The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art is pleased to announce its 2025 Essay Prizes in Law, Politics, and Art.   An internationally recognised, multidisciplinary journal based in the University of Cambridge and affiliated with Trinity College, the CJLPA  fosters a unique dialogue between law, politics, and art, bridging theory and practice, and robustly promoting freedom of expression. Contributors include Supreme Court judges, Nobel laureates, leading political figures, renowned artists, critics, and art historians.   Open across the three major disciplines covered in the Journal , this competition invites submissions from undergraduate students at the University of Cambridge.   Essay topics:   With separate prizes for each discipline , participants are invited to submit essays on one  of the two questions: Law: ‘He who saves his country, violates no law’ (attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769–1821). Discuss. Should AI replace human judges?   Politics: ‘And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty’ (Plato, Republic , trans. Jowett). Discuss. Is climate change shaping international relations? If so, how? Art: Does the art market define what is or isn’t art? Restitution of the Elgin Marbles should be ‘freely offered as a homage to the indivisibility of art and—why not say it without embarrassment?—of justice, too’ (Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011). Discuss. Eligibility:   To enter the competition, participants must:   Be an undergraduate student enrolled at the University of Cambridge. Submit an original, unpublished essay that is not under consideration elsewhere. Follow CJLPA on one of our social media platforms and share or repost the competition announcement.   Submission Guidelines:   Word limit: 3,000 words (excluding footnotes and bibliography). Formatting: Times New Roman, 12 pt, double-spaced, in any widely-used referencing style. Submissions must be in PDF format and sent via email to generaleditors@cjlpa.org  with the subject line ‘ CJLPA  [Law / Politics / Arts] Essay Prize Submission – [Your Name]’. Essays will be evaluated based on originality, clarity of argument, and depth of analysis.   Prize:   For each discipline, a cash prize of £250 . An opportunity to have your work read by eminent experts in the field. Publication in CJLPA  alongside leading scholars and practitioners. Honourable mentions may also be considered for publication.   Deadline:   20 June 2025

Professor Jan-Werner Müller is the Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He has published many books—including  Contesting Democracy  (Yale University Press 2011), What is Populism?  (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016), and Democracy Rules  (Penguin 2021)—and voluminously in academic journals and public fora including the Guardian , The New York Times , and Project Syndicate .   This interview was conducted on 3 January 2024—before the re-election of Donald Trump—and has been edited for length and clarity.   CJLPA : Good afternoon, Professor Müller. The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art  is singularly lucky to have you here with us today. To begin, can you tell us a little bit about your personal and intellectual biography and in particular what draws your theoretical focus to democracy?   Jan-Werner Müller : I’m glad we have about five hours so that I can pontificate at length about my autobiography! Many academics are rightly reluctant to go down a very autobiographical path because there’s the danger of seeming very narcissistic. But maybe less obviously, there is also the danger of appearing reductionist about one’s own interests, of simply reducing intellectual commitments to completely contingent contexts. So, with these caveats, I’ll be relatively brief: contrary to what is often said today, which is that the 1990s were an age of liberal triumphalism, complacency, supposedly ‘The End of History’, nobody quite believed that (and nor had everybody truly understood what Frank Fukuyama was really trying to say).   Contrary to that cliché, it’s important to point out that, at least in certain respects, the 90s were a moment of insecurity, of uncertainty, of liberals feeling that they may have lost their bearings. This is partly because the great struggle with communism, for shorthand, seemed to be conclusively over. And at the same time, issues were appearing that liberals felt they didn’t have much of an answer to. One of them was nationalism (which is not to say that nationalism had not been politically important during the Cold War).   For many years, if you lived in Europe, you were bound to be preoccupied with what was happening in the former Yugoslavia. Many of us became disturbed by questions about liberal democracies’ ability to respond to questions about belonging, where to draw borders, and what really holds people together in a democratic polity. As a result, there was much handwringing and agonizing by liberals at the time. Of course, I’m not saying that we had the answers soon after. I’m also not saying the story about complacency is completely wrong. But in certain ways, it was a very unsettling time. In the country that I originally come from, Germany, there were also questions about belonging, given that for many decades we had laws on the books that basically said you had to be ethnically German to be a citizen. Questions of belonging in a democracy, questions of social cohesion, questions of citizenship were very much alive in those years.   It was also in the 90s that a curious revival of the thought of the German political and legal thinker Carl Schmitt started. This was puzzling for many people at the time because, up until that point, there had been a general view that Schmitt’s reputation was simply too tainted by his involvement with National Socialism, and by plenty of evidence that even after the war he had no real regrets, and that he remained an anti-Semite. The assumption was that his theories could not come back into general circulation. But again, some of us who perhaps didn’t feel all that complacent at that time got the idea that Schmitt, whatever else one thinks about him, is a formidable critic of liberalism, and of democracy in certain regards. It’s important to take his critique seriously and to work out arguments that might respond to the kinds of anti-liberal and anti-democratic attacks that he had been advancing.   CJLPA :   One of the things that personally stuck with me when I first read Alexis de Tocqueville was a somewhat piercing comment he made about the future of democracy. He suggested that there was a wonderful chain that aristocracy had provided for the West, and what democracy did was break the chain. ‘Each man would be thrown upon himself alone…there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart’—a very foreboding comment about the future of communities and belonging in general.   JWM :   It’s interesting you bring this up. Let me react with two observations. Of course, the 90s were also a heyday of the so-called liberalism and communitarianism debate, and there was plenty of pressure on self-declared liberals to prove that somehow liberalism was able to generate resources for community building. Some of them reacted, rightly I think, by saying that the idea of community being held up by some communitarians was either undesirable or profoundly unrealistic. Plenty of people pointed this out, also among those who might not really see themselves as liberals at all—think of Iris Marion Young, for instance. Communitarian and liberal nationalist claims were also a reason for me to think about the concept of constitutional patriotism, often criticized as being, to invoke the particularly inappropriate metaphor that often comes up in this context, ‘bloodless’. A concept that supposedly only exists on paper, or supposedly a concept that only works for particular countries. For better or for worse, I tried to vindicate this idea and defend it against what I see as often very clichéd and superficial critiques.   The other thing I would say is that of course Tocqueville’s observation about what he would have called individualisme —a really bad thing for him, meaning atomization and isolation, not autonomy—has experienced a revival in our era. It very often serves as shorthand for a quasi-sociological explanation of why we may have seen the rise of right-wing populism, or, some would say, outright authoritarianism or even fascism. Of course, there are many important thinkers one can invoke in this context, not just Tocqueville. Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the emergence of mass society and atomization. All I would want to say in this context is that while certainly it is a diagnosis worth taking seriously, I worry that sometime these claims are made a bit too quickly, and that they, first of all, add up to a certain kind of psychologizing. Secondly, they sometimes underestimate that people who are tempted by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, fascism—whatever you want to call it in the context of our conversation here—are not always particularly isolated. In fact, sometimes they are extremely well organized.   Again, it’s worth remembering that, already in the 90s, our colleague Sheri Berman wrote an important article about civil society in the Weimar Republic, because civil society was a 90s buzzword. Many immediately framed civil society as normatively desirable and essential for democracy and so on. I don’t want to dismiss these arguments, they are important of course. But the thought didn’t occur to too many people that in the Weimar Republic you had an absolutely flourishing scene of associations and clubs—a wonderful, if you like, Tocquevillian civil society life—except that it was full of people who hated democracy, who were all-out racists, and who quite often celebrated violence for its own sake. So, all I’m saying is that we should be very careful with casual Tocquevillian readings.   CJLPA : You talk in Democracy Rules  about three bedrock principles of democracy :  equality, freedom, and uncertainty. I spent some time last year reading Montesquieu, who contends that for a republic to successfully operate there needs to be the passion of love or reverence, either for the principles undergirding the republic or for the particular republic itself, in order for it to be maintained. What role do history, culture, and indeed patriotism play in the strength or atrophy of a democratic state today?   JWM :   Like Hannah Arendt (again!), and many others, I would shy away from the language of love. I don’t think love has a place in the public realm. Again, the thought can too easily lead to a certain type of kitschy communitarianism; after all, we live in—here I am invoking Iris Marion Young once more—a polity of strangers. In certain respects, that’s a good thing. It’s also a good thing that we are not constantly pressured to make confessions, reveal emotions, or relate to people beyond what of course cultural pessimists would see as a certain kind of superficiality. The flipside of being strangers is that, especially in the anonymity of the modern metropolis—I am simply repeating what we have known at least since Georg Simmel’s writings—we can engage in forms of self-invention, of liberation, trying out different lifestyles, finding out who we really want to be. Of course, that’s never a totally isolated process, but I think that if in doubt we should go easy on the on the kitschy emotion talk.   On a more theoretical level, you might say, those who want us to have more emotions in politics often have a very hard time explaining how much exactly is needed, where exactly you find that magic balance of reason and emotion. I would hope that in this regard we’ve also moved beyond the 90s with its very stark oppositions of reason and emotion (or all-out universalism versus particularity all the way down). For one thing, emotions are based on what Jon Elster calls cognitive antecedents—anger, for instance, is not some incomprehensible, irrational outburst, but based on a sense of unfairness, for instance (that sense may or may not be justified).   CJLPA :   Fantastic. I asked this question in part because we’ve seen in America a recent revival in certain, you might say, right-wing domains of this idea of a sort of civic religion. That might be in the legal academy, through what is sometimes called Common Good Constitutionalism, or from political theorists themselves who look at America’s founding and they consider it as a sort of a step in the greater path that ended with some form of certainty in the realm of community. It’s an incredibly parochial view of history, but one that’s unsettling, at least in my eyes.   On the point of pluralism: we have in the modern day shifted towards a language of significant absolutism about certain what you might even call very necessary courses of political action. What would you say to someone who would deny the standing of a political adversary that resists or questions, for example, climate change or climate change related policies?   JWM :   If I may, can I follow up just very briefly on what you said earlier about civic religion? It’s important to bear in mind—work by colleagues like Philip Gorski at Yale is very helpful in this regard—that what is today sometimes propounded by way of Common Good Constitutionalism, or also Integralism, or for that matter Christian nationalism (very important phenomenon), that this is really categorically different from what people were talking about in the 20th century as American civil religion.   It doesn’t mean you have to like that old version of American civil religion—there are plenty of things one can find very problematic about it. Plenty of people would say, ‘let’s get religion out of political discourse altogether’. But it’s worth recalling that theorists who perhaps aren’t read that widely any more—like Robert Bellah, who initially came up with a whole theory of American civil religion—thought of these issues very differently than some of our contemporaries who really mean ‘religion’ when they say ‘religion’. The latter really mean that a good regime would basically use public coercive power to impose certain understandings of religion, certain forms of morality. This is a phenomenon that didn’t quite exist as recently as ten years ago. Now it’s possible to be quite open with the idea that certain aspects of what some of us understand to be crucial to democracy as such—including uncertainty of outcomes; repeat play in the democratic game; accepting that you lost an election even if you think that your moral conceptions are the correct ones or that you somehow possess the truth—might be of secondary importance or dispensable entirely. One more gesture to Hannah Arendt: let’s not forget that political judgment is about the ability to draw distinctions. And what is sometimes now sold as a new version of the old civil religion might really be quite different. Especially, of course, Christian nationalism, as it has become much more prominent in recent years.   Anyway, forgive the interludes and digressions. To your question and point about pluralism: what matters is that democracy, as plenty of other theorists have said, is not ultimately about necessarily finding consensus. It’s not about maximizing cohesion under all circumstances. Again, that’s the kind of communitarian kitsch which we hear far too often, where people say, ‘oh, we’re so divided, that’s so horrible, why can’t we all come together?’. But conflict is normal and legitimate in a democracy; the real question is: which ways of conducting conflict become dangerous for democracy? So, one has to think about what the boundaries of conflict are, such that conflict remains containable or ideally becomes productive for a democracy.   One of the boundaries, I would say, is that you do not delegitimate your political adversaries. You don’t treat them like enemies, you don’t deny their standing. This is what in my view, right-wing populists always do when they essentially say that the others don’t really belong to the polity to begin with. ‘She should be disposed of in Anatolia’. That’s more or less a paraphrase of what a leader of the German far right not too long ago said about a German politician whose family just happens to have Turkish origins. Or when, in the US it was said that certain politicians should go back to, forgive the word, their ‘shithole countries’. That makes it impossible to conduct a conflict because you’re communicating to people that the other person shouldn’t really be in the conflict to begin with, that they have no standing, that they don’t belong here, that they are not even a legitimate person to engage with.   The other boundary has something to do with facts. Of course, the line between facts and opinions is not always exactly clear, to put it mildly. And yet, drawing one more time on Hannah Arendt, if I may: it remains important in our conceptions of democracy to hold on to some kind of distinction between facts and opinion; to say that, of course, people can have their own opinions, but that opinions have to be constrained by something that is recognizable as fact. And ‘the truth’ we should probably leave out of democratic politics altogether. Because we do not say to losers in elections that somehow it was shown that they failed to grasp the truth. No, all that was shown was that maybe their opinions, their judgements, their programs and promises weren’t as popular, weren’t as attractive as those of the other side.   Now, there can be plenty of opinions about climate, but it’s hard to see how conflict with someone who claims that global heating is an invention of the Chinese government to destroy our manufacturing industry could turn out to be productive. Of course, some people would say that such views should somehow be sanctioned or should even become subject to what in some countries is known as militant democracy—the idea that you should restrict people’s basic political rights because of the dangers they pose to democracy. I don’t think that in this case that is remotely appropriate. What you have to do is, first of all, argue on the substance as best as you can. But then also occasionally bear in mind that democratic conflicts have audiences; it’s not just about you and your adversary. You also have to bear in mind what effects there might be on the audience. Occasionally, at least, it’s also important (even though it can sound very academic) to go somewhat meta and say, ‘look, we might have all kinds of disagreements, and I’m not going to vilify my adversary. I’m also not going to say that they’re stupid or anything. But here’s the evidence. And let me also explain beyond pointing to the evidence how this kind of stance just makes it extremely difficult to have a productive conflict in a democracy’. Because even if my adversary in this case were to accept some of the facts, that doesn’t commit them to particular view about what we should do. There’s plenty of room left for saying ‘Oh, we shouldn’t do anything. Let’s just all enjoy ourselves now’, or ‘I trust that in five years, some fantastic technological innovation is going to come along that will help us to deal with all these climate-related challenges successfully’.   As always, the facts are not going to somehow determine their political choices. Choices will always be informed by value commitments, by what Rawls famously called the burdens of judgment. So, you might be very risk taking; I might be very risk-adverse. Or you and I read history and the lessons it might offer very differently. There might be many other factors that come into the picture such that one could not simply say ‘being risk averse is illegitimate; hence you have no space in this conflict, et cetera’. Facts do not eliminate profound disagreements.   Long story short: it’s important not to fall into the trap that, alas, sometimes liberals have fallen into (especially since 2016) where they’ve very complacently settled on the view that whoever disagrees with an ‘us’ that is somehow taken for granted hasn’t understood the truth or necessarily is dealing in falsehoods, and we can simply dismiss what they say. To be sure, populists do lie. To be sure, they often propound conspiracy theories. But you can’t always know that in advance. And sometimes it’s important to say ‘let’s actually deal with the harder questions about differences in values, differences maybe in how we read history, etc’—as opposed to adopting a de facto technocratic stance which assumes that anyone who disagrees must be irrational.   CJLPA :   You recently wrote an op ed for the Guardian about Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is getting a lot of attention these days, and the potential disqualification of Donald Trump from the presidential ballot. This, one might say, is an example of militant democracy, effectively removing someone from a political process. In the piece, you take issue with commentators who argue that he should be properly defeated at the polls. Could you speak to your thought process in observing this legal dynamic play out and the political ramifications in light of what we just spoke about?   JWM :   That’s a very good but very difficult question, one with many layers. We could have a longer discussion about constitutional interpretation, but regarding the specific militant democracy angle that you also alluded to, I would say that removing somebody from the political process is of course an extremely serious, fraught decision that should never be taken lightly. It is not something that democracies should get into the habit of doing. There are countries like Turkey, for instance, which have a long record of constantly banning parties, and that’s one reason—never mind what has happened under Erdoğan more recently—to say that this was always a very flawed democracy at best because political associations were far too casually taken out of the process, of course in many cases because they were advocating for Kurdish citizens.   One has to take seriously the worry that has always shadowed militant democracy, which is that, as you are busy trying to save democracy, it’s actually you who is destroying it by restricting people’s basic rights, outlawing parties, substituting the Judiciary for part of the political process, and so on. One should never imagine that militant democracy is some quasi-technocratic fix, where you remove one or two bad actors and everything will be well.   Having said that, it also matters that militancy is usually something that plays out over time. Well-meaning actors, people who are aware of the dangers of militant democracy, would say, ‘yes, we should never be too quick in these judgments. We should leave some room for things to sort themselves out politically, ideally, before judges get involved’. That’s always much, much better than to imagine that, in quasi-technocratic fashion, somebody could rush in and somehow ‘fix it’. The flip side of that emphasis is that if, over time, you see certain patterns of behaviour and you don’t see any process of self-correction, perhaps you see even processes of radicalization, that also matters. So, with all due respect to some of my very learned and esteemed colleagues who say the political process should take care of all of this, they somehow seem to assume that the political process itself will not be endangered, will be clean somehow. And then, they assume, once Trump is defeated at the polls he will concede, and his followers will politely accept what happened. Then it’s over, finita la commedia . But we already know that this is very unlikely because we’ve already seen how this has played out once. We’ve already seen how in the campaign Trump is not signalling that he understood that inciting people to violence or denying the standing of adversaries is wrong. He’s not saying this time, ‘I’m going to win in a clean way that is in line with our basic liberal democratic commitments in the United States’.   One last thought, to signal that I’m not some gung-ho crusader for militant democracy. One of the most serious points that we can make about this whole approach is that there is a fundamental paradox about its application. When you can apply militant democracy, and when you can apply it in such a way that the outcome is accepted, you probably didn’t need it in the first place. A classic example would be West Germany in the 1950s. We can debate whether it was right or wrong to ban when the Communist Party at that point. Nonetheless, the Communist Party was banned and so was a de facto neo-Nazi Party, and that was accepted as an outcome. People did not say this did lasting damage to the political culture, but in retrospect, they also said, ‘look, probably West German democracy would have been fine, even without these bans’. Conversely, in countries where, broadly speaking, anti-democratic actors do enjoy large amounts of public support, and where maybe the public support is even increasing, or let’s say in a two-party system where one party seems to have turned away from democracy, it’s very unlikely that a ban would simply be accepted. But it’s in those situations precisely where it would be more urgent to actually have militant democracy because the threat is much more real than, say, some still relatively marginal neo-Nazi party. I don’t want to minimize the dangers; even small parties can terrorize people. It’s not like there’s no danger. But in terms of them getting hold of the national levers of power? No, very unlikely.   In other situations, anti-democratic actors might actually succeed. But precisely because it could happen, that also means that the outcomes of militant measures are probably not going to be accepted. So, the paradox is: when you can have militant democracy in a constitutional system, you probably don’t need it, and when you would really need it, you might not be able to have it, given the empirical circumstances. Some of our colleagues in the US today seem to suggest that the circumstances are such that militancy is too dangerous—which is another way of saying: we are being blackmailed by the MAGA movement. The threat is, ‘if you ban our candidate, we’re going to be on the streets and going to be violent’.   CJLPA :   What, perhaps besides what we’ve already talked about, do you identify as being some of the most immediate crises or problems with modern democracy right now?   JWM :   Again, let me say two things, preceded by a rather pedantic observation. We should take on board the lesson that recently was put forward by our esteemed colleague Adam Przeworski in his book about crises of democracy. There, he at least initially says, ‘look, folks tone it down a bit’. Not every policy challenge, even a very serious one, is quite the same as a crisis of democracy. In line with his in certain ways very minimalist understanding of democracy, he then argues that you really have a crisis if something like a peaceful transfer of power is no longer accepted; if people do not understand that, in a very specific sense, democracy is about uncertainty—which is to say we can never be certain about the outcomes, we can only be certain about the process. In autocracies, it’s the other way around. We all know who’s going to win in Russia this year, but the process could change all the time, up to the last minute, as it did last time, because the powerful are fiddling with various regulations up until the last minute to make sure that the one and only right person wins.   Under such circumstances it is justified to speak about a crisis of democracy, or also the possible end of democracy. This is also helpful in terms of assessing the real meaning of January 6th. One can debate how likely it was that the peaceful transfer of power was ultimately going to be impeded, but there was an attempt, and an attempt that, as we now know, was maybe more systematic than we had understood immediately at the beginning of 2021. In that sense, yes, that is a crisis. It’s also a crisis if—again, I refer to the idea of right-wing populism—you have actors who basically say only one outcome is legitimate because there is only one representative of what right-wing populists often call ‘the real people’ (such that actually not all citizens are the people). Only those who fit that understanding of the supposedly ‘real people’ are the people. That poses a permanent danger. It doesn’t mean that every single election outcome will be met with violence, but probably every single election outcome where a populist loses is going to be declared somehow illegitimate, problematic, not quite right, that there must have been a conspiracy, probably by liberal elites behind the scenes, such that the real people or—another famous or infamous expression— ‘the silent majority’ couldn’t really express itself. Even in situations where losing right-wing populists do not mobilize people to impede the peaceful transfer of power, very often they insinuate to their supporters that the outcome is illegitimate and must have been brought about by nefarious actors behind the scenes manipulating the system. In that sense they always cast doubt on the system and erode trust.   Now, allow me to add—because I’m not saying that we should all just simply trust the system—that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with criticizing, let’s say, the American election system. In fact, there’s plenty to criticize and to criticize in other countries as well, especially the extraordinary role of money which is one of the most structural problems for democracy today. But there’s a fundamental difference between a loser who says, ‘well, our system is rotten, because I didn’t win’ and somebody else who says, ‘well, I would like to point out that the power of the wealthy is far too large’. Or who says: ‘We have sections of the population who have basically quit the political process altogether, who simply don’t vote any more at all because they think there’s nothing in it for them’. I mean, these are very serious structural challenges, which one should talk about, but one doesn’t have to talk about them in the vein of right-wing populism.   CJLPA :   You wrote recently about how there is a popularly perceived decline happening in democracy in general, amongst the public. I wonder to what extent the perceived decline of democracy is a corollary of another popularly perceived decline, namely universities—whether indicated by rows over public school curricula in the US, or by commentary now surrounding the resignations of prominent Ivy League leaders.   