did at least provide for some degree of order, at least in its core areas.
whereas the world before 1945 had been wracked by major great power wars,
the world system thereafter had been characterized by great power peace
post-war European order moreover also cemented the relationship
between the United States and western Europe through the crucial vehicle
of NATO. Any change could very easily threaten both
Fears concerning German unification:
Mitterand made frequent reference
(at least in private) about Germany’s highly problematic past
Mrs Thatcher ‘instinctively’ distrustful of the Germans.
Perception in
Germany was that Britain (unlike France) was opposed to unification because
it still harboured suspicions of Germany.
Thatcher’s understanding of
another country’s history, far from advancing the British, or indeed her own cause in world politics, only ended up achieving the opposite
larger lessons drawn from history: one which taught that
when great powers or empires collapsed the consequences were always
bound to be dangerous and destabilizing.
Used by Gorbachev
fall of the Roman empire played a not unimportant part in informing western elite
attitudes
Weimar analogy used for Russia
With Yeltsin looking increasingly like a failed leader and his opponents on
both left and right making important electoral gains, the situation looked
anything but bright
historian Niall
Ferguson deployed the analogy for a different purpose: to warn the West not
about something that might happen but about something that possibly already
had because of Putin – the grave digger of Russian democracy.
wider belief that the Cold War had delivered some kind of long peace, and talk of a new Marshall Plan for Russia and references to Weimar, made very little difference to what finally transpired
no amount of agonizing reflections on German history
between 1871 and 1945 was able to stop the unification of Germany in 1989
use of history as warning, history as means of
legitimizing or delegitimizing certain courses of action, through to history as a
means of making sense of a mass of new information for which policy-makers
simply did not have a framework.
at times of great upheaval policy-makers are more likely to deploy history than in periods of stability. History to this degree becomes a sort of
reference point, an anchor almost to which policy-makers can attach themselves and from which fixed position they are perhaps better able to survey the waters swirling around them before deciding what to do next.
little real control at all. Learning from the past may have helped them reflect in a more (or less) informed way on what was going on. But it was no guarantee that what they set out to do was in the end what actually happened
Green, ‘How Brexiteers appealed to voters’ nostalgia’
majority of modern national referendums are about
undertaking a new project
In contrast, the Brexit vote was a choice between the status quo or returning to what the UK looked like before it joined the European Community in 1973.
Boris Johnson similarly talked about the UK’s “loss of
sovereignty”,
Nigel Farage also campaigned
on the slogan that “we want our country back”
call for returning to an unmentioned, halcyon past
directed at a variety of voters
1) Imperialist nostalgists. In 1973, the UK had only recently given up its
Empire and still clung on to some of its smaller colonies like Belize and
Hong Kong
2) Racists.
3) Non-racist and non-imperialist nationalists. ‘golden age’ of the nation. return their nation to its glorious past.
for many British nationalists the golden age is World
War II, references to the
war featured prominently in the Leave campaign.
Britain’s ability to ‘go it alone’ in World War II
4) Older voters. Nostalgia not only for what the UK looked like before 1973 but also what they themselves looked like. Mixing up happy memories of one’s youth with memories of society
can also help to
explain at least part of the strong support for the Remain camp in Northern
Ireland and Scotland, inasmuch as the period prior to 1973 evokes the Troubles for the former and a period before devolution and the discovery of North Sea oil for the latter.
if the question asked voters’ opinions about the specifics of the UK’s relationship
with the EU going forward, then appeals to history would be much less
salient
Greg Rodriguez and DawnNakagawa, ‘Looking Backward and Inward: The Politics of Nostalgia and Identity’,The World Post(2016),
As globalization marches forward, along
with seismic demographic shifts in the developed world,
the seductive pull to look backward and inward will
Intensify
Many are longing for a past
when the country was less diverse, communities were
more homogenous and self-contained and your
immediate surroundings largely defined your experience of the world.
Over the same period, the fortunes of
many of these communities have also declined,
particularly in the Rust Belts of the world. This economic
decline, coupled with ongoing demographic
diversification, has made it easy for politicians to
connect these unrelated dots
Nostalgia seems to most afflict those with a heightened sense that circumstances are changing beyond their
control and often against their entrenched interests. In
Britain, 61 percent of voters over the age of 65 voted to
leave the European Union while 75 percent of voters
under the age of 24 voted to remain.
Two-thirds of voters with only a high school education voted to leave, while 71 percent of voters with advanced degrees voted to remain.
