Dusk: How ideas drive decisions that make history

by Case Roole, Colin Brace (Editor)

Sovereignty has for centuries been the central concept for reasoning about political arrangements both inside countries and between countries. Today, the global system of sovereign states is unravelling. Meaningful sovereignty is diluted by supranational institutions, multinational companies, debt-imposed policies, multilateral treaties, external interference, and the prevalence of threats, sanctions, and violence. This book presents a vocabulary for speaking about political decision-making without presupposing sovereignty. It first explains how values, agency, and theories are related through decision-making. People can’t see into each other’s heads. Only through observing and interpreting actions can they determine the intentions of other people. It is not possible to settle one of the aspects going into decisions before the others. An indeterminacy in explaining actions in terms of values, agency, and involved theories will always remain as the different aspects can compensate for each other. Many actions take place in the context of organised interactions with other people. How do we divide and coordinate work? What is the point of democracy? What role does authority play? The games and scenarios structuring our lives influence the values and opportunities we see when making decisions on how to act. Patterns of thought box in our thinking about political situations. Sovereignty and citizenship set the standard for agency. Laws and rights vie for primacy in any analysis. And the role and intentions of opposing individuals easily get blown up beyond any realistic proportion. Changing a course of action is obstructed by rigid thinking that seems impossible to give up. To overcome conflict such patterns need to be considered and possibly revised. Listing assumptions, articulating values, and revising theories are necessary parts of this process. Two cases illustrate how the dynamics of values, agency, and theories can be applied as a tool of analysis. The criterion of equality is the core principle of the Enlightenment, the philosophical movement that drove change in Western societies since the seventeenth century. Israel is based on political, social, and economic inequality between Jews and non-Jews in the land of Palestine. By focusing on values, theories, and paradigms, we see how a number of ideological constructions of Enlightenment in the West are dismantled to justify the inequality constituting Israeli arrangements. The European Union was founded to support peace and prosperity. New political and economic arrangements replaced sovereignty and the adverse effect of borders. Political events in Ukraine in 2014 have been invoked to make “territorial integrity” paramount again. Europe is now captive of a negative process of escalation which is bound to lead to war on Russia and which causes a dramatic transformation of European ideology and institutions. What these cases demonstrate is how actual decisions diverge from what is needed to resolve conflict. Justifications for decisions involve explanations of why the respective conflicts can not be resolved. These explanations are subsequently accepted as part of the dominant ideology. Western decisions about situations in the periphery of the West are thus turned into values and theories underlying new decisions which transform the core of Western society. Captivated by the justifications for bad decisions in the past, the West has lost much of its ability to theorise propitiously. Furthermore, the priority given to the values of support for human life, consent of the governed, and prosperity has sunk. Enlightenment has made way for Dusk.

249 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 9, 2016