JWM :   By now you know I’m going to say that I’ll say two things. The first takes issue with the more general diagnosis and the second is more specifically about higher education. Firstly, I think we should be very cautious with colleagues and pundits who tell us that the people themselves are sort of disenchanted with democracy. I don’t see a lot of evidence for that. Most people want to hold on to democratic ideals. And even in countries where things are not going well for democracy, such as India, it remains supremely important for Prime Minister Modi always to point out that ‘we’re the world’s largest democracy. We have a very important tradition of having democracy and diversity at the same time’, and so on. You may recall that when Biden had his first democracy summit in 2021, even Beijing came out with an official paper saying, ‘actually what we’re doing is democracy, it is much better than the chaotic, messy US where nothing is working any more’. That’s one indication that people still want to claim the D word. And they wouldn’t do that if they didn’t feel that the people themselves actually like democracy.   If I may add one other thought to that: it’s very clear by now that in many countries where democracy is in danger or has already been replaced by more-or-less soft versions of autocracy, it is usually not the people who collectively endorsed that shift. It was usually a set of elites who said, ‘actually, we can do without democracy’, or ‘we get certain benefits from a different system’. As always, one should be very careful with the sort of macro comparisons with previous eras, but it’s not totally unjustified to say that, at least in some instances, we already saw this pattern in the twentieth century. So, in 2022, we commemorated 100 years of the March on Rome. And there was, of course, a March on Rome. But we sometimes forget that Mussolini arrived very comfortably by sleeper car from Milan because what in those days actually would have been known as liberal elites basically invited him in to take over the government. That was not a singular, isolated incident. That’s something that marks a certain pattern. I dare say we are sometimes seeing the same pattern today.   To your question about universities: here it’s very important to keep two things apart. We can have a very serious, learned, important discussion about academic freedom, which is not the same as free speech, even though the two are very often conflated. We can have a discussion about student clubs and what kind of speakers they invite and how under those circumstances which are not primarily, sometimes not at all, about academic freedom, you might or might not have certain limits on speech. All these are important discussions. But this is only one aspect. The other aspect is that a huge right-wing culture war machine is now engaged in systematic attacks on higher education. And we’ve seen this in countries that have already left the fold of democracies. You may recall that it was pretty important for Viktor Orbán to get Central European University out of the country. We’ve seen in the US what has been happening in Florida. On the one hand, the strategy contains glorifications of free speech, on the other it involves restrictions on what teachers can actually do, what professors may say—in many cases completely clear violations of academic freedom.   Why is this happening? Well, two hypotheses. For one, it’s always an easy way to prove you’re ‘populist’ by attacking universities. To be sure, this is not my understanding of the term ‘populism’. But one can see why there is an incentive for what in effect are elite actors to say: ‘we are going after the elites, we are with the common people against experts, against snooty professors, who tell us what’s what and tell us how to live’, and so on. It is basically a cost-free way of sending signals like this. Secondly, it’s about undermining centres of authority. I mean, most of us in universities don’t feel that we have all that much authority. But in some circumstances, it does matter that somebody can contradict a government official or tell a foreign journalist who’s just come to the country, ‘look, actually, we study this stuff, and we think this is a bit different than what the power-holders are telling you at the moment’. For some actors, it’s extremely important to remove these centres of rival authority.   Even if they don’t succeed—this is the third sort of quasi-hypothesis—it’s enough to cause confusion and obfuscation. This is the maybe less obvious point about what has been happening in the US more recently. As right-wing culture warriors themselves explain, their thing doesn’t work if they do not reach people beyond the already converted. Members of the MAGA movement know already that liberal professors are evil; the point, then, is to capture a wider audience, and to persuade people who do not think of themselves as remotely MAGA. This is the fateful pattern among many actors—sometimes politicians, sometimes pundits, sometimes academics—who see themselves as the reasonable centre. They’re basically saying, ‘oh, I prove to myself that I am the reasonable centre by being very carefully balanced and by being very moderate in my judgments’. Since you mentioned both Tocqueville and Montesquieu, of course this is something where one can very easily find very important backup in terms of saying, ‘it is a liberal virtue to look for a certain juste milieu ’. I’m not saying that this is necessarily always nefarious But, to use a word that has played a huge role in debates here more recently, context  does matter. And sometimes very self-conscious moderation and centrism become a colossal failure of political judgment.   I worry about the self-declared liberal who basically says, ‘yes, I’m really worried about Trump coming back, but I’m also extremely worried about’—and I think if you use this word in a pejorative sense you’ve already given away the game of where you really stand—‘I’m also really worried about the woke on campus’. You end up with a false equivalence. But if you present it this way, it’s very convenient. It’s very easy to say, ‘look, I’m the reasonable person who sees all the problems on all sides’. It’s actually a failure of political judgment. Those strategists in the right-wing cultural war industry, they’ve understood something that actually is not new. Steve Bannon already explained that it didn’t matter if you had Breitbart say that Hillary Clinton was corrupt; what you had to do was to get the New York Times  to run an article about a story of possible corruption.   Now, this does not mean, I hasten to add, that there are taboo subjects or, God forbid, that serious investigative journalists should hold off on stories that might hurt liberals politically. Of course not. But a lot of the stuff of what is sometimes now rightly called ‘reactionary centrism’ is mere opinion. Nobody went anywhere to investigate something. It’s usually somebody who banged out the op-ed piece in half an hour by recycling the same ten anecdotes about some crazy stuff that happened on some campus, supposedly, plus a quote from someone in some university who says, ‘I don’t feel like I can still say what I want to say’. And bang, there is your op-ed piece that sounds so reasonable and well informed. Zero reportorial labour has gone into this. Very often, with all due respect, zero intellectual labour gone has gone into this. But—to repeat—I’m not denying that we should be having a more serious discussions about the normative basis of academic freedom. We should think more systematically about how academic freedom and democracy hang together, for instance. It’s not like we have all the answers ready.   CJLPA :   My last question, since our hour is about up, concerns your current projects. We understand that you’re working on a new book?   JWM :   Yes, I’m trying to finish a volume on architecture and democracy. Among other things, I’m asking the question: what kinds of spaces might either represent democracy or sometimes concretely facilitate democratic conduct? This is something that I’m of course not the first to think about. We talked earlier about Rousseau. Think about his arguments against the theatre: why did he think that theatre was giving us passive citizens, why should we have festivals instead, where everybody can see everybody else and be affirmed in their belief that we’re all committed to a shared political project together? Quite a few political figures, eminent ones, have given thought to this, but there aren’t very many systematic accounts of the issues at stake.   A further point I would make in this context is that it is also important to rethink some of the basic, if you like, communicative democratic rights which are essential for the working of democracy; some of them require physical space. I’m thinking in particular about freedom of assembly. Of course in the US context it goes very, very far back. In other countries it’s much more recent as a codified right. It’s generally not a very robust right. If you think about what’s been happening in the UK, in terms of new legislation to supposedly prevent public disorder, some of that is very draconian. Even where demonstrations are allowed, they’re often unreasonably constrained. Often, people can’t demonstrate where they want to demonstrate. They might be shunted aside, they’re told to go to places which symbolically aren’t important or where they’re very unlikely to be in the face of other people.   If you make a criterion for permits that ‘assemblies must never disturb anybody’, then you’ve taken away the edge of freedom of assembly, of demonstrations, because that’s one moment where—going back to our earlier discussion about community in big cities—people want to be in each other’s face in a certain way, where they want to bother each other, where they want to start conflicts—and sometimes that can be unpleasant. It would obviously be a mistake to think that only nice progressive people do demonstrations. But that’s something that, as long as it remains peaceful, we have to put up with and should try to engage with. We should even, I think, be more tolerant of civil disobedience than has been the case—even if it can be annoying and causing all kinds of inconveniences. It’s part of the cost of democracy, so to speak. Even if now you don’t see any big reason to demonstrate out there, if we move to a system where it’s much more about technocratically managing dissent—as opposed to having somewhat more unpredictable, dare I say uncertain, forms of protest—you might regret that shift; you might want to be able to protest in a noisier and more disturbing way one day.   CJLPA :   The concept of a debate chamber being the absolute heart of a democratic republic is something which both Joseph Schumpeter and Carl Schmitt have spoken about. For them, these are not genuine debate chambers any more, but simply shells. They reflect a normative bedrock that no longer exists, which is the commitment to a particular discursive legislative process.   JWM :   Then again, Schmitt was making a bad faith argument in this context. He was arguing that in the nineteenth century, supposedly, parliaments were real sites of deliberative democracy, if you like. But then it became very easy to say, ‘let’s hold up this ideal, which proves that in the twentieth century and beyond—in an age of mass democracy, mass parties, and committee meetings where things are actually decided—this is no longer the case’. You can have a much more realistic view of parliaments; it’s not really the case that somebody makes an argument and then somebody across the aisle says ‘yeah, now that I think about it, that’s a really good point’. That is pretty rare, in fact. In many countries, things only really come to the debate chamber when they’ve already been decided. But even the speeches are important, as they dramatize conflict; it is a way to tell citizens what the different sides are thinking—all this goes back to the point that there is nothing wrong with conflict, even if conflict doesn’t result in consensus agreement or anything. As you’re hinting, that’s being endangered if now our representatives are mainly there to produce short social media clips and then, as Ted Cruz famously did, immediately check themselves on Twitter to see ‘is it playing well? Is it working?’ and so on. That’s not very helpful in terms of citizens getting a wider view of what’s actually at stake in a certain conflict, what are the different contending positions, and so on. I don’t have any sort of obvious solution to this, but at least realizing it’s a problem, even if you don’t have a terribly idealistic view of parliamentarism to begin with, might be helpful in terms of finding our bearings and putting our present situation into a bit more of a historical perspective.   CJLPA :   Professor, it has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today. On behalf of The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art , thank you.   JWM :   Well, thank you for having me. Thank you also for the thoughtful questions—and I don’t always say that! Benjamin Keener, the interviewer, is a law student at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where he is an articles editor for the Journal of Constitutional Law . Ben received his MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge and writes and publishes on topics of legal history and theory.

Professor Judith Butler is a world-renowned philosopher and theorist whose writing has made them a household name. Their work has shaped and continues to shape how we conceive of gender, post-structuralism, embodiment, sexuality, and language. This interview is centred around Butler’s recent work Who’s Afraid of Gender?  (2024), which addresses the cultural and political anxieties surrounding gender and gender nonconformity. The following discussion dissects the rise of anti-gender ideology and explores the possibilities provided by psychoanalysis, feminist coalitions, the law, language, and art in counteracting this ideology in order to achieve liveability.   This interview was conducted on 15 July 2024 . The views and opinions expressed by Judith Butler in this interview are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the interviewer or CJLPA . The interviewer assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the interviewee’s statements.   CJLPA : Who’s Afraid of Gender,  as the title suggests, is centred around various fears surrounding gender. The ‘anti-gender’ movement encapsulates multiple fears, whether of a destabilisation of norms, of invasion, inversion, regression, or also progression. Why is it that gender has become the site on which these fears have been projected? And what is it about gender that makes it so potent?   Judith Butler : It’s an excellent question. First, let me say that the anti-gender ideology movement does identify gender as a particularly dangerous and fearsome enemy. This anti-gender movement is largely part of broader right-wing movements, which target critical race theory, sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and migration studies as well. The teaching of race, gender, and sexuality tend also to be anti-migrant and/or subscribe to the Great Replacement theory. So, there are racial, sexual, gendered dimensions of this right-wing, psychosocial constellation, and gender can’t be easily or fully extricated from these other matters.   Secondly, I think it’s fair to say that potentially everyone is afraid of gender—that is, gender understood as gender identity or as a set of norms that convey both expectations and possible punishments. Gender and gender identity are, of course, distinct. Gender can be for some a way to establish a place in the world, who experience their body in a certain way, many of whom take gender for granted at the same time that they value its social operation. For some, gender anchors their experience and as such, when certain questions about gender get raised, they feel that anchor loosening, and fear a destabilisation or going adrift in directions that are unknown and possibly frightening.   That’s an abstract way of saying that many people don’t want to hear questions about how others can and do change their sex assignments or how the complexity of gender identity is lived. This fear also attends to the new vocabularies, including new pronouns, that have been developed to recognise that complexity of gender experience, not just among young people, but across generations, and which generally exist alongside political claims for equality and freedom, for protection against violence, and for protection against discrimination and pathologisation.   So, I ultimately think it is destabilising for those who hold the worldview, sometimes a religious view, that male and female are to be taken not only as naturally given or God given (divinely given through natural law) but also given for all time. That is, sex, or binary sex is considered to be an immutable thing we should not be debating—something that should not be subject to change or reinterpretation, something that is what it is for the time of life without alteration.   CJLPA : I wish to expand on the links you mentioned between race, gender, and sexuality a little later. However, prior to this, I wanted to focus more explicitly on some of the book’s terminology. The book ubiquitously refers to gender being construed as a ‘phantasm’ with purported destructive powers and draws on Jean Laplanche’s formulation of the ‘phantasmatic scene’. For the benefit of our readers, could you explain what it means for gender to be a ‘phantasm’ in the context of anti-gender ideology?   JB : One of the regrets I have about this book is that I didn’t spend enough time distinguishing the phantasmatic scene articulated by Laplanche from the adaptation I make of his theory for critical and political purposes—an appropriation that Laplanche himself or his followers would not have appreciated. The phantasmatic is invariably a structured scene where various elements come into a dynamic interplay. It has its own syntax governing the ways that elements can be related to one another. There are fantasies that we have that are more or less conscious. According to Susan Isaacs, ‘Phantasy’ with the ‘ph’ should designate unconscious processes. The phantasmatic is the syntactically organised scene in which phantasy plays out.   I was drawn to thinking about Laplanche’s phantasmatic scene because it gives us a way of understanding the psychosocial elements involved in what Umberto Eco identified as the ‘jumbled character of fascism’. Eco pointed out that those who are drawn to fascist movements are very often enticed by the fact that they don’t have to reconcile certain fears they’re living with. They are not governed by any standard of consistency or non-contradiction.   In other words, the enemy—in this case ‘gender ideology’—can stand for the acceleration of capitalism and hyper-individualism at the same time that it is taken to be a sign of an oncoming totalitarianism or state communism. Alternately, gender could represent the incarnation of the devil in our time, one which will destroy Biblical law and its mandates regarding men, women, and the family: its heteronormativity, heterosexuality, and the specific meanings of feminine and masculine. Is it an excess of freedom, of individualism, or is gender state control, a dogma, a campaign of indoctrination? It is said that gender is a doctrine of radical determinism. It is said that gender supports a totalitarian regime that will take people’s sex assignment away with the consequence that no one will any longer be able to be a man or woman. Supposedly, you will no longer be able to be a mother or a father as well! Gender is going to strip people of established sex identities. Those who fear the phantasm of gender can easily hold all these views at the same time, and land upon a ‘cause’ for their anxiety about what is happening to the world they once knew. And then we also have a different version of problems: gender permits for trans women to enter prisons and take over the place or invade it or do harm.   So, there are many different kinds of phantasmatic elements that are held together in one place or by one people, and that means they’re under no obligation to reconcile them. There’s no consistency mandate. There’s no coherency mandate because this ‘ideology’ collects them all and promises a relief from every point of anxiety or fear. There is something nearly religious in that promise which most fascists make. They’re going to restore order. They’re going to restore society to the way it used to be—in the case of anti-gender fascists, it is often patriarchal order or heteronormativity that needs to be restored. In this way, a promise of the restoration of order tends to also be part of the promise of fascism.   There’s one more point I would like to add. Freud’s interpretation of dreams was important to Laplanche, but also to me in thinking through the appropriation of Laplanche’s theory here. This is because in a dream sequence, as opposed to a logical one or most conscious ones that take a straightforward narrative form, there are elements that hold together different psychic issues—they could include an anxiety, a desire, or a fear. When one looks at how a dream is organised in terms of the characters, the landscape, the transitions, and the ambient feeling, it seems as if the psyche of the dreamer is, in fact, distributed in a certain way across the scene. It is, as we know, sometimes difficult to understand that the dream scene is the scene of one’s own psyche. It may well be informed by a profound residue from everyday life or infantile histories, or impressions from others. It’s never freed of the environment or social interaction—it carries those traces as well.   The phantasmatic scene is a particular way of rearranging those elements that doesn’t necessarily correspond in any mimetic way to reality; rather, it gives us a refraction of reality of a certain kind. I think that this way of thinking about phantasmatic scene helps us with Eco’s idea that here are these apparently disparate issues that are somehow brought together in a scene without having to be reconciled according to conscious, logical measures—criteria that we might usually seek to use.   CJLPA : That’s a very helpful framework. When you referenced Freud in the context of dreams, the first thing that came to me was his idea of Verschiebung (displacement) which brings to mind how gender has been distorted in order to accommodate disparate, often conflicting, elements of anti-gender ideology.   JB : Yes, Freud’s ideas of both displacement and condensation are at play, but so too is externalisation. I continue to think that we can’t do an ideology critique of the critique of gender ‘ideology’ without Freud.   CJLPA : Building on the aforementioned fears surrounding gender, the book also identifies that one of the consequences has been a rise of trans exclusionary feminism. The politics of fear, here, is generally centred around a fear of replacement and/or of violation. How seriously should this fear be taken? Additionally, I wonder whether over-engaging with these concerns risks dominating the discourse, allowing this fear to have primacy over the right to existence for trans women?   JB : Well, first of all, the fear of violation when stated should always be taken seriously. I think we all have a fear of violation. I don’t know anyone who belongs to a vulnerable community—whether that’s gay, lesbian, bisexual people, travestis in Latin America, trans people, or Black and Brown people, especially migrants—who doesn’t fear violation. But how we define who or what is threatening to violate us is a different matter. If we decide that members of other vulnerable communities are the real threat, then we have forgotten to ask what makes any of us vulnerable. The answer to that involves knowing the broader map of power, including extractivism and exploitation, abjection and effacement.   If many of us live in fear of violation, harassment, harm, rape, and murder, then we need to think clearly about the conditions under which those fears are rightly registered, and those in which they are incited and magnified to serve a fully different political purpose. I find it especially hard these days when countries who had earlier signed the Istanbul Convention are now unsigning that convention that did seek, for instance, to protect women against marital rape and gay and lesbian people against discrimination and harm. It mandated various kinds of social policies to help people understand the harm of homophobia and misogyny, and these are mocked and distorted by the political right as totalitarian educational projects.   Indeed, we have leaders now who mock feminist aims or misuse them for their own purposes. Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, in their debate preceding the general election, debunked trans claims in ways that I found profoundly disrespectful and politically regressive. And Giorgia Meloni, who now fashions herself as a centrist despite her prior affiliations with fascism, promotes the restriction of reproductive rights, including access to reproductive technology. She also has begun the process of nullifying trans rights and challenging the legitimacy of gay and lesbian parenting rights. There are many people on the loose in positions of power who make us all feel the fear of violation, because it’s not just that we are losing legal protection, but violation is being renamed as something normal, and this discourse gives permission for a certain kind of violation.   There seems to be no recourse when the laws that are supposed to protect us actually harm us. Protection is itself a problematic notion, since it assumes a ‘protector’ who has power over us, and without whom our safety is put in question. Equally, when the laws that protect us are withdrawn or mocked or rendered inoperative, we are left even more vulnerable, having to find resources and support in extra-legal networks and communities. So, I understand the fear of violation, and I don’t blame any of the trans exclusionary women from voicing the fear of violation, but I do hold them accountable for making trans people, who suffer that same fear, into the paradigmatic abusers. This move is painful, unknowing, and unjust, amplifying prejudice rather than destroying it.   I have suggested several reasons for the fear of violation. These fears are multiplied for Black and Brown women, trans people, non-gender conforming people, and migrants. One question I have is how did it come to be that trans women, who have historically broken with certain notions of manhood to embrace an identity necessary for their lives—an identity that puts them at greater risk of discrimination, harm, and even murder—are now the targets of feminists who understand what it is to be vulnerable and courageous? Why wouldn’t we object to rape, violation, harm, and discrimination against all vulnerable communities? Identifying another vulnerable community as the true enemy, the one with all the power to hurt us, not only breaks solidarity but also misreads the map of power in our times. That is a perilous error and plays into the Right’s plan of action.   Unfortunately, many trans-exclusionary feminists use rhetoric similar to that of the new fascists and neo-authoritarians. I’m not saying they are, therefore, fascists or neo-authoritarians, but it remains remarkable how rarely they have stepped forward to distinguish their criticism of trans people from a right-wing eliminationist discourse. I wish they would, because if they don’t like being called fascists, they should show that they aren’t.   Feminists need to consider what alliances we want to be part of. In Latin American feminism, trans people are at the centre of the battle against fascism and state violence. Even the emerging left in France, although fragmented, shows how quickly people can overcome deep divisions when they see the necessity of opposing right-wing, white supremacist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic forces. Our alliances need to be as deep or deeper than their hatreds. We make a grave mistake when we become hyper-sectarian or separatist, identifying other vulnerable communities as the true danger to our lives.   CJLPA : This brings up several important points. You pointed out that many people understandably fear violence, and you also mentioned the lack of recourse when protective laws are rescinded. Additionally, you touched on how shifting political landscapes influence this situation. Given this context, how do you view the law’s potential: is it still effective, or is it too closely tied to shifting politics, making its protections inherently unstable and prone to change?   JB : I think the law is really important. I appreciate left legal scholars and organisations—especially those who take on lost cases to make a point. I don’t share the deep suspicion of the law that some people on the left have. However, I believe it would be terrible if legal frameworks became the ultimate political frameworks. We need a larger framework for politics that includes the law and allows it to serve broader political and social aims. The law cannot effectively support goals like freedom, equality, or justice without a political movement and a firmly built vision of politics that provides the aspirations, ideals, and principles guiding our legal activism.   CJLPA : Practically speaking, how can we leverage the law to achieve these desired changes?   JB : Some years ago, I was on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, and now I am excited to see how they use legal strategies to advance progressive politics. They have an extraordinary way of thinking about the law. There’s also the National Lawyers Guild in the US, and I’m sure there are UK equivalents that I’m not familiar with, which are committed to political aims that drive their decisions about cases to take, how to argue them, and which precedents to establish in order to support our political struggles. This dynamic is happening, and as academics we might need to engage more deeply with these legal organisations to understand how they work and perceive the relationship between law and politics, allowing that to inform our own efforts to distinguish and ally the two.   