81 percent of surveyed Leave voters said
they saw multiculturalism as a “force for ill” highlights the
strong link between nostalgia and identity
Donald Trump’s
campaign to “make America great again” makes an
even more explicit appeal to nostalgia
hearkens back to a past in which white Americans largely enjoyed unchallenged economic and cultural dominance.
Solution to politics of nostalgia = creation of more robust, inclusive national identities
Nature of nostalgia
Turner 1987:
by converting the past into a Utopian homestead, nostalgia may lay the foundations for a radical critique of the modern as a departure from authenticity
4 elements of nostalgia:
Sense of historical loss or decline - departure from golden age
Perceived collapse of unifying values leading to loss of moral certainty
Perceived loss of individ freedom due to social processes associated w moder institutionalised regulation
Loss of simplicity, personal authenticity and emotional sponteneity
Svetlana Boym:
2 types of nostalgia
— reflective and restorative. While the former tends to
be wistful and dreamy
the latter, which lies at the core of many modern national and religious revival
movements, is deadly serious.
Restorative nostalgia has two essential plot lines, the
first being the return to a hallowed past and the second
being the conspiracies that explain why that past was
lost.
more about the pursuit of scapegoats than they are
about recapturing any sort of lost era.
Murphy:
Nostalgia = an affective state:
characterized by positive, yet bittersweet, asso- ciations with some aspect of the “personally experienced past,”
nostalgia is at once both deeply personal - recalling to mind the world of childhood - and eminently political
Important psychological functions of nostalgia:
nostalgia represents a powerful coping mechanism, helping to maintain identity continuity during times of social upheaval
nostalgia can serve to strengthen relational bonds among subcommunities who perceive them- selves to be under threat
Stewart, 1992:
Nostalgia’s forms, meanings and effects shift with the context - it depends on where the speaker stands in the landscape of the present’.
Allan, Atkinson, Montgomery:
Nostalgia encourages particular ways of ‘remembering the past’ so as to confirm a preferred definition of the present
Nostalgic discourse operates to re-appropriate the past so as to render legitimate preferred ways of negotiating time and space in the present
JamesBloodworth, ‘FromCorbynto Trump: Welcome to the politics of nostalgia’¸International Business Times(2016)
Nostalgia = better word than ‘post-truth politics’ or ‘populism’ to describe the tumultuous political upheavals currently afflicting western democracies
Theresa May’s desire to resurrect grammar schools summon a golden age of social mobility which is illusory
The sort of populism captivating large swathes of
western electorates is an attempt to dig up the past,
dust it off and impose it on the present in the manner of a square object driven into a round hole.
nostalgia politics summons a halcyon past that only ever existed in the
imaginations of its true believers
RichardJobson, ‘‘Waving the Banners of a Bygone Age’, Nostalgia andLabour’sClause IV Controversy, 1959–60
late 1959, Hugh Gaitskell declared that the Labour Party needed to revise Clause IV of its 1918 Constitution. Within the party, his proposals faced much opposition. Ultimately, the strength of this opposition meant that Gaitskell was forced to retreat on the issue.
nostalgia decisively shaped the episode’s outcome
1959 Labour Party Conference, Gaitskell
speech represented an attempt to move the party away from its perceived attachment to the traditional industrial working class of the past. In full anti-nostalgic flow, he continued: ‘Let us
remember that we are a Party of the future, not of the past
Dick Beamish, the
South Wales National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) executive member who had
spoken at the party conference, talked in a letter to Tribune about the miners’ struggle
for socialism in the face of the economic and political hardships of 1931
NEC had received 63 resolutions from various CLPs and trade unions ‘on Clause IV of the
Constitution and Standing Orders protesting at any amendments which would alter the principle of Common Ownership’
13 July, the document The State of the Party, an early draft of what was to become The Future of the Party and then Labour in the Sixties, noted that ‘the morale of the Labour Party . . . is at an all time low’ and that one reason for this was that ‘The debate on Clause IV touched on the most sensitive tenet of Labour’s faith
Nostalgia determined the ferocity of the party’s response to Gaitskell’s
attempts to alter Clause IV
Rather than expressing the continued relevance of public ownership
in the modern world, party members tended to deploy nostalgia in defence of Clause IV
Definitions of nostalgia
Jobson - a positive and idealised form of memory that exists in the complex
symbiotic two-way relationship between memory and identity
Andrew Murphy, ‘Longing,Nostalgia, and Golden Age Politics: The American Jeremiad and the Power of the Past’,Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2009)
Jeremiad and the American Tradition
- the tendency to lament the present and look to a more virtuous past
Jeremiads identify problems that signal decline vis a vis the past
critics from divergent political perspectives have argued that America is in the midst of civic and moraldecline example was Robert Put-nam’s Bowling Alone, which marshaled an impressive body of statistical data to argue that late- twentieth-century Amer- icans were not as civically engaged as their parents and grandparents had been
Jeremiads identify a point in the past in which the harmful idea or practice responsible for decline first made its appearance, and trace out the injurious consequences from its earliest inception to the present day
Many contemporary Jeremiahs pinpoint the tur- bulent years of the late 1960s as key to understanding the civic, moral, and political decline that afflicts the nation early in the twenty-first century
Jeremiads call for reform, repentance, or renewal - a specific course of action to reverse contemporary decline and to reclaim the original promise of communal life
late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century jeremiads are almost always enmeshed in debates about sexual morality, revised divorce laws, public school prayer, protection of the environment, the appropriate scope of government,
American aspect of the American jeremiad adds a sacred story. American chosenness
nostalgia is at once both deeply personal - recalling to mind the world of childhood - and eminently political
Christian Right thinkers present a Golden Age account of the nation’s founders and founding period.
