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CRITICAL STATE
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Your weekly foreign policy fix.
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If you read just one thing …
read about resident rights on the Norwegian archipelago!
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Kenneth R. Rosen writes in The Dial about Svalbard, a collection of islands roughly 800 miles south of the North Pole. Over 1,200 miles away is Oslo, Norway’s capital. Norway has sovereignty over the islands. Recently, the government there “has restricted the civil rights of non-Norwegian residents on Svalbard. This group, who made up roughly a 35% of Longyearbyen’s population in 2023, is no longer eligible to vote in local elections and residents from certain countries [are] no longer eligible to drive.”
Rosen takes readers through Svalbard’s history — and contemporary geopolitics. In 2007, Russian divers made a symbolic claim to the seafloor of the North Pole by planting a flag. “Since then,” writes Rosen, “signatory nations have started investing heavily in infrastructure and development on the archipelago.” And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine increased international tensions, the aftereffects of which were felt in Svalbard. But Svalbard’s residents are interested in continuing to have rights in the place where they live, and want to make sure that the terms of those rights are set by the people who live there as much as possible. Rosen describes a local association that is trying to push back.
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Magna Carta Holy Grail
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Joe Mathews, a fellow in the Berggruen Institute’s Renovating Democracy program, writes for Noema about penning a new Magna Carta, “a response to the hard questions that local communities now face about 21st-century threats.”
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Matthews had gone to Rome to organize his 2018 “Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy” conference. That same year, Rome’s City Council voted to create a new charter for “democracy cities,” and politicians reached out to him because they “wanted a document that other cities could sign to designate themselves as part of this network of “democracy cities.” But city officials didn’t want to write the document themselves and subject it to the vagaries of Roman politics. They wanted an outsider — a professional writer and native English speaker to write the document in English.” In other words, Matthews.
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Matthews takes the reader through the history of the Magna Carta, and why it endured despite there being no singular, original version. He also shared his version — and how it ended up being used as a jumping off point for local governments around the world. Why did people care so much? “ First, my document explicitly empowered cities to defend and extend democracy. Second, it said that everyday people, operating locally, should have the resources and authority to do whatever they wanted.”
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On Palestine and Principles
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In The Nation, Joseph A. Howley, a professor at Columbia, writes about the role of a university: “Preparing a diverse student body to be citizens in a pluralistic democracy, or even to just be adults in their relationships and lives, is the mission at the heart of undergraduate liberal arts education. And it is precisely what the leadership of Columbia University tossed aside last November when it began its formal crackdown on protest against Israel’s war on Gaza.”
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Howley argues that the university made a mistake in conflating protests against Israel’s actions and threats, and, in doing so, “indulged an extreme ideological position, one whose function is to crush all criticism of that state.” This, he says, is against the point of a university, which needs to help students distinguish between harm and offense, and in turn “helps students learn to understand the effects of their speech and actions … [and] helps us teach young people that they can offend or hurt without meaning to; that to do so is not a moral failing or a crime but something to recognize and acknowledge.”
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All of this, he argues, also hurt Jewish, Muslim, and Palestinian students. Actual prejudice against Jews was “hard to combat, because any discussion of antisemitism was tainted by the nakedly repressive project of the university,” while Islamophobic prejudice and violence went “unaddressed.” And after articulating his frustrations with how the university handled the pro-Palestinian encampment, Howley writes, “We will not both-sides our way through to any accurate account of reality, and we cannot more-dialogue our way through it if we can’t identify the particular enemies of expression. And we cannot build something to fill the void left by our leaders if we can’t reverse the polarization imposed on us by their failures.”
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History's Interpreters
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Different politicians and political thinkers depending on their ideologies interpret history differently. But what about regular people (not to suggest that politicians aren’t regular people)? That was the question before Francesco Rigoli in his new piece, “Ideology shapes evaluation of history within the general population,” published earlier this year in Political Psychology.
Rigoli’s article describes a study that was conducted across six countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Mexico, and South Africa. The researchers wanted to maximize difference (while still working within the constraints provided by Prolific, the platform they used to recruit participants). Participants were asked about their ideologies, as participants in political studies are often asked to do. But these participants were also asked about the recent past, the present, and the near future. In all countries, those on the political right evaluated the past more positively.
The researchers then turned to a second study with two groups of 100 participants each, manipulating the evaluation of the past between groups. For example, one group was asked, “Based on your memories, on what you have read, and based on what you have heard from other people, think about society in the period between 1950 and 2000. Take a couple of minutes to think about which aspects of this past society were worse than today. Write these aspects below.” The other group was asked the same question but with the word “better” in place of the word “worse.” This did not influence ideology, disconfirming the idea that people are moved toward the right because of a more positive perception of the past.
A third study “manipulated the salience of ideological representation between groups.” These were two groups of 200 participants each. All participants for this study were from the United Kingdom. The participants of this study were effectively encouraged to have certain participants’ ideological representations be more salient to them. The high-salience group did indeed demonstrate a stronger link between ideology and perception of the past, meaning that embracing an ideology does encourage a particular perception of the past.
A fourth and final study found that right-wing participants evaluated the past more positively at least in part because of nostalgia and tradition. Here, they recruited 1,200 participants from the United Kingdom, United States, Italy, Poland, Mexico, and South Africa.
Rigoli concludes that interpretations of history are central to political beliefs for laypeople as well as their leaders. Ideology impacts how people consider the world around them, and in particular what was and will be. Rigoli suggests that, in the future, links unexplored in this study — like ethnicity, education, religion, or level of political engagement — might also be examined.
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Ahtaram Shine reported on how the climate crisis has made life harder for Rohingya refugees. Life in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, was already fraught, Shine wrote. But weather, including fires and frequent flooding, has added to suffering — and increased health risks. Women, children, and the elderly are especially vulnerable. There’s also, still more problematically, a lack of an effective system for waste management. “Experts say camps in places like Cox’s Bazar need necessary precautions as climate change continues to become more severe: waste management and improved infrastructure, water canals and garbage disposal, solar panels and generators,” Shine wrote.
Rachel Marchand wrote that it’s time for the Global Gag Rule’s 40 year legacy to come to an end. The rule, Marchand explained, has prevented foreign NGOs from using their own funding to provide or offer counsel or information on abortions “as a method of family planning.” First implemented under US President Ronald Reagan, the rule is repealed during Democratic administrations and reimposed when Republicans are back in power. But as Marchand pointed out, “Even when administrations repeal the policy, communications on the provision of care are of a fractured nature, organizations hesitate to take action, and staff need time to become aware of the policy change.”
Michael Fox described the chaos created by heavy flooding in southern Brazil. “Right now, water levels in the Guaíba River are a foot and a half higher than they were during the 1941 flood. Thousands of people have lost their homes. Porto Alegre’s airport, Salgado Filho, is underwater and flights are expected to be canceled through the end of the month,” Fox wrote. Many rescues have reportedly been carried out by local residents, who have used “their own boats and jet skis.” Environmentalists said that relaxing environmental regulations made matters worse, as forest land cleared for agricultural purposes could have absorbed some of the excess runoff.
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Critical State is written by Emily Tamkin with Inkstick Media.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.
With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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