CJLPA : I now want to turn to the audience of the book. In the work, you describe experiences encountering individuals who are unwilling to engage in debate, some of whom even view your work and ideology as demonic. Moving beyond this group of people, I wonder how you navigate discussing the issues raised in this work with those who are willing to engage but who are outside of academic contexts? I noticed that this book, unlike your previous works, was published by a non-academic publishing house. Is there a deliberate shift in the audience you aim to reach with this book?   JB : There is often a difference between the audience you wish to reach and the one you actually reach. According to Amazon, my work reaches people in gay and lesbian studies, women’s studies, and those interested in the critique of fascism, which isn’t surprising. There has been some mainstream crossover, which I’m glad about. Even though I conceived this book as a non-academic one and deliberately published it with trade presses, it may still be a bit dense and lengthy for a broader public. Non-academics can get certain things from it, based on my conversations with many readers.   I wasn’t trying to defend my former positions in this book; I didn’t revisit my previous works like Gender Trouble  or Bodies That Matter  to clarify or defend past ideas. It wasn’t an academic self-defence or clarification. The concept of performativity is mentioned only a few times and in passing, which was deliberate because the book is not about me or my work.   Additionally, I dispute the idea that I have an ideology or that gender is an ideology. For me, self-criticism is important as I embark upon a new project. Often in my scholarship, I end up questioning presumptions from my earlier work. I appreciate the living character of theoretical work, where you can write a book with full conviction and then revise it based on people’s responses that you found persuasive. Academic humility is important. We shouldn’t hold positions over time and defend them against all opposition. Instead, we should listen to those who have good criticisms, or feel excluded or misunderstood by our positions, and be willing to change if we want to be responsive and overcome our own blind spots and unwitting prejudices.   Regarding the performativity of gender, I’m no longer sure how I feel about it. Other issues seem more important to me now. I became interested in talking to people who are unsure about what’s going on with the contemporary discourse on gender. For example, are women in prisons truly threatened by trans women? Or is the real threat from guards, or the prison system itself? The same people who threaten women in prisons often threaten trans people as well. What do we make of that? The violence of the prison system should be a focus, not just individual violent acts, but the harm inflicted by largely unsupervised guards, psychiatric personnel, and sentencing protocols.   Similarly, are women (AFAB) truly threatened by trans women using the same bathroom? Understanding the challenges trans people face when deciding which bathroom to use is crucial. Trans women and trans men face significant vulnerabilities and violence in these situations. For example, I have a friend, a trans man, who was thrown against a wall by police for choosing to use the women’s bathroom because he didn’t feel comfortable or safe in the men’s room. He was trying to avoid a potential scene of harassment by using the women’s bathroom. He figured he could be taken to be a very masculine lesbian butch. Why should such a person be in an imperilled situation no matter which bathroom they used? We should be identifying these vulnerabilities and sharing strategies and forms of resistance in a collective fashion rather than viewing each other as primary enemies, and letting the larger structures of oppressive power fade from view. This also applies to trans people who see feminism as their enemy. What a terrible and unnecessary division! The issue isn’t feminism as a whole but the broader transphobic world, with some feminists engaging in transphobia in horrific ways. Let us keep those larger structures in mind. We are more easily gathered together as a right-wing phantasm than by ourselves, in the interests of solidarity.   CJLPA : I would like to hone in on the importance of listening to those who feel excluded and allowing our own perspectives to be shaped by the lived experiences of others. I also appreciate you sharing your friend’s experience. With this in mind, I’m wondering whether you see a clear distinction between scholarship and activism, and if so, how would you define that distinction?   JB : I think there is a distinction. I think this book tries to show a not fully scholarly audience what scholarship actually does—that the false things that are said about gender can be defeated or debunked in a patient and informed way. For instance, I discuss biology at some length because people often wrongly say that gender denies the materiality of the body. That’s simply not the case. Look at the incredible work in feminist biology and feminist science studies—it is an extraordinarily rich field.   There are different ways to debunk or to oppose the false things that are said about gender. That’s important to do, but I’m also trying to deflate the fears that have become prevalent in the public discourse. People believe that their traditional households will be disrupted or destroyed by some gender ideology that’s let loose into the world. That’s not the case. A trans or queer couple living next to you won’t disrupt your traditional heteronormative marriage with your children and a dog. They won’t come rushing into your home to take your sexed identity away.   Many feel that their sense of being natural, necessary, and universal is profoundly challenged by the existence of queer kinship and trans folks trying to find reproductive technology that works for them. They feel deeply threatened. But are they truly threatened? What is it they’re actually at risk of losing? The only thing a traditionalist who’s afraid of gender ideology is losing is the sense of being superior, exclusive, and universal. My advice to them is to mourn that loss. You still get to have your life. It’s the same thing you’d say to a white supremacist: yes, you’re losing that sense of supremacy. That’s good. You’re going to live in a better world governed by equality, and that loss is necessary to live in that better world.   I don’t expect the most avid proponents of anti-gender ideology to be convinced by me. I suppose I am trying to talk to people who are confused in the political centre or who don’t know how to adjudicate some of the claims that are circulated without support on social media and news outlets. I looked at the Sex Matters internet site, for instance. They take established scientific journals and reject their claims without offering evidence to the contrary. This is bad scholarship and bad journalism. We need to listen carefully and distinguish between informed and ill-informed views.   I had someone come to a talk in San Francisco recently; she was a member of a trans-exclusionary feminist group. She and her cohorts leafleted the event in advance, and some of them came inside and then lined up to speak after the presentation concluded. One of them asked a question, and I thought that was good opportunity to see whether dialogue is possible. That person spoke about her fear of violation, identifying trans women as the threat to her personal safety. My approach was to have provisional empathy with that fear and then to open it up, and to ask if what you say you’re fearing is indeed the source, the reason for your fear. Are there other sources of this feeling that many of us share that something is, in fact, threatening our lives? I said, ‘like you, I fear violation. But unlike you, I understand its sources and instruments differently’. If we had been able to pursue a conversation, that would have been a starting point. It’s important to understand the kind of fear trans exclusionary feminists feel, and to offer them another way of understanding how widely shared that fear is, what might be accounting for it, and to let them know that trans and queer people share that fear. That can lead to a potential solidarity. Maybe we could overcome what I take to be a lamentable division among some feminists—a very minority view within feminists—that is trans exclusionary, creating a division between them and trans and queer allies.   CJLPA : In the book, you propose a form of coalition wherein all those targeted unite effectively, despite their differing viewpoints, leveraging their power in numbers. You note that a coalition, at its best, is not comfortable. However, beyond discomfort what do you think are the primary obstacles standing in the way of achieving this coalition? And how do we go about minimising these?   JB : I think it’s perfectly possible to ally without overcoming obstacles. To accept that there are, at least for now, irresolvable differences, and at the same time, to realise that an alliance is necessary in order to fight off a form of power—whether it’s fascist, neo-fascist, or authoritarian—that is going to strip people of their rights.   Here I am talking about women of all kinds, trans people, gay and lesbian people, queer people, migrants, vulnerable people, especially Black and Brown people, and indigenous people. We really identify and document who is involved in the attacks on such people and what powers are undermining the economic futures of those who are most precarious, including workers whose unions have been weakened or disbanded. We would be very foolish not to see the larger picture.   People ask me, ‘How would we get along? There’s so much vitriolic antagonism. How could we ever make an alliance?’ Ultimately, there are times when that vitriol and antagonism are not resolved but are understood to be secondary when threats are more appropriately identified as coming from fascist or right-wing sources of profit and power, both state and non-state powers. Ecologically speaking, we don’t have time for these internecine conflicts or, if they are necessary, we can accept the unresolved character of those conflicts as we join in the fight against fascism. When the question becomes, ‘How are trans and feminist people going to get along?’, we need to ask: What is the framework in which you’re asking that question? It’s very small and has narrowed into this little fight. What’s the background for that fight? What happens if we open up the frame to understand the background of that fight?   To what extent are we having that fight in order not to see ecological catastrophe, the true damage of hyper-capitalism, whose trace is in fascist discourse, or the true damage of amplified state power, whose trace is also in fascist discourse? What would a left, feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist alliance look like that could identify these issues given all the resources we have from socialist history and theory and from ecological criticism? What could we do if we understood those internal differences as persistent but secondary?   CJLPA : Looking at the bigger picture is clearly essential in the context of this coalition. However, some might be concerned that within a diverse and pluralistic feminist coalition, marginalised voices could risk being overshadowed by more dominant perspectives. What is your view on this potential issue?   JB : The form of coalition that I advance is one that Black feminists have articulated. I think that Black feminism is the future of feminism, and that it should indeed lead the way. Feminism from the Global South that has been building coalitions knows how to do it. These are the most important points of reference for thinking about coalition. It’s from that hard-won understanding that the rest of us need to learn. In that sense, those who emerge fighting from a history of subordination are leading the way.   CJLPA : I fully agree that intersectional feminism is the way forward. This also ties in with a discussion of language, as the book mentions how Eurocentric fictions have organised language into fixed and normative binaries. Therefore, while there is power in putting oneself into discourse (through the use of pronouns, for example), not everyone is given this power. What, then, does a decolonial approach to understanding gender look like, and how do we go about widening the ambits of discourse?   JB : This is one of those moments that Naomi Klein refers to as a ‘doppelgänger issue’. The Vatican claims that gender is an ideology seeking to colonise  the Global South, asserting that gender is another imperialist export and will undermine local cultures, especially the culture of the poor. Of course, if you’re on the left, you recognise the left version of this argument: ‘Oh no, we don’t want a feminism that’s imperialistic. We want an anti-colonial feminism. We want a decolonial feminism. We want a feminism that thinks seriously about white supremacy and colonial power and how feminism has been deployed to support those forms of objectionable power’. Of course, we want to deploy feminism against those colonial powers. There’s just no question about that. So, we could be taken aback or even taken in by the Vatican’s claim. But here is where we need to make a distinction.   What the Vatican would like to impose on the Global South is a Christian missionary view of the natural family: white, heteronormative, and anti-feminist. This view re-subjugates women and challenges the notion of gay and lesbian marriage or gay and lesbian forms of intimate association or kinship that are not necessarily marital or conjugal. So, we see a different kind of colonial imposition, the one that the Church has always been imposing, acting as if it is the protection against colonial domination. Now that needs to be exposed and analysed in detail. It’s not easy because we do know that there are colonial forms of feminism, and that feminism has been deployed in a pernicious and horrible way to wage wars against Muslim and Arab peoples, for instance. Such ‘feminist’ war tactics fail to recognise both Muslim feminist networks and anti-colonial feminist movements. The US has used feminism to advance war and colonial occupation, as we see in the mainstream coverage of the war against Palestine. But Palestinian women and children have been the ones to suffer most in that war.   So, we do need very strong criticisms of colonial feminism, but we also need to understand how versions of colonialism can be furthered by the right-wing appropriation of left arguments and the creation of a kind of confusion among people who cannot see the difference. It cannot be the case that we conclude, ‘Oh, the anti-colonial thing to do is to accept the Church’s teachings!’ No, that’s to accept a different version of colonialism, or sometimes the same version that the Church says is imposed by the Global North as they themselves impose it (from the Vatican, part of the Global North). I do think the Global North imposes ideas of gay rights, lesbian rights, and feminism that are very often smug, arrogant, and destructive, assuming what forms resistance and liberation should take for all people, imposing local norms as if they are, or should be, universal. That is actually a critique I have made alongside many others, and I continue to make it. Unfortunately, it rhymes with the Vatican view. Here again drawing distinctions is crucial, marking off the critique of colonial feminism and the one that’s being advanced by the Church as a subterfuge for the amplification of its own colonial power. I do try to address that a bit in the book. It’s not a large section, but I point to the scholarship that is doing that and should surely be read.   CJLPA : Who’s Afraid of Gender?  also explores ‘monolingual obstinacy’ and the productive potential of translation. Could you explain these concepts briefly, so that those readers who may not have read the book yet have a sense of how this ties in with our discussion.   JB : Well, one way of entering that question is autobiographical. I wrote Gender Trouble  in 1987 and 1988. It came out in late 1989. Suddenly that book took off in the US and the UK, Australia as well, and was translated into twenty-something languages in the following years. I was invited to various places, met those translators who were working with my language in Latin America but also in Eastern Europe. Those translators were also scholars. They were, and remain, scholars of the topic and they knew things about gender, sexuality, law, social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis that I didn’t know. I ended up learning from them not only about theory and the problem of translation, but the asymmetry of translation, how English floods non-English markets, how scholarship from an array of languages rarely finds its way into English unless the scholars master academic English. I also had to confront the limits of English, the arrogance of anglophone theory, and the importance of attending to the non-translatable.   Indeed, exposed to other languages through the translations of Gender Trouble  actually allowed me to learn different ways in which gender—as a term, a concept—is and is not translatable. Gender produced a disturbance in the so-called ‘target language’—I hate that military word, but that’s how translation theory works. I learned all kinds of things about why it doesn’t work. For instance, many people in South Africa explained to me why the term gender doesn’t work because there are all sorts of local ways in different African languages for designating what we call gender positions in kinship and community. Many people in East Asia explained why it was so hard to translate and the various political debates about translation. Even in Germany, where it seemed like ‘Geschlecht’ was the only thing you could use, it was too biological, related more to ‘species’ than to difference or identity. Maybe we should just say ‘gender’, or in French, could you really say ‘genre’ given the literary traditions that distinguish among them with such enthusiasm? So, I learned a huge amount as a consequence of being translated and actually came to be able to read in Spanish, which I never could do before, even though I live in California—and should have, much earlier. My own first-worldism was appropriately challenged, if not shattered. I became very interested in all the examples of why gender does not work. And I made friends with my translators, many of whom are among my most important interlocutors. My views on the importance of multilingualism to any theory of gender were established only after being translated.   Perhaps one insight I have now is the result of translation: gender sometimes works in ways we don’t anticipate and is sometimes feared in ways that are completely different from what it means in the scholarship or even in law and social policy. But sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s not the term; sometimes it needs to be forfeited for another vocabulary altogether. Those of us who’ve been working in that framework of gender, or gender studies, need to listen and learn and revise what we think according to what folks who are grappling with the issue of translation tell us.   Even though I haven’t been strictly monolingual as an adult, I still think every English language speaker and writer has to deconstruct their monolingual obstinacy, take apart the assumption that English is the language in which theory takes place or English is the language in which things become most clear. It’s not the case. Theory is not produced in the Global North, or in English, and then applied to the South. For those who work with that unexamined assumption, they operate with an arrogance that has to be undone. Embracing the practice of translation is a knowledge-seeking activity. It is, in fact, one of the main ways to learn about the world, that is, how the world is organised differently. It is also one of the main ways to learn how to speak across languages with greater care and openness, letting another language enter and transform one’s thought. I am a strong supporter of a transnational and multilingual forms of coalition. Those are both enormously important for any global movement that addresses the conditions of destruction, exploitation, extractivism, and domination.   CJLPA : It is crucial to go beyond one’s own perspective, rooted in one’s language, to understand how gender is currently understood by others and how it possibly could be understood looking forward. With this in mind, it is interesting that some feminists or gender theorists advocate for a post-gender world. Yet, your approach emphasises making diverse social embodiments more liveable.   Within the transgender community you acknowledge that while the binary framework works for some to articulate their gender identity, it is unworkable for others. Specifically, for those for whom the binary is unworkable, there is a form of hermeneutical injustice when it comes to the intelligibility of non-normative expressions of gender identity. There seems to be a tension between the flexibility to self-describe and this social intelligibility—I wonder what you make of this tension.   JB : Well, look, there are those who say to me, don’t we want to simply abolish the gender system? And I generally respond, from what position would we, or could we, do that? I accept that we’re historically formed and that we act from a distinct situation. I would not say that we are historically determined in a deterministic sense by all kinds of norms. We can, and do, break with them. But the conditions of that break? How do we understand that historically, as evidence of the open-ended and nondetermined character of history and historical formation? I don’t think we can leap out of history or our own historical formations to simply get rid of gender. We can do that in a play or a film, or maybe a dream, and dreams are important for politics, to be sure. But what precisely is the practice of abolishing gender?   We could start by saying, ‘Okay, hospitals shouldn’t assign sex’—which is a very interesting idea, one that Monique Wittig proposed, and I liked it when I first heard it, but I took it as a thought experiment. If we seized power in hospitals and banned sex assignment, then we would be accused of being those totalitarians who are going to strip people of their sexed identities. Is that what we want? Or are we on the side of freedom, wanting to expand the domain of gender freedom? Of course, that threatens the Right from another side, but so be it. If we want to abolish gender through law, then through what state power would we act? And would we then be aligned with the State, or would we be State powers? Is that what we want?   I think of sex assignment as iterable, meaning it happens not just once, but throughout life. It happens again and again. I suggest that that’s true for people who stay with their original sex assignments, who effectively say ‘I was assigned female. I like being female. Female is great. I’m assigning myself female all the time. I am in my life living out that assignment and repeating it and reproducing it’. No one simply has a sex assignment. It is being renewed all the time, or broken with, recommenced with another category. So we might say there’s an iterable or performative dimension to sex assignment (which does not mean it is fake or an artifice). No, it’s part of the temporality of a life. Sex assignment happens when we rely on observations about what sex someone is. There are chains of such acts, and those chains can be broken by those who actually need to break the chain to live, and to start another sequence as a way of living, if not flourishing.   I think that takes us away from the idea of a punctual and definitive sex assignment, which I don’t think does justice to the way that assignment works in a lifetime over the course of a life—and how it can change.   CJLPA : I find this approach highly compelling. I am also curious to hear what role you think art—especially visual art which transcends language—has in this venture of ‘curating’ one’s self-expression and broadening the remits of how gender is perceived.   JB : I think art is crucial. I think we need a new imaginary or, rather, counter-imaginary. The right wing is filling the world with these phantasms. They appeal to passions like fear and anxiety, longing for a different world, mainly an ideal of a former way of life. And what do we on the Left offer? What passions are ours? And how do we appeal to them imagining a future in a different way—not the imagined future in which patriarchy and racism is restored, but an imagined picture of greater liveability, equality, justice, and freedom?   I do think that liveability has to be included as a goal. It sounds like a very modest goal, but it’s not. It actually includes survival and flourishing. And it assumes equality and universality, since I cannot achieve a liveable life if the conditions for that life are not accessible to everyone else. At the same time, it is not easy to stipulate for everyone what constitutes the ‘liveable’. I published a short book with Frédéric Worms on this.[1] For instance, I’m not going to say from the outset that anybody who stays in the binary gender system is not living a liveable life—who would I be to say that? That’s just wrong. However, if they live in that binary system and say that no one can live outside of it, then I’m going to oppose them. So, I think we need to accept from the outset that people find liveable very different ways of naming and practicing embodiment. Affirming that complexity is important with the caveat that certain ways of practicing sexuality can be coercive and violent and must be categorically opposed.   I understand that Gender Trouble  was taken by some readers to license self-expression as a value. Although that is certainly important, I’m less interested in self-expression than in establishing modes of liveability that includes the affirmation of complexity. Once we go back to self-expression as the core of our aesthetic practice—focusing on issues such as self-crafting, we’re also implicitly or explicitly subscribing to individualism. And then we’re forgetting that what we need to do is fight for a world in which liveability is achieved by affirming complexity and difference. So, I want a common, if not collective, vision, and not simply an individualistic one.   CJLPA : Finally, I’m aware that you have put off writing a book on Kafka to write Who’s Afraid of Gender?  I’m curious about whether you believe Kafka’s writings offer any insights into countering anti-gender ideology.   JB : I always have—there might even be a brief reference to Kafka in Gender Trouble . I had read Derrida, I’d seen Derrida give a talk on Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’   as I was writing Gender Trouble , and I’ve been teaching Kafka for many years. I love his humour, and I appreciate his ways of seeking to flee a world that is fundamentally unliveable. There are fundamental questions in Kafka about the ways that legal life confounds human existence, extending key legal concepts like judgment and prison to everyday life. He lets us to see that the promises of law to deliver justice, for instance, are very often broken, or that some legal systems built on property relations and racism, break their promise of justice at the moment of making it. As a result, we have to reconceive our way of understanding law as bound up with that broken promise and the way that promise works in our lives, inspiring the very hope that it tends to destroy.   It is easier to think about the false promises of authoritarian and fascist leaders than the ones we live within democracies governed by the rule of law. Of course, there are false promises that are made by fascist leaders right now, but we would be wrong to think that the fascism at issue is not produced in the midst of democracies that are supposed to be their opposite. The false promise is exciting and blinding, and some people would rather have the promise, regardless of its falsity, than not have it at all. Very often in these cases, the promises of a restoration to a former time are fuelled by a restoration fantasy.   Kafka exposes how that works. In his short fiction, mainly parables, but also the novels, the narrative expectation is established that law will deliver justice, that liberation is at hand, that a way out can be found. And then, in The Trial for instance, it turns out that sentencing and punishment precede the trial that never arrives. This destruction of a narrative expectation relates, for instance, to the work of Ruth First’s 117 Days . That work speaks, of course, to questions of indefinite detention under South African Apartheid, but it also speaks to the scrambled sequences that now govern our lives. So, I would argue that there are temporal and fictive dimensions to fascist passion and fascist promise that would benefit from a reading of Kafka.   CJLPA : What strikes me most about Kafka’s writing is the quintessential narrative manipulation of time and space. To me, it seems that this disfiguration and disorientation from conventional coordinates also prompts readers to reimagine the status quo and to consider different realities which easily extends to gender.   JB : For sure, if you think about developmental narratives—‘oh, you’re born a girl, you’re supposed to become a woman’, many ways of blocking freedom and complexity are taking place. The detour, the error, the ‘failure’ are all constitutive of the scene of gender, as are new beginnings and persistent modes of ambivalence. This temporal elaboration within which we seem to live, almost unconsciously, is generally accompanied by great disturbance, and that is significant. This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in forward motion of any kind; I am in favour of forms of hope that can be shared and grounded in workable solidarities. Kafka disturbs the temporal developments that are often assumed or expected in literature, law, and life, so one question is how such expectations inform promises of a political or legal kind, or even religious expectations of fulfilment. That disturbance does open up a different kind of imaginary, one perhaps that we don’t know how to expect, but which will change the course of our political expectations of justice. Or so I hope—see, I do hope. This interview was conducted by Helena de Guise. Helena graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2022. She remains academically interested and personally engaged in feminism, law, German literature, and postcolonial theory. [1] Judith Butler and Frédéric Worms, The Liveable and the Unliveable (Fordham University Press 2023).