where indi- viduals subordinated their particular interests to the com- mon good, and a Judeo-Christian consensus structured public and private life more generally.
Progressive Jeremiads:
thought of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass
When Lincoln and Douglass looked for a solution to the nation s difficulties, they looked to the past, and evoked the spirit of the nations founders.
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. King narrated the story of America as based most fundamentally on a founding promise, a birthright of sorts: the “check” written to all Americans by the nation s founders
On the one hand, the progressive jeremiad is not susceptible to the sorts of critiques we saw above regarding nostalgia and Golden Ages, because it does not make empirical claims about past practices
But its historical element, like that of its traditionalist counterpart, is also a narrative construction, and therefore its own partial and moralized tale of the past.
In a sense, we can never get beyond narrative, and all stones of the American past are moralized tales seeking to advance political agen- das in the present. Decisions about the adequacy of vari- ous jeremiads as historical accounts seem ultimately to reflect political as much as empirical judgments.
Progressive Jeremiads
are more appropriate to a situation of cultural and religious pluralism such as exists in the twenty-first century United States
Golden Age
David Lowenthal:
“an imagined landscape invested with all [critics] find missing in the modern world.”
Hilton and McKay, Ages of Voluntarism (2011)
Politicians have fetishized ‘golden age’ of Victorian philanthropy and volunteering. Volunteering in decline due to rise of welfare
No - voluntary sector has reinvented itself repeatedly. Import lesson to policy makers who seek to make serve agendas other than their own
David Cameron’s Big Society in 2010 - idea of unleashing voluntary sector pwr
Hilton and M - this is politically motivated use of past to justify spending cuts.
Disrupting rhetoric rooted in nostalgia and rhetoric of golden age
Thatcher, ‘Now’s the time to choose’, public statement, 16 April 1979
built great country thru individual effort. Br in decline. Same time as freedoms of individuals chipped away
Key elements of nostalgic discourse highlighted by Turner
Thatcher’s whole 1979 election campaign rooted in this
More recent past characterised by Labour’s Br of 1970s
1983 poster - Br is great again. Don’t let Labour wreck it
• Key theme - nostalgia and how deployed by polits
• Sentimentality for the past
• Imagined/ idealised past
• Regularly used when trying to appeal to voters
• 4 key areas of nostalgia - once aware, start picking up on it all over the place
• Historical sense of decline
• Idea collective values collapsing
• Perceived loss of individual freedom
• Sense we’ve lost simplicity/ authenticity
• Context - pamphlet. 1979. (Don’t know if you don’t know contextual info in exam
• 1979 election interesting, Labour campaign hampered by industrial distressed
• This pamphlet delivered to 250 000 householders. Appealing to individualism
• Conservative party won election, roughly 5% swing
• Thatcher immediately starts with idea of decline
• Year after year falling further behind
• 1st bit in bold - nothing inevitable about continuing decline. Br was once great and still great
• Look at words they return to when deconstructing political rhetoric
• 5th para - harking back to idea there was once cohesive whole which we’ve now lost
• Claims around what country has to do to reverse decline
• Individual freedom
• 1st step to recovery - lowering taxes on earnings
• 2nd step - stop individual being stifled by the state
• 4th step - simplicity. Greater respect for law and order
• Values - no country worth much if not prepared to defend itself. Collective/ shared values
• We shall unite country by politics of common sense - suggests shared values. Political nostalgia
• Short extract but great way demonstrating how politicians deploy themes
• See words repeating. Simple solution. Scene of nostalgia then her manifesto points
• Lots of Thatcher speeches in Thatcher Foundation
• Simple, straightforward, easy to deconstruct
• Always about language and context in which things used. Given sense of context in the exam
• 1979 campaign, Saatchi and Saatchi, Labour isn’t working
• Appealed to old sense of society
• Law and Order early central platform of Thatcher’s campaigning