A central image in the consideration of law is the totemic figure of justice—Justitia—the blindfolded Roman goddess of justice. Often appearing in statue form in many courthouses and carrying a sword and scales, she heralds the idea of law as impartial and unseeing, of law as a system that, theoretically at least, is open to all—democracy as a form of blindness. The irony of this sightlessness will not be lost on artists, who tend (with good reason) to think of law as oafishly clunking behind them, laughably out of touch with contemporary artistic form, ideas, and methods, and unconversant with the light-fingered nimbleness of creative work. Law generally confines creative freedoms, increasingly in the interests of the gods of corporatised intellectual property. Artists often see law as dry and administrative, as an expensive threat, or something to be resisted (with the usual artistic-anarchic leanings), rather than, dare I say it, a source of curiosity, or a medium for them to work with, like paint.   Justice’s blindness is said to represent objectivity—since postmodernism, another enemy of artists. Justice must be seen to be done, thereby allowing public access to many trials, and the principle of ‘open justice’, but law privileges language and the written word over images and aesthetics. In this era of McLuhanesque visuality-over-orality, in which Instagrammability has tended to trump criticality, this seems especially absurd. Legal theorist Peter Goodrich asserts that Justitia’s blindfold ‘marks an exclusion, an indication that mortals should keep out’[1]—a class issue with which most of us can sympathise. Nevertheless, from the perspective of visual artists, or perhaps only us perverse ones, all this might represent temptation, in terms of a rich subject. Law may have been termed an ‘empire’[2] (and that idea in itself should act as artistic provocation) but its gaps, elisions, and silences—and there are many—are lacunae, or a form of social-sculptural negative space. Law has an unconscious—we just need to analyse it.   Law’s inherent relationship to performance could be seen as further enticement. The courtroom can of course be seen as a ‘theatre’ of judgment, centring on the performance of authority and the fragile recall and transferral of mental images by witnesses and defendants as well as jury, judge, and litigants. Law’s many performative statements, in which speech becomes act—‘I sentence you’, etc—have been termed ‘superperformatives: performatives backed by force’,[3] evoking law’s complex relation to the body and the physical. Law’s inherent violence, its state- or sovereign-backed ability to remove a person from life, society, family, home, and possessions, is Foucault’s ‘technology of power over the body’.[4] But we should not forget that the law also includes a liberatory potential, a choreographic circumscription of individual agency, rights, promises, and liberties. Fig 1. Carey Young, Palais de Justice (still), 2017. Single-channel HD video (from 4K); 16:9, colour, quadraphonic sound; 17 mins 58 secs. © Carey Young. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Once upon a time … … … a true story … … … I lived in a cave.   A four-day journey on a rattling bus across Europe carried me to Greece when I left London after quitting journalism. It finally became clear the work was imprisoned in a web of commerce, with ideals at best an occasional flimsy afterthought. Truth and justice were liked but not essential. Making money through pandering to thoughtless appetites was. Murdoch’s Fox is the flower of 50 years’ evolution since then.   What is meaningful, true and humane in this labyrinth of life? At seven years old I fell in love with Botticelli’s painting Venus and Mars . The peaceful dream of the gods drawn with such perfect clarity and painted in colours balanced between subtlety and lusciousness, all amazed me with beauty. When I reached 12, Man’s continuing history of inhumanity through war, Holocaust, nuclear bomb, slavery, and starvation horrified and angered me. At 15, Keats’ line from Ode on a Grecian Urn , ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, seemed the key to understanding. Ten years later the doors to my inner life were more fully opened in my cave. Fig 1. Venus and Mars (Sandro Botticelli c 1485, tempera and oil on poplar, 69.2 x 173.4cm). © 2021 The National Gallery, London. This hidden shelter was up a cliff on a rocky island in the middle of the myriad blues of the Aegean Sea. Big enough to house one person, its spiral form had been carved by sun and wind from the limestone escarpment. The sandy floor moulded comfortably to my sleeping body. The pale stone inner tip of the spiral swirled up in front of the opening making a partial screen. Inside, a ledge provided storage for my few belongings and a place for a candle at night. There, alone, I was immersed in the fundamental essences of life—earth, fire, air, and water. Asleep at night embraced by encircling stone, each morning I would be woken by the sudden glare of the sun as it rose above the hills opposite and shone hot on my face. Sparkling air all round, turquoise sea lapped into the cove below my cliff. In such simplicity the connection was forged between my inner being and the great forces outside.   This experience has been coursing through my life ever since, opening me to a Universe in which the miracle of consciousness aligned with the wonder of imagination have evolved in us. Looking to the night sky, its beauty balances out fear of its impossible depths. To observe with the naked eye Saturn 800,000,000 miles away on the other side of the Solar System, as we were able to after twilight for the last months of 2020, is to be transfixed by the beauty of the planet and the idea of its being. Seeing that minute, perfect circle of pale pink light in the darkness confirms we belong here with it. We connect in the pattern of mutual existence, the space between us shrinks, and loneliness is assuaged. We know a little more of where and what we are.   ‘Where are we?’ ‘What are we?’ ‘Why are we?’ These questions have been asked for thousands of years since the first enquiring gaze to a sky filled with stars connected us to its mystery. We know some of the answering stories, but the original words are gone along with sound of song or movement of dance. It is visual art which leaves its permanent mark. Stories willed to us by prehistoric ancestors are those directly told through the beauty, energy, and intelligence of the paintings and engravings made most often in the protective environment of caves.   With the exception of 2,300-year-old Chinese manuscripts concerning cave art, it is barely 150 years since prehistoric tools and artefacts were found by us and intelligently noticed. In 1879 María Sanz de Sautuola and her lawyer father, an amateur prehistorian, discovered the ravishingly beautiful paintings of bison herds on the walls of the Altamira cave in Spain. We do not need to know precise cultural causes for their creation. Why these paintings were made sits wordless in the works themselves. Strong sweeping lines describe with masterful accuracy the muscular forms of the bison. Perfect strokes lead down haunches to delicate cloven hooves which suggest the precision and speed of the animals. Love drove the early cave artists to constantly observe and practice—just as it has continued to drive artists throughout the ages to attempt to capture the mystery of the beauty of life. The Altamira masterpieces are of similar age to the fabulous 17,000-year-old paintings discovered on the walls of the Lascaux caves, France, in 1940. Since the invention of modern dating techniques, there has been a speeding up of discovering further Palaeolithic art in caves all over the world, including recently a 45,000-year-old painting of a magnificent purple pig in Indonesia.   Striving to know when human consciousness was born, we hope to find ourselves back there then to make more sense of being here now. Toolmaking was for a time considered the practice that defined humanity until we discovered that great apes, with whom we share common ancestors, modify natural objects to make tools for obtaining food and even as weapons.   No—the evidence we seek is not in artefacts but in art.   What is art, and from where? It comes from noticing everything around us with our conscious mind and from noticing everything around us with our subconscious mind. It comes from fears, desires, and dreams, the imagination and language that emerged during the separation between us and other animals. Fear became wonder. We turned our experience into recorded form intentionally in rituals of remembering, projecting, and invoking. It is love and beauty, physical and metaphysical—the very heart of being human.   Beauty is life itself resonating with more power than usual. We feel more intensely at the encounter whether the cause is sorrow or joy. In his Poetics  Aristotle said the experience given by the tragedies, a heightened, transformative awareness, opens to catharsis—the cleansing necessary to move on.   Ceremonies and rituals have used all functions of the arts to give access to expanded consciousness so we can let go of fear and embrace being more fully alive.   Recently the art of performance poetry was powerfully set at the centre of much-troubled America in a highly symbolic ritual—the Inauguration of President Biden. The ceremony took place on the stage of the opened cave of the Capitol. The young poet Amanda Gorman, her yellow coat the shaman’s cloak evoking the rising sun after so many months of darkness, her slender hands moving with grace and beauty to the rhythm of her words, entranced those who heard and saw. Her incantation enchanted; a spell to heal us out of sadness towards belief in the unity and goodness of our future.   It is only with principles of justice, the balance of sharing and generosity, that we will be able to build lasting, creative civilisations. This virtue is practiced in abstract form in art through various polarities including symmetry-asymmetry, order-chaos, stasis- kinesis, crystallinity-amorphism, and many others, which reflect the constant juggling of forces as life changes over time and new patterns emerge.   Reading about the 100,000-year-old painters’ workshop in the Blombos Caves, South Africa, filled me with the joy of fellowship. Adding pleasure to my sense of connection is a photo showing the landscape to be similar to that around my cave in Greece.[1] The organised system of paint production that was in hand in Blombos Cave suggests it was both studio and laboratory; art as the first science. Analysis of paint on neatly stacked pallets shows that animal fats were used as binders for the ochre pigments which were ground there. For the past 600 years linseed oil has been used to bind oil paint. The methods are closely allied.   Art has been the binder of human history for hundreds of millennia, fundamental to cultures in every part of the world. It connects us to our origins both through looking and through practice. It finds pattern in the unpredictable so that we can feel at ease, not just survive. It exercises human hand, eye, mind, and heart and supports self-discovery for confident participation in the world. This is what makes it so important in education.   The creative mind needs exercising as do all other parts of the body.   A function of art is to open up the cave in every one of us.   A major function of education is to help people discover their innate creativity. Art revolves round the exploration that draws these abilities out, validating imagination as well as contributing to intellectual learning and evolving morality. Advances made by educators during the past 40 years have focused on how to stimulate students’ creativity to enable them to participate more actively in their own education. Recently an unimaginative government has reversed this approach, re-establishing old, narrow formulae which are easier to administer and measure but disadvantage large groups of people. Now emphasised is training—for reiteration of data, rather than education—for expression of understanding. Two subjects which have been cut significantly are art and music.   Art has defined us for more than 300,000 years. How can we possibly expect to nurture civilisations if we remove from the process the core characteristic of our humanity?   Art practice uses body as well as mind. Eyes and hands are exercised by use which feeds neural pathways in the brain. Its combined physical, emotional, and intellectual stimuli give people of widely differing abilities a chance to find their way through the maze and to share their discoveries with each other. Collaborative projects can provide a format wherein students initially explore and express themselves individually, then form groups to exchange and design together, reinforcing the sense of belonging with pleasure of shared responsibility.   Academic subjects taught with art can engage students at many levels. Shortly before the first COVID-19 lockdown I was privileged to teach chemistry through art to a large group of 11-13-year-olds. The project was in praise of the Periodic Table of the Elements, which had filled me with wonder when I was their age. I wanted these students, too, to be inspired by the beauty of the structure of the atomic universe. Each participant chose an element to research and create as sculpture in response. The commitment of the group, the varied beauty of their sculptures, and the way they helped each other and discussed their methods and meanings, were inspirational. Academic children deserve encouragement to open and explore their inner poetic world with the practical exercises art offers; the less obviously academic deserve opportunities to identify with the processes of science which can be made more accessible through art. Young, inattentive minds can open suddenly to academic work after practicing art. Fig 2. Hexagons in Arpeggio (Willow Winston 2018, brass, variable configuration) at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2018. One example of the innumerable possible static positions. © Willow Winston. Fig 3. Hexagons in Arpeggio (Willow Winston 2018, brass, variable configuration) at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2018. Sculpture changed by visitors into different configurations. © Willow Winston. Simple exercises can open up experience in surprising ways. I often ask classes to start drawing with eyes closed. You never know where it will take you and that is the point. You don’t need to know where you are going. You just need something that sets you on the journey, that gives you confidence to dare.   Society publicly declares its relationship with art through the environment it makes. Psychological spaces erected throughout cities point to the quality of our shared inner life. Unfortunately, that is becoming increasingly mechanistic. Undue profit prevails. Buildings are the new investment bank: 3D savings accounts that do not cater to the community visually, socially, or spiritually. Increasingly we neglect how to integrate with nature, the principle by which all beautiful cities of the world were built.   London City Island in the River Lea was developed recently on the dominating monetary principle. What an opportunity missed! No visual harmony is attempted between curving river and concrete. There stand dull boxes, most with dull-coloured cladding, seven to 27 storeys high, crowded top-heavy onto the slender peninsula. Strictly identical windows divide each façade. No change in rhythm, it is all spondee—the monotonous meter used by Virgil in his poem the Aeneid  to emphasise the brute horror of the one-eyed cyclops in his cave.   Why are we building towers that resemble high prisons? If we must build on a vast scale to make our civilisations function economically, much higher standards of public aesthetics are essential or we will destroy what we love. However, without laws that loosen the grip of corporations which control most of the building industry, without making planning processes transparent and truly accessible, without genuinely including communities in choices during development, and without splitting enormous profits, currently made by the few, for fairer sharing with communities where development takes place, our yearning for widespread humane architecture will be unrequited.   From junior education onwards, Environmental Studies, using both art and science, should become a core subject. By infusing art into a critical curriculum more of the population may consciously demand fulfilling environments, as with growing science awareness they are demanding action to counter climate change. These go hand in hand.   An imagined international cooperative, www.Super-Bauhaus.com,  would collate world heritage building design for study in every architecture and engineering school. Paintbrush and pencil would be used exclusively one day each week with some designs made with left or non-dominant hand to banish habit and release the unexpected. World music, too, would be included in courses to promote deeper exploration of rhythm in every aspect of building. Dance, including Laban’s theories on the body moving through Platonic geometries, would open minds to how shaped space affects emotion.   Effective application of these studies for large-scale building will require future generations of computers to incorporate organic function and accessible personal programming. Individual creativity could then be applied more directly than current limited, predictive programmes allow. The human race, of infinite variety, abilities, and potential, is a treasure of the world’s future. Dedicated to beauty and truth through art and science, the cave and tower could integrate in harmony. Fig 4. Thames Tide Rising (Willow Winston 2004). John Laing Equion Head Office, London. Willow Winston   Wide-ranging art practice, including engraving, painting, and theatre design, laid the foundations of Willow Winston’s sculpture. Her metal constructions embody in material form the beauty and emotional power of abstract mathematical concept. With work in public collections in the USA, the UK, and Canada, she has exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic and taught from postgraduate to primary level. Committed to collaborating on innovative educational methods, she is developing ways of using art to teach sciences. Recently she was appointed Patron of Centrepieces Arts Project for Mental Health. [1] Bruno David, Cave Art  (Thames & Hudson 2017).

Introduction   The 2015 Paris Agreement was a pivotal moment in the struggle against climate change. While previous climate agreements had failed to unify the nations of the world in effecting concerted emissions reductions policies, Paris marked a new era of optimism. An unprecedented 196 nations signed a legally binding treaty with the goal of preventing an average global temperature rise of more than 2°C.[1] Of particular significance was Article 6.2, which detailed the use of ‘internationally transferred mitigation outcomes towards nationally determined contributions’.[2] In other words, this referred to the implementation of international market-based carbon pricing mechanisms to deliver emissions reductions.   The modus operandi behind carbon pricing is to account for the external cost to society of producing emissions (externalities) by internalising it into the price of conducting the polluting activity.[3] The price of goods in an economy experiencing a carbon pricing policy will therefore partially mirror the overall greenhouse gas emissions embedded within the goods.[4] There is a wealth of literature concerning different carbon pricing strategies, but carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes (ETSs) are by far the most prevalent.[5] In both of these market-based systems, a price is imposed for each tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by polluters, to incentivise emissions abatement at the lowest cost. More than 90 countries have declared an intention to develop carbon pricing policies, and the World Bank states that there are 64 existing pricing initiatives, covering 22.3% of global emissions.[6] However, the vast majority of emissions remain unpriced, which can result in a phenomenon known as carbon leakage.   Carbon (or emissions) leakage is the relocation of emissions from one jurisdiction enforcing a carbon price to another in which there is a lesser or no carbon price.[7] Emissions leakage can occur via two primary routes. a) A reduction in demand for fossil fuels in emissions-abating countries may provoke an increased demand for them in non-abating countries following a drop in fuel prices. b) Energy-intensive and trade-exposed (EITE) industries may relocate to non-abating jurisdictions because of competition from overseas industries that face lower or no carbon prices.[8] A border carbon adjustment (BCA) can be implemented to combat the latter, and more indirectly, the former. A BCA taxes imports from non-abating countries, offers rebates for exports to these countries based on the emissions intensity of the products, or does both.[9] A BCA strives to level the international playing field by transferring the onus of emissions abatement to non-abating countries while establishing trade neutrality between taxed domestic and untaxed foreign goods.[10] While BCAs may be well-intentioned, the process of implementing them on the global stage is fraught with legal and political challenges which may inhibit their development, or even undo the international progress on climate that was achieved in Paris.   Border carbon adjustments   Besides BCAs, there are many other mechanisms with which to counter emissions leakage. These include output-based rebates (OBRs), free allocations of emissions credits, and specific industry exemptions from carbon pricing. Modelling by Christoph Böhringer, Jared C Carbone, and Thomas F Rutherford found that although all of these instruments go some way to reduce leakage, BCAs were the most effective.[11] In the 2012 Stanford Energy Modelling Forum, a consortium of a dozen models showed that BCAs could reduce leakage by 2–12%, with an average value of 8%, by levying a fee on the carbon content of imports.[12] These results indicate that, although effective, the fuel leakage channel and other economic drivers may be more influential in steering emissions leakage.[13]   The efficacy of BCAs, therefore, must be balanced against the complex and varied impacts that imposing them have. The key areas to be considered are competitiveness, international trade relations, and distributive impacts, although there are strong linkages between these areas.   Competitiveness   The driving force behind the implementation of a BCA is to ensure that domestic firms are not disadvantaged when competing against international organisations that are not subject to equivalent emissions regulations. As such, a BCA is considered by many to be a form of protectionism, of disputed legality.   The WTO General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Article I (‘most favoured nation clause’) concerning national treatment prohibits discrimination against ‘like’ products of different origins.[14] Article III concerns whether process and production methods (PPMs) affect the ‘like-ness’ of products created by processes of different carbon emissions intensity, and whether different product origins should be subject to this rule.[15] It has subsequently been argued that general discrimination based on PPMs would not be valid without a GATT exception, although this is contested.[16] GATT Article XX permits exceptions to Article I to protect human, animal, and plant life or to conserve finite natural resources.[17] The validity of this statement is likewise subject to heated debate, although many feel that this is a legitimate exception.   Furthermore, GATT Article II(a) permits members to impose a charge equivalent to an existing internal tax via an indirect  tax.[18] Only indirect taxes are permitted to be adjusted on the border. It must therefore be established whether a BCA qualifies as direct or indirect, as direct taxes would be viewed as a subsidy and not an adjustment under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM).[19] The major distinction between the two is that indirect taxes are generally mirrored in the price of the product, while direct taxes are not.[20] The majority of scholars, then, do accept that a BCA qualifies as an indirect tax, and that it would therefore be allowed, in theory, under these regulations.[21]   Ultimately, these exceptions are not clear-cut, and the nuances surrounding them are debated at length. It is uncertain exactly what constitutes unfair treatment of international exporters, and whether putting a higher fee on more emissions-intensive imported goods than on cleaner domestic goods, contravenes these trade rules.[22] WTO case law suggests that setting assumed emissions intensity levels for specific countries would qualify as discrimination, but that setting levels for the carbon content of specific foreign products might be permissible.[23] Here, though, there is a difficulty in determining the embedded carbon content of foreign goods, as this information is not always readily accessible. This adds another layer of administrative complexity and cost to proceedings.[24]   It is also worth investigating whether climate policy adds a significant burden to domestic producers which could result in relocation to other jurisdictions. Currently almost half of carbon pricing initiatives hold a value of carbon of below $10 per tonne, which is often of lesser significance when compared with labour, transportation, and energy costs of business.[25] It is likely that these other factors contribute more meaningfully in decisions for more energy-intensive companies to relocate. However, some schemes surging in price—the EU ETS and UK ETS have surpassed €50 and £50 per tonne respectively—this factor may become more significant in the coming decade.[26]   By contrast, Henrik Horn and Petros C Mavroidis argue that promoting competitiveness of domestic firms is not a legitimate rationale for BCAs.[27] They state that the goals of competitiveness stand in stark contrast to the objectives of climate mitigation, for which a BCA would be implemented. Additionally, they argue that the literature naively assumes that BCAs will not serve protectionist purposes, whereas in the trade community it is accepted that the majority of BCA policies are in some way protectionistic. The fact that competitiveness and climate mitigation are so closely intertwined in a BCA means that a poorly designed policy may result in nothing more than a greenwashed protectionist policy.[28] Similarly, it may be challenging to extricate the different motives behind this policy, which may hinder its political and public acceptance. It is equally possible that a BCA that could be seen as overly protective of domestic industry may provoke an international political backlash that may impact trade relations and climate agreements.   International relations   Inevitably, the implementation of a BCA in one jurisdiction or bloc may cause tensions with other exporting nations depending on their exposure to the effects of the policy. The share of fossil fuels in the energy mix, the quantity of exports to the BCA-imposing region, and the emissions intensity of the exports will all determine the susceptibility of a nation’s trade.[29] For instance, India, China and OPEC nations—as large fossil fuel and manufacturing exporters— would likely oppose any such policy and perhaps impose retaliatory tariffs which could result in a trade war.[30] The Paris Agreement has always rested on unstable foundations, as demonstrated by the USA’s withdrawal in 2017, so it is plausible that a BCA seen as targeting a group of nations may result in a splintering, or even a reversal, of the work Paris has achieved.   Moreover, in the absence of a global emissions pricing scheme, different BCAs at different borders could result in a labyrinth of complex border adjustments that would frustrate international trade. North America illustrates the difficulties that this would entail should BCAs be established in the US or Canada. Because the US failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and rejected the 2009 Waxman-Markey Bill, it has introduced no economy-wide carbon price or emissions trading scheme.[31] Instead, individual states have pushed for specific mitigation options, such as the emissions trading scheme established in California, in what has been described as a wave of ‘new federalism’ by Dan Lashof, US President of the World Resources Institute.[32] By contrast, Canada has laid the plans for a progressive carbon tax set to reach CA $170 by 2030, and has numerous extant provincial sectoral policies. This does raise the question of how these two nations could navigate new BCAs or equivalent emissions abatement measures. With a myriad of different carbon pricing structures, it seems likely that trade channels may develop that avoid a BCA in states or provinces imposing such a high carbon price. Indeed, the economic and political complexity of trade adjustments that would arise between these two historically strong trading partners could outweigh any environmental benefits that could be had. Moreover, in no national jurisdiction is there one sole carbon price in place. Instead there are rich tapestries of regulations and climate policies. Should BCAs be implemented on a global scale, questions of how to evaluate and compare other nations’ climate policies will be asked and will undoubtedly lead to international disputes over trade.[33]   On the other hand, there is a school of thought that BCAs, rather than provoking division, might encourage non-abating countries to impose similar carbon pricing structures, or even to join a climate coalition of nations.[34] Indeed, by transferring the burden of emissions abatement to non-acting countries via a BCA, reductions can be achieved at the lowest global cost through ‘where-flexibility’, by increasing the global efficiency of abatement.[35] Yet this might also promote regional disparities.[36]   Distributive impacts   On shifting the onus of emissions reduction responsibility onto the shoulders of non-abating nations, it is argued that this may defy the ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ statement enshrined into law.[37] This UN declaration dictates that although all nations share similar climate aims, historically less economically developed countries should not bear equal responsibility for emissions abatement to polluting nations. It is suggested that less economically developed nations could be exempted from BCAs, although some argue that this would violate the aforementioned ‘Most Favoured Nation’ GATT principle.[38] Although the WTO ‘Enabling Clause’ permits some favourable treatment to these nations through policies aimed at advancing development, this is unlikely to fall within the remit of a BCA.[39]   The design and structure of a BCA would determine which industries and emissions were included within the policy’s bounds. Whether all greenhouse gas emissions contribute to the embedded emissions of goods, or only carbon dioxide, will disproportionately affect some nations. Madanmohan Ghosh, Deming Luo, Muhammad Shahid Siddiqui, and Yunfa Zhu demonstrated, using a general equilibrium model taking into account both CO2 and non-CO2 emissions sources, that nations with a strong agricultural contribution to GDP, such as Brazil, are more acutely affected by BCAs—two thirds of Brazil’s emissions stem from non-CO2 sources.[40] Despite global gains in cost efficiency, and reduced leakage rates, broad-based greenhouse gas BCAs are perhaps unlikely given their tendency to increase welfare disparity in large agricultural nations.   Given that a BCA’s raison d’être is to protect EITE industries, for reasons of pragmatism it is likely that BCA policies will focus solely on these sectors.[41] Because these industries have strong lobbying power, it is improbable that further manufacturing industries and sectors would be included. As a BCA is expanded, the benefits gained by a specific industry become smaller, because the export rebates offered are reduced. This would therefore erode the power base driving for the BCA.[42] However, a strong incentive for implementing carbon pricing policies such as ETSs or carbon taxes must be remembered: the revenue stream, which can be used to alleviate other distortionary taxes or in further low-carbon investments.[43] Indeed, there is a growing desire for this income to benefit low-income communities that disproportionately experience the effects of pollution.[44] However, rebates would ensure that a proportion of the finance generated by a BCA would support EITE industries instead. This could be seen as politically divisive, and could exacerbate welfare disparity in low-income communities.[45]   The EU Border Carbon Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)   Despite many scholars having expressed doubt that BCAs will be established, we are now seeing the concept taking its first steps. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, announced that the EU would set up a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which is now expected to commence in 2023.[46] Initially, it will cover only EITE industries, but it will have inbuilt flexibility to expand in the future should there be an appetite for this.[47] Ahead of the COP26 (Conference of Parties) summit, and with many countries increasing their climate ambition and drive towards net zero, the establishment of the CBAM sends a clear signal to non-abating nations. There is a wealth of discussion and research on the topics covered in this article, on how to implement a BCA while maximising the environmental benefit and minimising the geopolitical, legal, and welfare-related backlash, and on how to fine-tune policy to ensure this.[48] Nevertheless, as might be expected, the BRICS countries have condemned the EU’s move to implement the CBAM. China, India, South Africa, and Brazil labelled the policy as ‘discriminatory’ in a joint statement, while Russia has cast doubt over the legality of the policy with respect to WTO rules.[49]   Additionally, for the CBAM to be permitted under WTO rules, a restructuring of the EU ETS may be required. Currently, a certain number of allowances is granted to EITE and other industries, free of charge, to prevent leakage. This is known as ‘grandfathering’.[50] It may need to be re-evaluated in light of a new border carbon policy, because of the preferential treatment EITE industries may receive should both policies be present.   Despite its detractors, the implementation and performance of the CBAM will be highly influential in guiding carbon pricing over the coming decades. Time will tell whether it will be accepted under WTO rules and whether this would bring a significant international backlash. Whether the CBAM has the power to unite or divide the nations of the world in fighting climate remains to be seen.   Conclusions   A BCA would be a novel weapon in the arsenal against climate change. Its promises in reducing leakage, bringing in revenue, and aligning global ambitions on climate make it an attractive proposition. However, its basis in WTO law, international relations, and welfare distribution must be evaluated and resolved lest it work against the very climate goals it is intended to achieve. The recently developed EU CBAM is the first real test the BCA has to endure. Its robustness and resolve will be scrutinised carefully on the world stage.   Ultimately, however, a BCA is only a second-best instrument that lies far from the potential that a global emissions trading scheme might achieve.[51] Given that this looks very unlikely, the EU CBAM may set a precedent in emissions pricing. However, rather than using a BCA to strong-arm international emissions reductions, many believe that linkages between pricing mechanisms in ‘carbon clubs’ could be employed instead to encourage international abatement.[52] Support is building for these clubs, but the variegated mosaic of unique market structures that exists may make it challenging to facilitate linkages in the coming years. The direction major economies take on this road will be instrumental in determining how the world addresses the climate crisis. The COP26 summit set to be held in Glasgow in November 2021, therefore, will be pivotal in outlining the roadmap for this target. It may be the most important conference since Paris in guiding effective climate policy towards a zero-emission global economy. Callum Winstock   Callum Winstock is an MSc student in Energy and Environment at Lancaster University. He completed an undergraduate degree in Chemistry at Durham University. He works alongside his studies as an analyst at CaliforniaCarbon.info, a US climate finance analysis company specialising in North American carbon markets. He is excited to contribute to the new energy transition and will begin working in a graduate role at EDF Energy in September 2021. [1] UNFCCC, ‘The Paris Agreement’ (2021) < https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement > accessed 20 May 2021. [2] United Nations, Paris Agreement (2015) < https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/english_paris_agreement.pdf > accessed 20 May 2021. [3] James K Boyce, ‘Carbon Pricing: Effectiveness and Equity’ (2018) 150 Ecological Economics 52. [4] Andrea Baranzini, Jeroen CJM van den Bergh, Stefano Carattini, Richard B. Howarth, Emilio Padilla, and Jordi Roca, ‘Carbon pricing in climate policy: seven reasons, complementary instruments, and political economy considerations’ (2017) 8(4) Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change e462. [5] Joseph E Aldy and Robert Stavins, ‘The Promise and Problems of Pricing Carbon: Theory and Experience’ (2012) 21(2) The Journal of Environment & Development 26. [6] Kshama Harpankar, ‘Internal carbon pricing: rationale, promise and limitations’ (2019) 10(2) Carbon Management 219; World Bank, ‘Carbon Pricing Dashboard | Up-to-date overview of carbon pricing initiatives’ < https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/map_data > accessed 19 April 2021. [7] Christoph Böhringer, Edward J Balistreri, and Thomas F Rutherford, ‘The role of border carbon adjustment in unilateral climate policy: Overview of an Energy Modeling Forum study (EMF 29)’ (2012) 34 Energy Economics S97. [8] Stefano F Verde, ‘The Impact of the EU Emissions Trading System on Competitiveness and Carbon Leakage: The Econometric Evidence’ (2020) 34(2) Journal of Economic Surveys 320. [9] Justin Caron, ‘Estimating carbon leakage and the efficiency of border adjustments in general equilibrium — Does sectoral aggregation matter?’ (2012) 34 Energy Economics S111. [10] Ludivine Tamiotti, ‘The legal interface between carbon border measures and trade rules’ (2011) 11(5) Climate Policy 1202. [11] Christoph Böhringer, Jared C Carbone, and Thomas F Rutherford, ‘Unilateral climate policy design: Efficiency and equity implications of alternative instruments to reduce carbon leakage’ (2012) 34 Energy Economics S208. [12] Böhringer, Balistreri, and Rutherford (n 7). [13] Joseph E Aldy, ‘Frameworks for Evaluating Policy Approaches to Address the Competitiveness Concerns of Mitigating Greenhouse Gas Emissions’ (2017) 70(2) National Tax Journal 395. [14] WTO, ‘WTO | legal texts - Marrakesh Agreement’ (1947) < https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/gatt47_01_e.htm#art3 > accessed 26 May 2021. [15] Jason Potts and International Institute for Sustainable Development, The legality of PPMs under the GATT (International Institute for Sustainable   Development 2008). [16] Christine Kaufmann and Rolf H Weber, ‘Carbon-related border tax adjustment: mitigating climate change or restricting international trade?’ (2011) 10(4) World Trade Review 497. [17] Tamiotti (n 10); WTO (n 14). [18] WTO (n 14). [19] Kaufmann and Weber (n 16); Tamiotti (n 10); Aaron Cosbey, Susanne Droege, Carolyn Fischer, and Clayton Munnings, ‘Developing Guidance for Implementing Border Carbon Adjustments: Lessons, Cautions, and Research Needs from the Literature’ (2019) 13(1) Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 3; WTO Working Party, ‘Border Tax Adjustments’ (1970) < https://www.worldtradelaw.net/reports/gattpanels/bordertax.pdf.download > accessed 26 May 2021. [20] Paul Demaret and Raoul Stewardson, ‘Border Tax Adjustments under GATT and EC Law and General Implications for Environmental Taxes’ (1994) 28(4) Journal of World Trade; Kaufmann and Weber (n 16). [21] Joost Pauwelyn, ‘Carbon leakage measures and border tax adjustments under WTO law’ in Geert Van Calster and Denise Prévost (eds), Research Handbook on Environment, Health and the WTO  (Edward Elgar Publishing   2013). [22] Cosbey, Droege, Fischer, and Munnings (n 19). [23] Pauwelyn (n 21). [24] Cosbey, Droege, Fischer, and Munnings (n 19). [25] World Bank, ‘State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2020’ (2020) accessed 26 May 2021. [26] Aldy (n 13); Camilla Hodgson and David Sheppard, ‘Cost of polluting in EU soars as carbon price hits record €50’ Financial Times  (London, 4 May 2021) < https://www.ft.com/content/2b965427-4fbc-4f2a-a14f-3be6019f0a7c > accessed 21 May 2021; Camilla Hodgson and David Sheppard, ‘UK carbon price trades at £50 as market opens for first time’ Financial Times (London 19 May 2021) < https://www.ft.com/content/56e02d3d-8c31-4937-be50-60d4bf9342f7 > accessed 21 May 2021. [27] Henrik Horn and Petros C Mavroidis, ‘To B(TA) or Not to B(TA)? On the Legality and Desirability of Border Tax Adjustments from a Trade Perspective’ (2011) 34(11) The World Economy 1911. [28] Kaufmann and Weber (n 16). [29] Randolph Bell, Carbon border adjustment: a powerful tool if paired with a just energy transition  (2012)   < https://oecd-development-matters.org/2020/10/27/carbon-border-adjustment-a-powerful-tool-if-paired-with-a-just-energy-transition/ >   accessed 17 May 2021. [30] Aldy (n 13); Matthias Weitzel, Michael Hübler, and Sonja Peterson, ‘Fair, optimal or detrimental? Environmental vs. strategic use of border carbon adjustment’ (2012) 34 Energy Economics S198. [31] Noah Kaufman, John Larsen, Ben King, and Peter Marsters, OUTPUT-BASED REBATES: AN ALTERNATIVE TO BORDER CARBON ADJUSTMENTS FOR PRESERVING US COMPETITIVENESS  (2020) 18. [32] Callum Winstock, ‘Exclusive Interview: Kevin Poloncarz (Part 2) on State & Federal Regulatory Interplay, Cross-Border Carbon Equivalence, and Voluntary Offsets’ ( CaliforniaCarbon.info , 14 April 2021) < https://www.californiacarbon.info/exclusive-interview-kevin-poloncarz-part-2-on-state-federal-regulatory-interplay-cross-border-carbon-equivalence-and-voluntary-offsets/ > accessed 13 May 2021. [33] Kaufman, Larsen, King, and Marsters (n 31); Aldy (n 13). [34] Christoph Böhringer, ‘Alternative designs for tariffs on embodied carbon: A global cost-effectiveness analysis’ (2012) 34 Energy Economics S143. [35] John P Weyant, ‘The costs of the Kyoto Protocol: a multi-model evaluation’ (1999) 26 The Energy Journal 131. [36] Elisa Lanzi, Jean Chateau, and Rob Dellink, ‘Alternative approaches for levelling carbon prices in a world with fragmented carbon markets’ (2012) 34 Energy Economics S240. [37] Christopher D Stone, ‘Common but Differentiated Responsibilities in International Law’ (2004) 98(2) The American Journal of International Law 276. [38] Bell (n 29). [39] Cosbey, Droege, Fischer, and Munnings (n 19). [40] Madanmohan Ghosh, Deming Luo, Muhammad Shahid Siddiqui, and Yunfa Zhu, ‘Border tax adjustments in the climate policy context: CO2 versus broad-based GHG emission targeting’ (2012) 34 Energy Economics S154. [41] Lanzi, Chateau, and Dellink (n 36). [42] Aldy (n 13). [43] David Pearce, ‘The Role of Carbon Taxes in Adjusting to Global Warming’ (1991) 101(407) The Economic Journal 938; David Klenert, Linus Mattauch, Emmanuel Combet, Ottmar Edenhofer, Cameron Hepburn, Ryan Rafaty, and Nicholas Stern, ‘Making carbon pricing work for citizens’ (2018) 8(8) Nature Climate Change 669. [44] James B Bushnell, ‘(Overly) Great Expectations: Carbon Pricing and Revenue Uncertainty in California’ (2017) 70(4) National Tax Journal 837. [45] Aldy (n 13). [46] Susanne Dröge, The EU’s CO2 Border Adjustment: Climate or Fiscal Policy? (2020) < https://www.swp-berlin.org/en/publication/the-eus-co2-border-adjustment-climate-or-fiscal-policy/ > accessed 26 May 2021. [47] Ewa Krukowska, ‘The World’s First Carbon Border Tariff, Explained’ ( Bloomberg , 9 Apr 2021) < https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-09/how-to-understand-the-eu-s-carbon-import-levy > accessed 25 May 2021. [48] European Parliament, ‘Trade related aspects of a carbon border adjustment mechanism: A legal assessment’ (2020); European Commission, ‘Inception Impact Assessment’ (2020) < https://www.euractiv.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/07/CBAM.pdf > accessed 26 May 2021. [49] South African Government, ‘Joint Statement issued at the conclusion of the 30th BASIC Ministerial Meeting on Climate Change hosted by India on 8th April 2021’ (8 April 2021) < https://www.gov.za/nr/speeches/joint-statement-issued-conclusion-30th-basic-ministerial-meeting-climate-change-hosted > accessed 26 May 2021; Sam Morgan, ‘Moscow cries foul over EU’s planned carbon border tax’ ( EURACTIV.com , 27 July 2020) < https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/moscow-cries-foul-over-eus-planned-carbon-border-tax/ > accessed 26 May 2021. [50] European University Institute, ‘A WAY FORWARD FOR A CARBON BORDER ADJUSTMENT MECHANISM BY THE EU’ (2020) < https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/69155/PB_2020_06_STG.pdf > accessed 17 May 2021; Aldy and Stavins (n 5). [51] Böhringer, Balistreri, and Rutherford (n 7). [52] William D Nordhaus, ‘Climate Clubs: Overcoming Free-riding in International Climate Policy’ (2015) 105(4) The American Economic Review 1339; Nathaniel Keohane, Annie Petsonk, and Alex Hanafi, Toward a club of carbon markets’ (2017) 144(1) Climatic Change 81.