• Don’t need to know massive detail but worth knowing context
• Politicians of all stripes oft create crisis narrative to convey own messages more effectively
• Conservatives exploited sense of chaos and out of control trade unions
Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2004)
and 2003 documentary
Apologist for Br emp
Positive force in shaping modern force
Transforms hist of emp into something that marks Br out as great power. Something to be proud of
Ferguson belittles hist that acknowl oppression on which Br emp built
Stuart Allan,Karen Atkinson, andMartin Montgomery,‘Time andthe Politics of Nostalgia:An Analysis of the Conservative Party Election Broadcast `The Journey’’,Time & Society, Vol. 4 (1995)
BBC and ITV Wed 18 March, in initial week of 1992 campaign
excursion, Major visits locality of his childhood, chauffered around south London.
‘The Journey’ seeks to render as popular memory its specific ideological inflection of the ‘moral certainties’ of ‘conservative traditions’
Culture that produces the nation, not the other way around
Audience of BBC1 viewers = 3.7 million. 5.1 having watched News, 4.5 going on to watch weather
ITV - 10.4 million
Overall, broadcast scored neutral
message - bc the Conservative Party is the party of opportunity, ordinary people can become prime minister
Script of a success story - personal in Major’s case, concurrent w story of Br as a nation w appeal to shared sense of progress
invoking free market past - ‘Enterprise Pub’ been there for as long as I can recall
Brixton Market as Conservative symbol of enterprising success at local lvl
Purchases tomatoes in way he used to, allowing Major to seemingly transcend constraints of temporality, as well as other restrictions associated with PM status
Major’s memories of his youthful enjoyment of the game reaffirm the place of cricket in discourses of Englishness, particularly in terms of the related symbolic associations with intense competition, discipline and tradition. Organising themes of conservatism
Major’s reminiscing develops into Conservative Party rhetoric on essence of human nature and individualism
Colin Hay,’Narrating Crisis: The discursive construction of the ‘Winter of Discontent’‘,Sociology, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1996), pp. 253-277.
Crises constituted in and through narrative.
Such narratives recruit the contradictions and failures of the system as ‘symptom’-atic of a more general condition of crisis
Through the discursive construction of the winter of discontent itself that Thatcherism achieved state power
Social Contract - govt extending strictures of wage restraint. Trade unions effectively being held to ransom by govt
Winter of discontent = rank-and-file rejection of the strictures of wage restraint
Symptomatic of union weakness, not strength
Media influence in ability to frame the discursive context within which political subjectivities are constituted, reinforced and re-constituted
In encoding of media texts, subject positions are constructed within the narrative for active readers. Yet basis of interpellation lies in inherently imaginative process of decoding through which we, readers, inject ourselves into the narrative structure
Daily Mail 1 February 1979 - THEY WON’T EVEN LET US BURY OUR DEAD
Invites us to share in collective revulsion
meta-narration - discursive ‘recruiting’ of a variety of specific events and phenomena and experiences to which they give rise as symptomatic of a more generic condition - winter of discontent
Britain under siege
Callaghan passively ‘suns himself in the Caribbean’ whilst Thatcher ‘calls for curbs on strikers’ cash’. Impression created that Callaghan’s actiosn illegitimate and inappropriate
Daily Mail coined the famous ‘crisis, what crisis?’
(Callaghan was in fact attending exclusive international summit of Western leaders with Chancellor Schmidt, President Giscard, President Carter
Success of narratives rely not only on ability to accurately reflect complex webs of causation that interact to produce disparate effects, but in ability to provide a simplified account sufficiently flexible to ‘narrate’ a great variety of morbid symptoms whilst unambiguously attributing causality
Struggle to impose new trajectory on the structures of the state is lost and won in process in which crisis is constituted, not in wake of crisis moment as Gramsci argues.
‘winter of discontent’ = moment in which Thatcherism achieved state power.