Many significant cultural objects have found uncomfortable homes in museums across the world.[1] They have been trapped behind glass, victims of looting, ‘scientific’ collection, and other damaging colonial acts. After many years, museums have come to recognise how important it is that they engage with repatriation and culturally sensitive forms of display. Repatriation has been the subject of intense debate. I focus in this article specifically on the issue of display. I will do so through the lens of one object, a Māori  pouhaki . This taonga  was made by the master carver Tene Waitere.   Waitere was born in Mangamuka in Northern New Zealand in 1854 and is of Te Arawa and Ngāpuhi ancestry. His links to Te Arawa also connect him to a strong carving tradition. I argue that sensitive display has contributed to the restoration of the pouhaki ’s mana .[2]   In its current home within the main gallery of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), the pouhaki  is one of the most striking objects on display. An eight-meter carved flagpole, it is, according to Nicholas Thomas, the only one of its kind outside New Zealand, as well as the oldest extant.[3] It is carved on three sides with manaia , supernatural figures that guard against evil.[4] The fourth side is incomplete, potentially indicating the rush to prepare it for its original purpose, as a gift to the Prince of Wales on his 1920 visit to New Zealand. Splits in the timber also suggest the totara  wood was not fully seasoned when it was carved, another indication of being made in haste.[5] The pouhaki  has suffered damage in its lifetime, and although some of this may have been due to transport between Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom, much of it was undoubtedly the result of inappropriate display over 85 years in a garden at the HMS Excellent  Navy Training Centre.[6] Earlier in its life, the currently eight-meter post would have had an additional pole on top and a crossbar, but these have been lost. In its initial presentation, ceremonial flags would have been connected to guyline-like ropes from the crossbar or the top of the pole, mimicking the effect of a ship’s mast. [7] Figs 1 and 2. Kauri-wood pouhaki (flagpole) carved by Tene Waitere and restored in 2008 by James Schuster, Tene’s great-grandson. Rotorua, New Zealand. Donated by the Ministry of Defence Art Collection. This image is copyright. Reproduced by permission of the University of Cambridge, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (2010.672). As this history suggests, the progress of the pouhaki  from Rotorua to Cambridge is an unusual one. It was first presented as a gift to Edward, Prince of Wales, on the tour he made of the Dominions to thank them for their support in the First World War. On 19 April 1920, it made its first official appearance during a powhiri  in Rotorua at Arawa Park, where it displayed around 14 tribal flags.[8] When Edward returned to the United Kingdom two years later, he brought the flagpole with him, and gave it to the captain of the HMS Excellent , a training facility on Whale Island, Portsmouth. It was then placed in a rose garden, which at the time was something of a menagerie for the exotic animals acquired by naval captains.[9]   Leaving the pouhaki  stranded in a garden in Portsmouth undercuts its cultural significance. The very fact that it is a flagpole  is significant. As Nicholas Thomas (Director of the MAA) notes, ‘It is a striking feature of Aotearoa New Zealand’s history that Māori have consistently and effectively embraced signs of European power and sovereignty, and made them serve their own ends’.[10] Indeed it is almost impossible to interpret the pouhaki outside the context of colonisation and disputed sovereignty. The very idea of a flag, and the pole that supports it, is tied to concepts of ruling powers. As easily as Māori had taken up metal carving tools, during the nineteenth century they adopted symbols of European dominance and used them for their own purposes. Flags and flagpoles were part of this process, and in some cases Māori resistance movements harnessed their symbolic power. In its original state this pouhaki  would have strongly resembled the mast of a sailing ship, a crucial tool of economic dominance and colonisation.[11]   Though a gift to the British royalty, the pouhaki  did not connote servility. It has significance beyond symbolising the distinguished service of Māori during World War I. Arawa oral tradition maintains that taonga  were most commonly gifted in order to settle differences between hostile groups.[12] Thomas interprets the pouhaki  as an affirmation of friendship on equal footing, and a subtle way of highlighting the Crown’s neglect of the reciprocal obligations set out in the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed in 1840.[13] Te Arawa had supported the Crown during the New Zealand Wars which followed in the 1860s. By the 1920s the settler government had a poor track record of upholding its obligations to the Māori community. The Treaty had promised Māori they would retain  rangatiratanga (chieftainship), while the Crown received kawanatanga  (governorship). However, in the course of its colonial rule the Crown often did not respect Māori sovereignty, even for groups like Te Arawa which had previously supported its aims. Māori would often remind the government of its broken promises in symbolic ways. For example, just a few years later, in 1940, Nga Puhi wore red blankets to a Treaty of Waitangi commemorative celebration as a protest against land loss.[14] Similarly, whilst the pouhaki remained a gesture of friendship, it was also an ornate reminder of government failure to respect Māori sovereignty.   The pouhaki ’s initial placement in an environment close to a zoo speaks to a conception of it as an exotic souvenir, a far cry from a taonga created by a highly skilled and respected artist. Few would   have been aware of the pouhaki ’s origin or meaning, or indeed, with the exception of those working at the base, of its very existence. During this time the accompanying plaque also inaccurately identified the flagpole as a sort of totem pole used to mark tribal boundaries. Thomas describes this as ‘a piece of information that somehow typifies the vaguely plausible but commonly erroneous captioning of historic native objects’.[15] It certainly demonstrates the lack of attention that had been paid to the pouhaki  since it arrived in Portsmouth. It was not until the 1990s that the curator of the HMS Excellent’s museum contacted Auckland Museum about the pouhaki , which led Jim Schuster, Tene Waitere’s great-great-grandson and a heritage advisor to Heritage New Zealand, and Dean Sully, a conservationist, to come and view it in 2006. Nicholas Thomas made a follow-up visit in 2007. Finding the pouhaki  to be in good but imperfect condition after its years outdoors, Thomas proposed, with Schuster’s support, to have it moved to the MAA.[16] It was at this point unclear who legally owned the pouhaki , so it was accessioned to the Ministry of Defence’s art collection. The Ministry, however, came to support the proposal for the pole’s removal in October 2007.   The removal of the pouhaki from Portsmouth was a first step, but more was needed to display the object in accordance with Māori gifting practices. Paul Tapsell describes three essential elements of taonga . The first is mana , instilled in the object by the ancestors as   it passes through their hands over generations.[17] The second is tapu , which marks an object as sacred and protects it from transgression, preserving its mana  for the future. This would usually entail care by senior elders of a tribe. The third element is  kōrero , the orally transmitted knowledge and ritual surrounding an object. This would usually take the form of a karakia .[18] Accordingly, Schuster performed a karakia when the pouhaki  was removed, which both recognised and restored its mana and resituated it within its  kōrero . Significantly, the pouhaki was reconnected with its carving whakapapa as he carried   another Waitere object, a tokotoko , with him during the ceremony. Respecting such practices is key to appropriate display.   Tapsell also compares the journey of Arawa taonga , gifted outside its tribe, to that of a comet.[19] He first notes that the gifting of a taonga raises the mana  of both parties—the receiver’s as a result of gaining a powerful object, and the giver’s as a result of their generosity. This obligates the receiver to reciprocate in some form, so the pouhaki  was intended not only to remind Europeans of their duties but also to reaffirm them.[20]  Utu , the idea of repayment or reciprocity, is key in Māori culture.[21] When a taonga  is given it is most often expected that it will be returned, that ‘one day [ taonga ] suddenly reappear, charged with the spiritual energy of past ancestors, returning home to their descendants in a blaze of rediscovery’, creating even greater mana  for all parties involved.[22] Such gifts were typically given   between different Māori tribal groups, which understood their obligations to the object and the power surrounding it.[23]   When an object is passed into foreign hands, however, as in the case of the pouhaki , there is no longer a guarantee of reciprocity or maintenance. Customs surrounding the object are often ignored or forgotten. For these objects, display is more than visual. It incorporates a more extensive and temporal process—its  kōrero  must be understood. While the tribe most likely did not expect the pouhaki itself to be returned, it would be viewed as part of a cycle of obligations—beginning with the tribe’s service in the war, reciprocated by the visit of the Prince of Wales, and ending with the pouhaki  itself. The most probable expectation of reciprocation would have been the general fulfilment of European obligations towards Māori, an issue that remains contentious to this day.   I would argue that ignorance, rather than malice, is the cause of the neglect around the pouhaki . A pouhaki  displayed in a rose garden under an inaccurate plaque is not being intentionally violated. But it is fundamentally separated from the layers of knowledge which give an object its mana . It is divorced from the genealogy of its maker, its tribe, the practice of carving itself, and even from the reasons why it was gifted in the first place. Some from outside of Māori culture may not understand why this manner of display was disrespectful. In a culture which prioritises preservation of treasured objects, the declining physical state of the pouhaki  might have seemed the only real problem at hand. However, the removal from context was a greater loss than physical neglect. Mana and tapu  are essentially threatened by the loss of kōrero . As Tapsell describes, ‘such taonga , which can be found in their thousands in archives, upon the countryside, or in museums, remain recognisably Māori because of the patterns embedded in them … but because they have lost all associate knowledge, they are consigned to museum-like roles of representing an obscure and irretrievable past’.[24] The object clearly does not fit into the narrative of theft, violence, or coercion that entangles many objects held by British museums. But in any case, objects should be displayed appropriately to their cultural context.[25]   The restoration process is a good example of how an acceptable compromise can be found between European curatorial practice and Māori custom. Present-day Western curatorial practice tends to preserve an object in the condition in which it arrives, whereas Te Arawa customs would be much more hands-on, to the point of painting the object red.[26] The restoration of the pouhaki , which was carried out by James and Cathy Schuster, Dean Sully, and a group of Sully’s students, ended up being much more responsive to the unique position of the pouhaki  within the MAA.[27] While replicating a traditional mud-based stain was considered, technical analysis showed the existing stain on the pouhaki was shellac, probably from the 1920s, as by then Māori had adopted commercial paints and varnishes.[28] With that context in mind, it was clearly unnecessary to pursue the most traditional route possible, and indeed more suitable to take one that was adaptive to the environment, just as Waitere had adapted to the use of modern materials. James Schuster felt that the pouhaki  should be visually consistent with the rest of the gallery, particularly the Haida Totem Pole.[29] He decided instead to use linseed oil, which was very visually effective despite being unusual both for Māori and European custom.[30]   The restoration process also went further than re-staining the wood to restore the pouhaki  to its former glory. In sections near the top of the pole, where carvings had been damaged by a woodpecker, Schuster used Waitere’s own tools to repair the damage.[31] This not only returned the pouhaki  to its original liveliness but also restored some of the object’s mana , by reconnecting it with the tapu  tools and its own living history. The  pāua -shell eyes were also replaced during the restoration as the originals had been lost over time.[32] The glittering shells now ensure the pouhaki is as communicative and lively as originally it would have been. These alterations are compatible with Te Arawa customs because, as mentioned above, when a taonga  becomes too delicate for use its power is often   transferred to a replica. The significance lies not so much in the particular object as in the power surrounding it.[33]   Museum display contexts are tricky territory when it comes to Māori objects. Not only are there the history of stolen objects and inaccurate display to contend with, but the very idea of a ‘museum’ is also at odds with Māori treatment of  taonga . Tapsell speaks about this in relation to his own research into taonga :   I could easily understand why many Māori people feel alienated from their taonga  held in large city institutions. Apart from the physical barriers of distance and glass cases, the visiting tribes also have to cope with foreign labels and bureaucratic hierarchies. These not only separate taonga from their descendants and ancestral lands, but also recontextualise them in Western culture as objects assigned monetary valuations and institutionally defined in terms of legal possession.[34]   This passage shows how displaying taonga  can prevent them from fulfilling their cultural function, especially as Māori consider them living objects. Even if an object is displayed in a local museum that Māori could easily access, it can create a sense of alienation.   I would argue that the pouhaki  is an exception to this rule. There were a number of factors which led the Schusters to decide that the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge was an appropriate home for the pouhaki . It was decided that the pouhaki  should remain in the UK as it was a legitimate gift with no   expectation of return, as detailed above.[35] They also felt the museum allowed the pouhaki to be placed within the context of other Pacific objects and Indigenous carvings like the Haida Totem pole, as well as other gifts that were presented to British royalty. Importantly, the museum already held a tokotoko  that Waitere carved.[36] It also helped that the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology retained a royal connection, as the Prince of Wales had graduated from it, and that Cambridge University had a history of visits from prominent Māori figures such as Hongi Hika.[37] Finally, the Schusters’ consent and involvement with the placement is itself a vital legitimising factor, reinvigorating the relationship between the descendants of Waitere and their ancestral taonga .[38] The pouhaki  is still legally owned by the Ministry of Defence, but the physical connection with the object, and acknowledgement of Waitere’s descendants, is more significant to appropriate display than legal technicalities of ownership.[39] Though the pouhaki  is not expected to be returned, it is nonetheless reconnected with its whakapapa .   In December 2008 a formal ceremony of dedication took place.[40] The event was reported in the New Zealand Herald , and the very title of the article, ‘Historic flagpole recovers its mana’, indicates how the object’s new placement was the very opposite of what is usually entailed by museum display. In this article Schuster talked about the great sense of emotion that rediscovering the pouhaki  had brought him.   Just to see it, knowing it was made by his hands, it brings great pride. There’s lots of our things over there [and] you always feel a lot of aroha for them—being away from home. But there’s also a sense of pride knowing that your great-great-grandfather’s work is being appreciated on the other side of the world.[41]   The improvements also showed off the prestige of the tribe and Māoridom at large to any visiting the museum. Similarly powerful reactions have been recorded by those encountering other taonga. This demonstrates the immense emotional value these objects have for Māori people. In the face of such connections, it is clear that European museums must do better to bring together objects in their care with those who made them, when such objects are put on display. In many cases, the appropriate action will be to repatriate the object, but the story of the pouhaki shows that new kōrero can be developed. An open dialogue between institutions and families can result in arrangements where specific objects can remain in museums while retaining their mana.   Glossary   Hapū: A kinship group. Section or subtribe of a larger kinship group. Iwi: An extended kinship group, such as a tribe. Karakia: Highly ritualised form of prayer. Kōrero: Orally transmitted knowledge and ritual surrounding an object. Often in the form of a karakia. Mana: A kind of spiritual power, instilled in an object by the ancestors as it passes through their hands over generations. Ngāpuhi: Iwi based in the Northland region. Paua: Abalone. The shell has an iridescent interior often used for decorative purposes. Pouhaki: Flagpole. Tapu: The sacredness of a taonga. Tapu protects a taonga from transgression so that its mana is preserved for the future. Taonga: Broad and complex term often roughly translated into English as ‘treasure’. Can refer to anything from man-made objects like carvings to natural treasures such as waterways. The three essential elements are mana, tapu, and kōrero. See Tapsell (n 12) for further explanation. Te Arawa: A collective of Māori tribes (iwi and hapū) that trace ancestry to the Arawa canoe. Based in the Rotorua and Bay of Plenty area. Te Reo: The Māori language. Tohunga whakairo: Master carver. There is no Te Reo word which translates to ‘artist’ directly. Tokotoko: Walking stick. Utu: Loosely, repayment, reciprocity, or balancing of obligations. Closely related to mana. Whakapapa: Genealogy or ancestry. A highly significant concept in Māori institutions.   Definitions are sourced from < https://maoridictionary.co.nz/ >. Piper Whitehead   Piper Whitehead is a third-year undergraduate in History of Art at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She is a winner of the Warren Trust Award for Architectural Writing and has been an Arts Columnist for Varsity . She is also a published poet and enjoys theatre and competitive debating. [1] Māori terms are defined in the glossary. [2] Deirdre Brown, ‘Colonial Styles: Architecture and Indigenous Modernity’ in Peter Brunt and Nicholas Thomas (eds), Art in Oceania: A New History  (Thames and Hudson 2012) 318. [3] Nicholas Thomas, ‘A Māori Flagpole Arrives in Cambridge’ (2011) 24 Journal of Museum Ethnography 193. [4] Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, ‘Accession No. 2010.672’ < https://collections.maa.cam.ac.uk/objects/552750 > accessed 29 January 2021. [5] Nicholas Thomas, Rauru: Tene Waitere, Māori Carving, Colonial History  (Otago University Press 2009) 25. [6] Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (n 4). [7] Thomas (n 5) 25. [8] ibid 190. [9] ibid 25. [10] ibid. [11] Thomas (n 3) 189. [12] Paul Tapsell, ‘The Flight of Pareraututu: an investigation of taonga from a tribal perspective’ (1997) 106(4)The Journal of Polynesian Society 338. [13] Thomas (n 3) 190. [14] Jock Philips, ‘Anniversaries – New Zealand’s Centennial, 1940’, Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand  < https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/43020/apirana-ngata-at-waitangi-1940 > accessed 21 March 2021. [15] Thomas (n 5) 25. [16] ibid. [17] Tapsell (n 12) 327. [18] ibid 328. [19] ibid. [20] ibid 337. [21] ibid 338. [22] ibid 339. [23] ibid 338. [24] ibid 332. [25] Nicholas Thomas, ‘Introduction’ in Brunt and Thomas (eds, n 2) 19. [26] Thomas (n 3) 191. [27] Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (n 4). [28] Thomas (n 3)192. [29] ibid 191. [30] ibid 192. [31] Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (n 4). [32] ibid. [33] Tapsell (n 12) 331. [34] ibid 341. [35] Thomas (n 5) 26. [36] ibid. [37] Thomas (n 3) 190. [38] ibid 193. [39] Thomas (n 5) 26. [40] Thomas (n 3) 193. [41] Vaimoana Tapaleao, ‘Historic flagpole recovers its mana’ New Zealand Herald (Auckland, 27 November 2008) accessed 29 January 2021.

As a theorist, economist, politician, author, and co-founder of two transnational democratic and progressive movements, Yanis Varoufakis is a political Renaissance man who has captured some of the main social, political, and economic movements of our times. He catapulted to fame as Greek finance minister in 2015 where he displayed a strong opposing voice to European powers in a time of turbulent financial crisis. Varoufakis has continued to be a leading voice for change. In 2016, Varoufakis co-founded the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), and in 2020 he co-founded the international organisation Progressive International. Currently, Varoufakis is a member of the Hellenic Parliament in Greece representing MeRA25, The European Realistic Disobedience Front, an electoral branch of the DiEM25 movement.   In this interview, Varoufakis provides an honest and enlightening account of the shortcomings of today’s politics, the rise of techno-feudalism, and the challenges and achievements that he has encountered while leading and participating in new democratic movements.   CJLPA : Could you perhaps talk a bit about your personal trajectory, and how you got to where you are today?   Yanis Varoufakis : I moved to England when I was 17 to study mathematics and economics. I tried to abandon economics for mathematics, but then eventually ended up doing a PhD in Economics, so I was dragged back into the mire of the dismal science. I taught for decades in Britain, in Australia, in the United States. You would never have heard of me—unless you wanted to read esoteric stuff on game theory and political philosophy—if it wasn’t for the fact that the 2008 global crisis spearheaded the bankruptcy of the Greek state and the sequence of bankruptcies across the Eurozone, because as a commentator, I kept saying that all the European Union was doing was extending the bankruptcy into the future, reproducing it and magnifying it. At some point, my counterproposals were sought out by a young man who was going to become Greece’s Prime Minister [Alexis Tsipras], who then said, ‘You’ve got to put your money where your mouth is and you’ve got to be finance minister’. Thus, I spent six months being the finance minister of the most bankrupt European country, saying no to more loans, the purpose of which was, again, to extend and pretend the crisis.   CJLPA : What would you say is the main motivation behind your work, or has it changed across your career paths?   YV : Curiosity. Not taking epiphenomena for granted. Not accepting that the way things look is how they are. As the Royal Society’s motto has instructed us, not to take anybody’s word for it, to keep searching for deeper causes and to discover that those in power have a vested interest in creating a narrative that obfuscates rather than enlightens us regarding the circumstances in which we live.   CJLPA : Do you think there was a moment when this became clear to you, or is it something you have had since the very beginning?   YV : It was something I had since the very beginning. I was blessed and cursed by a highly political life from a very young age, because I grew up in a tempestuous period for Greece’s history. Mind you, Greece has this capacity of stirring up a lot of tempests. But, I was only six when the secret police broke down our front door to abduct my father. And then I was nine when my mother’s brother was sentenced three times to death by a military court during the military dictatorship. If you have that kind of environment, it doesn’t take too much to start querying power, sources of authority, and what constitutes the difference between democracy and oligarchy. At the same time, it wasn’t that terrible. It was, as a boy—I think it would have been different for a girl because of patriarchy—all very exciting, never a dull moment.   CJLPA : You have commented a lot on the happenings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What is the biggest misconception that political commentators, observers, even some of your followers, have of you and your perspectives?   YV : It depends on who you are talking about. The misconception on the right wing of politics is that I am an unreconstructed Marxist-communist who wants to see the transition to a state-run system. I consider myself to be a liberal, even libertarian, who is as scared of the state as I am of Google, Microsoft, and ExxonMobil. The misconception on the left is that I’m a stooge of the establishment who is peddling left-wing ideas only in order to ensure that the status quo is reproduced.   CJLPA : Have you attempted to mediate or address these misconceptions through dialogue, or do you continue to progress and express your views?   YV : I think dialogue is everything. This is constantly what I’ve been doing, and I never say no to an opportunity to have a vigorous debate with my worst critics, whether they come from the right or the left or the centre or wherever. I’m very proud of one thing that I’ve managed to maintain: a very civilised, even friendly exchange with people both from the left and the right. There aren’t that many politicians, economists and so on, who count amongst their friends both Lord Norman Lamont, former finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Tory government under [John] Major—he’s a friend of mine and we have wonderful debates about everything—and Julian Assange, and Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador, the left-winger. It’s wonderful to be able to have these relationships and not to allow them to fall prey to differences of opinion.   CJLPA : You wrote in your book The Global Minotaur  that politicians can’t be theorists for three reasons: they are rarely thinkers; their frenetic lifestyle does not allow them to give them time to think big ideas; and because theorists have to admit the possibility of being wrong. How have you been able to translate these features of a thinker and a theorist into your role as a politician?   YV : By being a bad politician. I think it’s important to be a bad politician. I take pride in being an awful politician. And what do I mean by this? The beauty of an academic environment is that what you do, whether you’re writing an essay, or presenting a talk in a conference, is you are putting forward a hypothesis and your audience has a job to shoot it down, to find its weak spots. That’s what you do in a lab as a physicist: you have a hypothesis and you allow nature to take shots at it. If nature does not bring it down, it means that there is something to this theory that it is useful. So similarly, whether it is anthropology, literature, or whatever, you put forward a hypothesis, you have the best minds in the audience (you hope), and they try to bring it down. If they don’t completely destroy it, it means that there is some merit to it. But if they bring it down, it’s also very pleasing to say, ‘See I was wrong. My hypothesis was interesting, but it wasn’t up to it.’   In politics, by definition, you’re not allowed to do that. Think of BBC Question Time. I’ve been in that environment or similar environments many, many times, whether it’s in parliament or in a studio. So you’re representing the Labour Party or the Tory Party or the Libs, whoever, and you have the opposite side, and you put forward a hypothesis: your theory, your position, is a hypothesis. Could be right, could be wrong. Now, imagine for a moment that your opponents this week think, ‘Oh my God! They’re right.’ If you say so on air before the programme is over, you’ve been thrown out of the party. You have to resign as minister or shadow cabinet. This is what really suffocates me in politics: that whenever I am sitting around the table with political opponents, I know that even if I convince them, they cannot say so. As Upton Sinclair once said, it’s very hard to convince people whose salary depends on not being convinced. How do I manage that? By admitting it when somebody says, ‘by the way, this is a bad point’ and they can prove it. I constantly struggle not to fall into the trap of defending a position just because it is our party’s position, which means that I’m a terrible politician, because there have been many times when I confessed to the other side having a point.   CJLPA : What can be enforced so that politicians who are perhaps afraid to admit that they are wrong can do so without their livelihood depending on it?   YV : That’s up to you. It’s up to the vote. To vote out anyone who wants to be a minister. This is, of course, highly utopic. What we’re trying to do in DiEM25 and MeRA25, my party here in Greece, we have this saying that if you want the position, you’re disqualified from having it. If somebody really wants to be a Member of Parliament, it means that there’s something wrong with them, because nobody in their right mind should want to be a Member of Parliament. There’s nothing more boring, believe me. It’s mind-crushingly boring. So, anybody who really wants to do it—they have a screw loose. There’s a problem. But of course, it’s a dirty job and somebody has to do it. I keep using the awful analogy of taking the rubbish out at night. If a friend of yours really loves taking the rubbish out, you should ask them to go and see a psychiatrist, a psychologist, to reconsider their ways, because there’s something wrong with them. But of course, they have to do it. So you’ve got to treat politics, electoral politics, as a chore. It’s up to voters to ensure that they do not vote for people who are keenly eager to be politicians. It should be public service. It should be something that you do as a sacrifice.   CJLPA : You mentioned the DiEM25 movement that you founded in 2016. First of all, what is the main motivation behind the movement?   YV : Beginning with the realisation that the crisis we have in Europe is not a crisis of Greece, of Germany, of France, of Italy, but it is a pan-European crisis. It’s got to do with the architecture of the EU. So, if the problem is EU-wide, the solution must be EU-wide. The problem with our governments is that they are all elected on the basis of nation-state-specific parties, who go to the voters with an agenda that is completely pie in the sky because they are all nation-centric agendas that can never be realised by a nation-state government. We don’t have the levers, at the level even for Germany, to do that which German political parties are proposing. So you have fake politics in a sense, you have democracies at the nation-state level that do not have the power to do that which they promise, and you’ve got EU-wide political decision making which is not democratic.   Once we had that analysis, the obvious thing to do was to create a pan-European political movement, a unitary transnational political movement. We’re not talking about an alliance of a Greek party, a Polish party, a Dutch party, and so on, because those alliances really don’t work like confederacies. They don’t have a common programme. They just share jobs in Brussels, and that’s neither here nor there. We’re the first movement that doesn’t have a Greek chapter or a German chapter, and on our Coordinating Committee we don’t have the Greek representative, or the German representative, or the Dutch representative. We are all elected by all of the members, independently of our nationalities. Some of us happen to be Greek, German, and Italian, but we’re not representing Greece, Germany, and Italy on the Committee. We’re representing the whole membership across Europe. To run electorally, for example, we created the Party in Greece. But all the decisions regarding the Party, the manifesto—ie what is our policy regarding refugees in Greece? What is our policy regarding VAT in Greece?— are voted for by everyone, including the Germans and the Dutch, not just the Greek members. That’s never been tried before.   CJLPA : What does it take to create such a political movement? How does one go about it? What are its challenges?   YV : It’s very hard. It’s very hard work, let’s face it, because of the geography as well. Europe is vast, so before COVID-19 we were always in an airplane running around, having meetings and so on. But the way we did it was, when we started the movement in 2016, we booked a very nice theatre in central Berlin, the Volksbühne theatre, and we invited people who come from all over the place. We had the website, and we said: join. From that moment on, we decided the process of policy-making: on the one hand, at a pan-European level, a lot of which was digital of course; the local campaigns; and then the setting up of local committees—we call them DSCs, ‘DiEM25 Spontaneous Collectives’—in Poland, in Greece, and so on and so forth. It’s been hellish trying to organise that and then running the elections. In the European Parliament elections in May 2019, we ran in eight countries, which was hard, especially for a movement that had no money. We had five euros here and five euros there from our members, and that’s why you don’t see us in the European Parliament. We got very close to getting MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) elected in Greece, in Germany, and in Denmark, but we just missed out by very little. But still, we got one and a half million votes across Europe—which is not that much, but at the same time it’s not negligible—and we’ve influenced many other people. It’s a constant struggle. We have not succeeded, but we have not withered. The fact that we are alive and kicking is a great success for us.   CJLPA : What would you say is DiEM25’s biggest achievement? Would you say it was the electoral prominence that it had?   YV : No. The biggest achievement is the Green New Deal for Europe—our policy agenda—which fills us with a great deal of pride, because we all talk about the green transition and green politics, how to combine the social with the environmental, and about green new deals, but we were the first ones to actually come up with one, and one that is comprehensive, radical, and realistic at the same time. And also the way we did it. Back starting in 2016, we had a committee of about 20 economists, environmentalists, and experts who put together a questionnaire, just questions, which we distributed across Europe and beyond Europe, amongst our friends in America and elsewhere, which were very specific. Key questions like: how much should we spend on green energy? Figures, not pie-in-the-sky stuff. Where is this money going to come from? Which part of it will be public finance, which part of it will be taxes? How will it be distributed? What will it be spent on? What about public debt, which is a huge issue especially the European Union and the Eurozone? What about private debt? What are we going to do with the banks? How do we regulate the banks? What about universal basic income? Do we want it? And if we want it, how do we pay for it? I’m just giving some examples. These were all questions, and it was a logistical nightmare because we’ve got, as you can imagine, thousands of answers, and had to sift through all of them. From all of those answers, that committee of 20 people had to put together a draft Green New Deal proposal, which then went out for consultation. More answers came, we fixed it again and we brought it back together, and then we put it up for an all-member vote across Europe. That was voted in. Then we formed the alliance with which we stood in the May 2019 European Parliament elections, so we brought in other parties that had not been party to this European Green New Deal and they had to contribute themselves, so that changed the game. Now we have a document which, if you compare it to what comes out of the European Commission—the Green Deal of Mrs Von der Leyen—I’m very proud of, because what they have is really not worth the paper that it is written on, I think, compared to ours. I mean, of course, there are things that could be improved and will be improved and are being improved because we are constantly adapting it to the post-COVID-19 era.   That’s a major success in the sense that the worst enemy of progressive politics is the belief deep down, even of progressives, that [Margaret] Thatcher was right, that there is no alternative to what is being carried out. Even progressives, even people who demonstrate on the streets, deep down they worry that maybe the adults in the room know what’s best, that maybe we don’t like what we see but maybe we don’t have an alternative to what’s going on. This Green New Deal for Europe is the alternative. You read it and you think, ‘OK, now we could implement this tomorrow.’ It’s not like, ‘In another world, in a better world, we could do this’, no, because part of our blueprint is what you can do this week, in six months’ time, in 12 months’ time, in five years, and ten years. Maybe we’re wrong, but at least we thought, ‘OK, we put this on the table’, and we say to others, ‘Come and tell us where we’re wrong’, in an academic kind of fashion. ‘Come and shoot it down, tell us what your ideas are.’ Whenever we had political parties from Italy, from France, and so on saying, ‘Let’s collaborate’, and we say, ‘OK, let’s collaborate, but look, we have a program here for Europe, tell us where we’re wrong’, at that point we realised that most political parties, if not all, said, ‘No, let’s agree on how we’re going to stand together and who’s going to become a Member of Parliament.’ But we are not interested in that. We want to agree on what needs to be done. If we are in office, then we discuss who will be in office. We are trying to change the direction of movement from talking about who is going to get what position to, say, what needs to be done if we get the position. This is not very appealing to the existing political system. Not even to the left, or even to the Greens.   CJLPA : You mentioned this inevitability that Thatcher was right. You recently said that we’re entering a post-capitalist world—what you termed ‘techno-feudalism’. Could you perhaps elaborate on, firstly, how we finally reached this post-capitalist society, and then on this new concept of ‘techno-feudalism’?   YV : When I was your age or even younger, I remember being schooled into the great schools of thought that were clashing with one another. And the main two at the time—it was, of course, the Cold War back then—were the liberal democratic capitalist school, harking back to Adam Smith, with elements of Friedman and von Hayek, who were representing capitalism as the ideal system, on the basis that you have a minimal state providing security and everything else is left to individuals. These individuals are free, through the market, to pursue their own private interests, with the market operating as if by an invisible hand behind our backs—a kind of divine providence—synthesising our greedy individual self-interests into the good of society. As nobody can know what people want or what people are capable of, certainly not the state, allowing this decentralised decision-making process to progress is the best way of combining private liberty with the public good. That was one view. According to that view: the state is there, it is minimal; investment is private, and comes out of savings; households save; firms borrow and invest; and you let a Darwinian process decide who survives and who dies with a state playing a minimal, safety-net kind of role. That was one view.   The other view, which was the socialist view, the left-wing view, even the communist view—from the side of those who were in favour of central planning Soviet-style—the view was that capitalism and the market fails, it creates inequality and injustice, and you need a state representing the public will to coordinate both incentives and constraints so that you achieve the public good. That was a big clash, and I was very interested in this clash. The pro-capitalist view versus a kind of socialist view. This is irrelevant now, and it has definitely become irrelevant after 2008. In 1991, the socialist tradition collapsed because the Soviet Union collapsedand with it social democracy collapsed as well, even though the Social Democrats were very anti-Soviet. The left lost its mojo, so to speak, in 1991.   In 2008, the Thatcherite School, the liberal, libertarian tradition, had its comeuppance because the private capital combusted and dissolved. Since then, what we have had is the state keeping capitalism alive. So the central bank—the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve—keeps on pumping money, giving it to the private bankers who are completely bankrupt otherwise, who are giving it to companies that would be completely bankrupt otherwise. So you have the zombification of the private sector by the states. It’s no longer the clash between the private and the public. The public is keeping the private zombified, in a state of being undead—not alive, but not dead either—because if the Bank of England pulls the plug, the whole thing collapses. If the Fed pulls the plug, it’s all gone. It’s no longer this juxtaposition between the state and the private sector. The state is producing the fuel that keeps corporates alive. At the same time, the old story that households save and corporations borrow to invest has died as well. Now you have a situation where corporations are saving. Apple has $220 billion of savings. Every large corporation is saving. Why do they have savings? Because they are too scared to invest. They are scared to invest because they look at you and say, ‘She will not be able to buy stuff from me at a price that will give me profits, so I’m not going to invest.’ They don’t invest, they don’t create good quality jobs, and they instead create crap jobs. Crap jobs means that people like you then don’t have enough money to buy their stuff, so that confirms their decision not to invest. But how do they keep themselves alive? They get huge loans from the private banks that get the money from the central bank. What do the large corporations do with the huge loans they get from the private banks? They go to the stock exchange and buy their own shares. Share prices are very high, bonuses to the members of the board of directors are very high because they are linked to the share price, so they are doing really very well. Financial markets are booming, but profits are zero. This is a complete disconnect between the financial world and capitalism. That’s not capitalism. The model of capitalism, and the heads of those who supported capitalism when I was growing up, has gone.   Now what you have is certain companies like Tesla, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so on, based on remarkable new technologies—and they are remarkable, I love them—that creates huge power for them. Those companies are no longer operating within a capitalist framework: the moment you go into amazon.com, you are outside capitalism, and you are inside a platform that provides everything for you. It’s equivalent of walking down the high street only to discover that every shop is owned by the same man, every product sold is distributed by the same company that owns the shops. The tarmac is owned by the same company, the air you breathe is owned by the same company, and what your eyes see is directed by the same company. This is what happens on Amazon. What you see on Amazon right now is directed by the company. That’s not a competitive market. That’s not a market at all. This reminds me of feudal times, because if you were a peasant and you lived in some estate, in a Downton Abbey-like estate, you lived in a place which belonged to one family. You had a dwelling, you ploughed the land, you went to festivals, but it was all within a fiefdom owned by one person. That’s more or less where we’re moving now, where we already are. If you combine that with the fact that all the money comes from the state, from state printing presses—the Bank of England, or the Federal Reserve—and it’s all technologically kept together and promoted, I think that we can’t talk about capitalism anymore. ‘Techno-feudalism’ is a better term for it.   CJLPA : Seeing as the state essentially funds this techno-feudalism, how can we maintain democracy and accountability when it is already tough to maintain it between the public and the state, let alone the public and the corporations?   YV : Through a series of steps. The first thing we need to do is to cut out the middleman, and I’ll be very specific here. I already described how the central bank prints money, gives it to Barclays, or the Royal Bank of Scotland, or to Deutsche Bank. They then pick up the phone. They don’t call you. If you go and ask for a loan, you won’t get it because they don’t trust you to pay it back. So what they do is they pick up the phone and they call a large company and say, ‘I’ve got these millions here. Zero interest rate. Do you want it?’, and they give it to them for zero interest rate because they themselves pay negative interest rates. In other words, the central bank pays them to take the money, so even if they give it away for free to the large corporations, as long as they take it back, they’re laughing. So the large corporation which is too scared to invest because little people do not have the money to buy stuff, then take this money and goes to the stock exchange and buys back its own shares. Their shares go up. But this is wasted money. It’s not feeding economic activity, especially the green transition, investment in renewables, and so on. So we need to cut out the middleman. Imagine if whenever the Bank of England printed £100 billion, instead of giving it to Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland, imagine if they credited every bank account in Britain with £5,000. Then you would go out there and buy stuff, and suddenly there would be economic activity. Businesses would start saying, ‘Hang on a second, she can buy stuff now. I’ll produce things. I will employ people.’ So this is one step. It’s not the only one, but it would be a significant step to cut out the middleman. That’s the summary.   The second step is that we need public investment in the green transition, because the market cannot be relied upon to do that which is necessary in order to save the planet, because the market can never price things that don’t have prices. The air we breathe doesn’t have a price, so it can never be rationed through the market. It has to be done by us, by a political process. For that, we need a public investment bank that soaks up excess liquidity in the financial sector and presses it into the service of the green transition. Britain used to have one when I lived in Britain a long, long time ago. It was called the Post Office Savings Bank. Jeremy Corbyn had this programme in his manifesto in 2019, for creating a national investment bank. Boris Johnson talked about it again recently, but I haven’t seen what they’ve done or whether they’ve done it. The Germans have it: it’s called KFW, and it’s a very good investment bank. Imagine you have a national investment bank. They issue bonds—in other words, they borrow—they soak up liquidity from the financial sector, the Bank of England can guarantee those bonds and say, ‘If their price goes down, I’ll buy them’, so suddenly everybody who has money will want to buy those bonds because the Bank of England is standing behind them, and then you create a kitty from which you pay for the Green Industrial Revolution. I’m using those terms because they were first used by Jeremy Corbyn, but Boris Johnson has taken it now and he talks about the Green Industrial Revolution. So, go spend the money, go and create the green technologies. And what are they? We need to invest in hydrogen, to take over diesel. We need more renewable energy, from windmills and so on in the North Sea. We need batteries, because the Chinese are completely monopolising the battery technology. I’m not against them. Good on them, except Europe is not doing it, and we’re going to increasingly rely on battery technology coming from China. Other technologies are already being experimented with elsewhere, like compressed air, so you use renewable energy to compress air so its decompression can be used during peak times when other renewables are not available. There’s some artificial intelligence. These are some things that you can direct the investment to.   Those two steps, they’re not even that radical, they’re just using existing institutions and existing tools and weapons against the common problem. So you create good quality jobs. People have more money to spend. You’ll be able to end the constant humiliation of needy people who have to go through the wringer of Universal Credit and all those mechanisms that crush their soul to give them a penny. If everybody gets it, the Bank of England credits everybody with £5,000, and then the rich people can be taxed on this money at the end of the year anyway, so their money goes back to the state.   But finally, if you really want to democratise the economy, you have to rethink the whole notion of tradable shares. My view is that that’s a very bad idea. It started in 1599 in London with the British East India Company, where you had the notion that you take the ownership of a company and you break it down into little shares that are anonymous and that can be traded like confetti. We need to rethink that, because in the end what we’re saying is that somebody who has money can effectively own all the power of the large corporations. We would not tolerate that when it comes to politics. We would not have tradable votes in politics. Why do we have them in the general assembly of shareholders? But this is a much longer-term and a more radical rethink that I am proposing.   CJLPA : You mention that these two steps are not that radical. Do people in influence or in power know this? And if they do, why is it so hard for them to implement it?   YV : Of course they know. It’s not hard for them. They don’t want it because they make a lot of money at the moment due to the fact that it’s not being implemented. When I say cut out the middleman, I’m effectively saying cut out the commercial banks. Commercial bankers understand the importance of that, but they would rather die than see it happen. They will do anything. They will kick and scream and threaten us with blue murder if we dare do it. So the question is: who is running the show? Is it the bankers, or society? At the moment, it is the bankers.   CJLPA : I was wondering if we could turn just for a brief moment to your home country, Greece. You are a politician in the electoral branch of DiEM25, MeRA25. What do you think we—as Europeans or just as world citizens—should know about Greece at the moment, and are there any opportunities or challenges that you think Greece will face in the future?   YV : The challenge is never-ending. We are now in the eleventh year of our long winter of discontent, our Great Depression. Greece went bankrupt in 2010 and is more bankrupt today than it ever was. What I think is quite instructive, especially for young students of political economy and politics more generally, is: why don’t you hear about this anymore? Because up until a few years ago, Greece was front-page news. Its bankruptcy was almost on a daily basis on the front page of every newspaper around the world. Everybody considered it to be insolvent and a threat to the global financial system. That is no longer the case. It’s no longer appearing on the front page. Does this mean that it has been mended, as the powers that be claimed the case to be? No. We are even worse now than we were in 2010. You can ascertain this very easily. When we went bankrupt, we had a debt of, say, 300—forget the zeros. Now we have a debt of 380. Our income then was 240, now it’s 165. We are far more bankrupt today than we were in 2010, which proves that politics determines who is considered insolvent and who not, that insolvency is a political issue in the end, especially when it comes to countries. When I was finance minister, we were being discussed left, right and centre every day—on the BBC, everywhere—because I was putting up a struggle against our official lenders, the European Union in particular, who wanted us to take another credit card to pretend that we were repaying the previous credit cards. And I was saying no to that. They shut down our banks in order to force us to do it, and that was big news. It’s like a riot in an awful prison camp: when prisoners have had enough of awful conditions and they stage a riot, that becomes big news. Television vans arrive and you’ve got all the shots of the fracas in the prison. When the riot is put down by riot police, the television cameras leave, but that doesn’t mean that the situation in the prison is good. It means that it is no longer newsworthy. This is the same thing.   The lesson, I think, is that it’s not a technical question, the bankruptcy of a state. It’s a political question, and that has repercussions for Britain, it has implications for the United States. In the 1970s, Britain had to go to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) for a loan, and everybody said Britain was bankrupt. But Britain was not bankrupt. It was a political decision to go to the IMF. Britain had no reason to go to the IMF. There was no obligation to go to the IMF. The government at the time was a Labour government, the James Callaghan government, and they decided that they wanted to keep the exchange rate between the pound and the dollar steady. If you have an outflow of money, you can’t keep it steady unless there is an inflow. If you put, above all else, the maintenance of the exchange rate between the pound and the dollar, then you go to the IMF and you declare yourself bankrupt. But that was a political choice. There were losers and there were winners as a result of that. Those who had reason to be able to convert their pounds into dollars and not to lose money, especially large companies or Brits that had investments in the United States or outside Britain—they benefited from the declaration that Britain was bankrupt. Workers and weaker people suffered immensely without getting any of the benefits of having declared Britain to be bankrupt. These are, I think, especially talking to students in an academic environment, the lessons from Greece. When it comes to a corner store, bankruptcy is more or less a technical problem. If the corner store’s revenues are not up to it, then of course at some point you have to close down. It’s an inevitability. It’s a technical point. But when it comes to the bankruptcy of a nation, and therefore the questions about public debt, and deficits, and austerity, and whether Rishi Sunak is right to say that we will have to start repaying now because otherwise we will be in trouble—none of that is a technical issue. All of it is political. It is a question of which social groups’ interests those in authority are prioritising.   CJLPA : Are we already seeing this sort of politicisation with the pandemic at the moment?   YV : Absolutely, we already see it. You already see that, including the pandemic, as a result of the process of creating money that I described before—where the central bank prints money for the banks and the banks give money to the corporations—you have a gigantic increase in inequality because little people suffering from COVID-19 or COVID-19-related ill effects on their economic circumstances are absolutely desperate. They’ve lost their livelihood. Their revenues have gone down by 80%. They’re worried about furlough: is it going to end? When will it end? But those who are in receipt of wealth injections, as a result of the Bank of England’s money printing, they’ve seen their income and their wealth multiply at ridiculous   levels. The Swiss bank UBS came out with a report that, only in the United States, since the beginning, between March and December of 2020, during the first nine or ten months of the pandemic, the richest Americans increased their income and wealth combined by $1 trillion as a result of doing nothing. Just by sitting there, in their sleep. So yes, we’ve already seen that. Now that Britain, due to a rather decent vaccination process, is facing exit from the pandemic and the opening up of the economy and so on, austerity is coming back as the chosen policy of the Conservative Party. And austerity is just another form of class war, and it is more plundering of the victims of a crisis on behalf of those who benefited from it.   There will be a post-pandemic. Maybe we’ll have another one later on, but this one is going to die. The Spanish flu died after 1918 even though there were no vaccines. Now we have vaccines as well, so it will go. But what will be left behind? If you think about it, we do have some recent evidence. 2008 was a catastrophe for global capitalism, especially Western capitalism, and it got its effects. Those who caused the crisis, the bankers, exited the crisis with more power than what they had before the crisis, and the little people were even weaker than they were before.   CJLPA : I wanted to quickly ask you about Progressive International. I wanted to specifically ask: why does Progressive International believe that the time is now to create a collective, international, progressive front?   YV : I think the time was in 2008. We are late, and the reason why I think that is because, as I mentioned before, 2008 was our generation’s 1929. It ended capitalism as we know it, or as we knew it, and created a new regime which I call techno-feudalism. This is the result of regressive international coming together. This is, if you want, the G20 decision of April 2009 under the chairmanship of Gordon Brown, when all the bankers, central bankers, finance ministers, prime ministers, and presidents got together and decided to save capitalism. The way they did it—I’m not criticising it, just describing it—was to create huge solidarity between bankers. The bankers of the world got together and saved each other by transferring their losses onto the public ledger. That was a clear demonstration that internationalism works for the bankers, and then once this was combined with austerity for everybody else, you had discontent. And discontent breeds populism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, all those things that come out of humiliation and deep-seated discontent, just like it happened in the 1930s. We saw that with the success of Brexit, of Donald Trump, of Bolsonaro, of Modi, of Le Pen, of Salvini, of the Alternative für Deutschland, and so on. The bankers got together, created their international, and worked. Then the fascists got together and internationalised, and they’re a huge power around the world, even if they lost the White House. Trump is gaining strength, as far as I’m concerned, in America. Fascism is solidifying, if anything, under Biden even more than it did under Trump. The bankers and the fascists internationalised. It’s time for progressives to internationalise. That’s what Bernie Sanders and I thought in November 2018. We met in Vermont and asked, ‘Will anyone join us?’ So we started.   CJLPA : Have there been any challenges or any achievements thus far with Progressive International?   YV : The problem was that we had the American presidential campaign intervene between November 2019 and now, which meant that Bernie could not be part of it for legal reasons. Senators cannot participate in international [organisations], especially candidates for the presidency, so that went into abeyance for a while. Then Bernie’s involvement with Joe Biden—and he was running his economic policy through the Senate—meant that he could not be part of it. So we were delayed by this. Then we launched about a year ago properly, and we did this on the basis of bringing together people. The organisations that are part of the Progressive International have about 200 million members around the world. Our first major campaign was called ‘Make Amazon Pay’. It started on the day of Black Friday last December. It’s a beginning. I’m very proud of what we did. We had a rolling strike in warehouses of Amazon pushing for better wages and conditions for workers around the world, and it started in Bangladesh, it moved to India, shifting time zones, then to Germany, then to New Jersey, then to Seattle, then to Australia. This was the first attempt to do anything like that. It had never been done before, and we’re very heartened by that. Now, we need to bring in consumers with boycotts, not just against Amazon. The philosophy is this: we need local action in support of communities that need it, with a global perspective and global solidarity. This combination is hard and essential at the same time.   And also, we have gone from the model of campaigns and collective actions of the nineteenth century, where you combined maximum private personal sacrifice by participants with minimal personal benefits, [to a system where you have minimal  private personal sacrifice and maximum  personal benefits]. If you think about it, a gold mine going on strike back in the nineteenth century was a maximum sacrifice because it meant no food on the table, no wages. It meant that some of them were victimised, some of them were beaten up, arrested. It is like asking people to sacrifice themselves. What was the benefit to themselves individually? On average, very low. Even if they got a wage rise, everybody got it, including those who didn’t strike and those who broke the strike. This cost-benefit analysis at the private level of early reforms of action has been very detrimental to the common cause. Maybe we need to do things differently. So we have minimal personal sacrifice, especially if it’s a global campaign like, for example, don’t visit amazon.com for a day—it’s a tiny sacrifice for you, I don’t want to say never buy from Amazon, but, for a day or a week—with maximum impact. As well as campaigns, we were represented in Bolivia during the election campaign, now in Ecuador. We are running a campaign in Turkey against the banning of the third-largest party and the torture of Members of Parliament. We are being active everywhere, as far as we can.   CJLPA : In the introduction you wrote for the Communist Manifesto , you poignantly wrote that a dilemma faces young people today, similarly to that faced in the time of Marx and Engels. The question is: conform to an established order that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself, or oppose it, at considerable personal cost, in search of new ways of working, playing, and living together? In light of this, what piece of advice would you give to young people today who will likely set foot in positions of influence or who seek change?   YV : Make this choice with a clear understanding that you are making this choice. Don’t allow yourself to drift into a kind of lifestyle by default. I’m not a moralising kind of guy. [George] Bernard Shaw, I believe, put it like this: there are people who try to adapt themselves to the world, and there are other people who try to adapt the world to their view of what the world should be like. The latter, of course, means sacrifice. It means that the world is not going to take kindly to being told by you that it should be different. But you’ve got to make this choice consciously, you’ve got to weigh up the pros and cons and know what kind of deal you are ending up with. If you choose to go against the grain, you are probably not going to make a lot of money, you are probably going to have quite a lot of heartache, maybe threats and so on, if you go against the insiders as I say. But at the same time, you will have the immense satisfaction that you are autonomous, that you are not simply reflecting the terrain around you like a chameleon. On the other hand, I’m not going to be sitting in judgment of somebody who says, ‘There’s only one life, I’m not going to be struggling all the time, I want to get a cushy nice job and I want to have the money and the time to go travelling or go skiing.’ I highly respect that too. But make that choice consciously. Don’t simply drift into the default position. This interview was conducted by Teresa Turkheimer, a final-year undergraduate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, working towards an MSc in European and International Public Policy at the London School of Economics in the 2021-22 academic year. Her interests lie in European politics, European Union foreign and security policy, and political philosophy.

Sylvana Tomaselli is a historian and lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where she is a fellow of St John’s College. Her work concentrates on eighteenth-century philosophy and theory, and she has written extensively on Locke, Hume, Smith, and Wollstonecraft. She is Advisory Editor for the Politics section of the first issue of CJLPA .   CJLPA : Please could you start by outlining the main premise of your recent book Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion and Politics  (2020) and the context in which you started writing it? What key factors were involved in inspiring its argument?   Sylvana Tomaselli: I have been teaching and writing on Wollstonecraft for many years, and one concern I have had is the extent to which she is measured against conceptions of feminism—various feminisms—depending on what predominant feminism at any one time is. I’ve never felt happy about this because she wrote about other topics, and it is conceivable that she might not have been as intensely concerned with the condition of women, or at least not in a way that would be subsequently understood as the focus on her thought.   One of the things that I objected to was that everything she said was seen through the prism of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , obscuring A Vindication of the Rights of Men , as well as her other writings. What was most important to me was ensuring some of her works didn’t obscure others. Then the question that I asked myself, given that I didn’t want to apply any labels—I find them unhelpful, at best—was how she would describe herself. Bless her, she does describe herself at least once as a philosopher and a moralist. This seemed to me an accurate representation of the way she thinks and the way she writes.   Having already written a great deal about her, with an emphasis on all the things she criticised—she criticised almost everything—I was rather bored with past ways of approaching her. I started asking myself, ‘What did she approve of?’, and when I realised I did not know this as clearly as I ought to have, I decided to explore what she liked in life. I started with the positives, not the negatives as we often do, and followed the format of her first publication On the Education of Daughters —a set of short essays on various subjects—to look at the things she appreciated. The book then followed this format, more or less.   CJLPA : The book is highly engaged in emphasising the connection between Wollstonecraft’s own biography and her philosophical interests and writings. What would you consider to be some of the most formative aspects of her political philosophy, and what themes were particularly recurring?   ST : I think I’m trying to find terms that are not overly identified with other thinkers, but she’s very much preoccupied by the fact that human beings, male and female, young and old, are not educated in a way which allows them to be what they ought to be. The question is: what did she think human beings ought to be? Well, she thought that they ought to be in a position to develop their bodies and their minds to the maximum. There’s a strong emphasis on the idea of potential. She thinks within a creationist perspective and, while it’s difficult to know the extent to which she adhered to any aspect of Christianity, it’s roughly a religious vision.   For Wollstonecraft, we are creatures with various potentials: physical, mental, as well as emotional. We must be encouraged to allow these potentials to flourish, to be realised. This might be referred to somewhat as an Aristotelian conception—that life is a project and one must have the requisite tools to deal with its opportunities. Still, she likely wouldn’t have thought it directly in these terms, and her focus was primarily directed at the challenges presented to life, as well as the impact of resilience in overcoming this. Wollstonecraft affirms that we have to be strong. We have to be strong of body and mind because in her world—but one might say in the world of most people today—life is very hard.   In relation to that, she argued that some people, particularly women, were not educated to be strong of body and mind. In fact, they were educated to be weak of body and mind—not at all resilient. She regarded this as a contradiction, given society’s expectation of women as mothers and wives. This combination of thoughts, that is, the gap between social expectations and social provisions, provides the foundations to her philosophy.   CJLPA : You highlight the impact of Burke, Rousseau, and Smith in shaping Wollstonecraft’s philosophy. In what ways was she influenced by them, and perhaps more significantly, in what ways did she diverge from their ideas?   ST : Well, she was perhaps most influenced by Burke. By influence, I do not mean that she adopted his views. She was deeply disappointed by his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which indeed caused her and many others who thought Burke a friend of liberty to shift their positions. Equally, because of his criticism of Richard Price, the Dissenting Minister, whom she knew and was close to, she engaged in a very extensive critique of Burke’s work. That shaped her thinking, not because she adopted his views but because she was so determined to undermine him and everything he believed in. So it would be difficult to list all their divergences. That would simply be a reiteration of the whole Vindication of the Rights of Men  and indeed, of Woman . Of these, one could say that she disagreed with what he said on the sublime and the origins of ideas of the beautiful, in which she saw it said that we identify beauty with smallness and weakness, and that women therefore mimic the weak. She also disagreed with his views about the relationship between church and state. Initially, she disagreed with the praise he lavished on the English constitution, though she later modified her views on that. So, one might say that Burke’s thematic shaping of her work was commensurate to her disagreement with him. Interestingly, though, she did use Burke’s language of beauty and the beautiful in her letters from Scandinavia, so one might say she was in conversation with his semantic choices.   With regard to Rousseau, she disagreed with his view of the history of civilisation. She did not think that all had been well, and that the history of mankind was simply one of decline. She certainly didn’t think that the world was perfect at present, but she did think it could be made better. She did disagree very, very strongly with the account of education of Sophie—the protagonist’s female counterpart— in Émile . The education given to Sophie, for Wollstonecraft, is unsatisfactory in its own terms, but she similarly views it as a contradiction of Rousseau’s own premise.   In contrast to Rousseau and Burke, I actually think she agreed with Smith. What she took from him was that the intensification of the division of labour had a very baneful effect on the human mind and needed countering. Smith thought it should be countered by providing a modicum of education to those who would be taking part in menial repetitive work. I don’t think Wollstonecraft would have agreed with this. And this is not a disagreement with Smith as such, but its opposite. Rather than thinking that the intensification of the division of labour was an inevitable feature of the future of mankind, she thought that we should stop this process and ensure that no one is part of an economy such that they are engaged in tedious, repetitive work.   CJLPA : You highlight the importance of artistic performance to Wollstonecraft’s work, notably the impact of creation and the sense that the arts need some kind of ‘training or conditioning’ in order to be fully appreciated. How was this same strand of thought integrated into her political philosophy? Would it be appropriate to characterise it as an ‘Enlightened’ political philosophy, or would you say it is something else entirely?   ST : I wouldn’t call it ‘Enlightened’. Again, it’s a label. There are so many people who are called Enlightenment figures, but they’re very different and it doesn’t really tell us anything. I wouldn’t resort to that. Wollstonecraft did think about art a great deal, and this is because she was worried about imitative behaviour, but on the other hand she understood that education involves a degree of imitation. This was particularly true in relation to nature. Should one imitate nature? Is this possible? What is the relationship between art and representation, and how is the viewer positioned in all of this?   Her position on this was that art should not just be slavishly imitative. It mustn’t be affected or artificial, if you will. Her view of sculpture illustrates this well. She didn’t think that a sculpture of the human figure should be essentially a ‘photocopy’ of the body, and drew instead from her vision of how Greek sculptures were constructed: with a variety of angles and shapes taken from different sides. Equally, there was a sense that sculptures should be larger than life in quite a literal sense. The point of that is that art should effectively convey something. Now, what it should convey will obviously differ depending on the artist.   Wollstonecraft’s conversation on art is not by any means prescriptive. She’s very critical and concerned with its relationship to education. When it came to poetry, she sketched out the difficulties faced by imposing and teaching some of its stricter forms, proposing instead a more open-ended model of the arts in relation to individual growth.   CJLPA : Let’s turn to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , arguably Wollstonecraft’s magnum opus. How did this text reconcile concerns with the legal status of women with a broader vision of humanity and its passion? What roles did imagination play in construing Wollstonecraft’s visions of politics and law?   ST : The Vindication of the Rights of Woman  is notable in part because it says relatively little about rights. At the beginning of the text Wollstonecraft says that she will write a second volume which will consider the rights of women. The hints we have towards this volume contain even fewer, if any, references to law and to the rights of women as legal persons. The notes are mostly about aesthetics and moral philosophy. This is because this is simply what she liked to think about. She liked to think about morality, moral philosophy, and the origins of our ideas—more generally, epistemological concerns. It’s not really a book that aims to reconcile concerns about the legal status, because those concerns are not truly its focus. What it essentially is, is a critique of a number of educational proposals for women and, indeed, for men. It proposes some forms of education and goes into some details about who should be taught when and what, and proposes that schools should be mixed.   The way in which she tries to convince what might be a recalcitrant readership is by showing the contradictions within society’s beliefs about women and its constitution more generally. So as I said earlier, there were strong expectations that women should fulfil their duties as wives, mothers, and neighbours, and she points to the way in which culture does everything it can to undermine women actually fulfilling these duties, and fails to prepare them for what these duties might actually be. Much of the text, then, is essentially holding a mirror to society and saying, ‘Look at women’, ‘Look at men’, and the way in which they negotiate so many aspects of social life. Look at the way people think about marriage, poverty, motherhood, etc, the way they conceptualise these things versus what they want effectively.   In turn, Wollstonecraft argues that if you really want women to be all of this and fulfil their roles and duties, you’ve got to give them their rights and the means to exercise them, and the means to this, broadly speaking, was education. The implication is that, in order for women to be as society expects them to be, men would have to be different. In order for men—and women—to be different, we would have to have a different culture and different conceptions of beauty and the sublime, and virtually a different conception of life on Earth.   So how does that fit in with visions of humanity and passion? Wollstonecraft argued that the current passion was to appear, to shine, to outshine, as evidenced in young women competing for the best match on the marriage market. Her question was then whether that should be the predominant passion when, even if one were a winner in that kind of game, it could ultimately lead to shallow unhappiness. Looks could fade, marriages would fail, feelings change. Wollstonecraft saw women who were now deeply unhappy and had no inner resources to contend with the vicissitudes of life—death, illness, loneliness. So there’s a sense in her work that the passions of her time needed to be changed. Wollstonecraft’s aspirations for men and women could not be remotely fulfilled if passions remained the same. In her view, men and women should not be driven by the desires to be admired or to project a certain appearance, of money or status. There was a need for something more substantial to guide people, both men and women.   CJLPA : Should we view A Vindication of the Rights of Woman  as the starting point for feminist philosophy, or should it be viewed as a continuation of all the ideas and themes that came before it? In what ways can it serve as a point of departure, and how did it perhaps lend itself to a multitude of feminisms? Does it, in some ways, set the tone for certain parts of Western feminism, and how has our present context transformed the way in which it might be read?   ST : Different periods have emphasised different parts of Wollstonecraft’s work, and academic and cultural concerns have shaped which parts are highlighted or actively rejected. I think she will always be an important thinker, but it will depend on what the issues of the moment are. For example, it’s much easier to teach Wollstonecraft now than it was in the eighties. We’re much happier to talk about women’s bodies, the need to be physically strong, issues, looks, and so forth, than we were in parts of the twentieth century. We do not at present denigrate motherhood the way that it was denigrated at earlier stages of the feminist movement. Equally, there was some concern over her views of sexuality. It seemed to some that she was for repressed sexuality. Many scholars looked down on Wollstonecraft’s discussion of marriage and motherhood because this did not fit with the main themes being explored at that time. She is much more of the moment.   She’s also much more of the moment because of her emphasis on resilience. COVID-19 has recentred the word ‘resilience’, whereas just even a few years ago, discussions of it were taken as old-fashioned. Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on that, along with education, are really crucial and contemporary. Her visions are also quite compatible with modern realistic utopian visions of a more decentralised, less consumer-driven world. Her critique of the slave trade and slavery is now very much integrated into debates on the relationship between feminism and anti-slavery, and has been particularly reinvigorated by our current context.   It’s very important to consider too what she reacted to herself. She lived in a politically interesting time and was deeply responsive to what she was seeing. It’s an interesting process: she responded to the world she saw and we, in turn, respond to her based on what is happening in our world. Nothing is independent. Maria Stella Sendas Mendes, the interviewer, is a second-year undergraduate in Politics at Peterhouse, Cambridge, with a keen interest in liberal political theory and comparative political economy. She is a first boat coxswain and former secretary at her college’s boat club, as well as the speakers’ officer for two politics societies at the university. She aims to pursue a career in commercial law.

Jean Tirole is a French economist who specialises in regulation, behavioural economics, industrial organisation, finance, banking, and macroeconomics. Considered one of the most influential economists of our time, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2014 and the CNRS Gold Medal in 2007. He is currently Honorary Chairman of the Toulouse School of Economics (France) and of the multidisciplinary Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, US), and a member of various public policy committees. In 2017, Jean Tirole published  Economics for the Common Good , a general-audience book translated into 14 languages. He is also a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He and MIT economist Olivier Blanchard have recently been appointed by President Macron of France to make proposals to address post-COVID-19 economic challenges. In conversation with Cambridge first-year historian Gabrielle Desalbres, he discusses the management of the COVID-19 crisis and the different paths to economic recovery.   Crisis management   CJLPA : In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many states to implement national lockdowns, resulting in the interruption of almost all economic activity. Whilst the economic recovery from the 2007–08 subprime crisis was still fragile in most Southern European states, it was crucial for governments to intervene quickly and with sufficient means to avoid mass unemployment, social unrest, and widespread company bankruptcies. States are therefore borrowing at unprecedented levels. But how long can this last?   Jean Tirole : How much debt can a country sustain? There is no magic number; a 40% debt-to-GDP may be unsustainable for one country, while another can sustain 200%. It all depends on a range of factors: the country’s fiscal capacity (can it increase taxes further if needed?), its rate of growth (a given debt burden is much lighter in relative terms in a growing economy), the debt maturity (a short-term debt creates more pressure on countries to disgorge money for debt repayment than debt whose repayment is far into the future), the countries’ dominant political constituencies (which shape public policies, as was observed in the case of German exporting industries), or the debt’s ‘home bias’ (the percentage of debt held domestically. The higher this number, the lower the country’s incentive to default: over 90% of Japanese debt is held in Japan, so a sovereign default would amount to Japan’s shooting itself in the foot. By contrast, over half of the French sovereign debt is held by foreign investors).   Another lesson is that measuring debt is highly complex. Indeed, countries (and also regions, municipalities) do their best to hide new debt as ‘off-balance exposures’, despite improvements in Europe in their accounting a few years ago. Off-balance exposures are contingent liabilities which may or may not lead to a future disbursement: guarantees given to social security systems and public enterprises, ECB guarantees though the European Stability Mechanism, collective borrowing under joint and several liability per the European 2020 stimulus package, the securitisation of future revenue, and the use of derivatives (credit disguised as swaps) to conceal indebtedness. Even unfunded pensions, a big item in the pay-as-you-go pension systems of France and many other European systems, are counted as a contingent liability, even though citizens expect their pensions to be paid for sure. All those items are not part of a country’s formal debt, but they are certainly part of the debt.   CJLPA : Can governments keep borrowing?   JT : The pandemics have triggered an extraordinarily high increase in public debt. No-one exactly knows how big this increase will be in the end. This depends on how efficient we will be at ending the pandemic, but it will also depend on the subsequent macroeconomic crisis. In a country like France, many firms have taken on debt from the government (loans, unpaid social security contributions, etc). This debt, combined with the lost earnings during the pandemics, will make it hard for firms to finance new investments or even to survive. Some of it will just be forgone, adding to the state’s indebtedness. Tax revenues will also decline in the recession relative to the pre-Covid situation. And austerity might kill the economic recovery.   The increase in the public debt burden is a concern not only for emerging countries, but also for Southern Europe. The hard question is whether it is sustainable. As we discussed earlier, this depends in particular on whether countries will grow faster than the rate of interest at which they borrow. Can they roll over their debt or do they get in dire financial straits? The rate of growth is likely to be low in the years to come, but so will the rate of interest despite high public debt (high volumes of public debt in principle go together with high yields on them to attract enough savings). Precautionary savings and low corporate investment mean that savings will be high and the corporate demand for funds low, so savers will receive low returns. In theory, therefore, this large increase in public debt may be sustainable, but there are two caveats as is clear from the previous argument. First, the rate of growth must remain above the rate of interest for a substantial amount of time. Second, trust must be maintained and there must be no speculative attack. A country whose economic growth is at 1% can borrow very large amounts at a 0% rate of interest, but if doubts about country repayment emerge, international markets will demand a ‘spread’, say a rate of interest of 5%, and public finances will quickly be drained. Such speculative attacks are self-fulfilling phenomena and may (or may not) occur when the country is highly indebted.   Although one cannot have certainties in the presence of self-fulfilling phenomena, the situation is risky. One possible approach is to avoid contracting output through tight budgetary policies, but assuage the markets’ fear of profligacy by signalling intentions to better manage public expenditures and reorient the latter toward more investment and less consumption. Indeed, investment is what will create the conditions for the sustainability of the debt in the future.   CJLPA : An alternative might be to repudiate the debt…   JT : Two proposals are on the table. The first is to cancel the debts held by the central bank. A letter recently circulated within the Eurozone countries to call for the cancellation of debt held by the European Central Bank (ECB). This makes no sense. We would be defaulting on ourselves, because the ECB belongs to European citizens. Indeed, the ECB’s profit, net of its day-to-day running expenditures, is paid back to the member states’ treasuries. So what we would gain on one side—the alleviation of debt repayment—we would lose—exactly the same sum—on the other side. It is a mere  jeu d’écriture . Erasing the debt held by the ECB could alleviate the disparities between member states but it would consist of a fiscal transfer. Such a project would inevitably be opposed by Germany and the Netherlands whose public finances are strong compared with the rest of the EU, and would heighten the tensions between member states even further.   Some economists make a parallel between ‘coronabonds’ and the erasure of the debt held by the ECB, but the two are different. Member states have agreed to borrow jointly by issuing treasury bonds to cover the increase in public expenditures incurred during and after the sanitary crisis, thus securing common interest rates on the financial markets. But, except for the grants component of the program (which de facto is a set of transfers among countries), each member state in principle has to reimburse its own debt.   The second proposal is a broader default, euphemistically called ‘restructuring of the debt’, which would include among its victims private investors, and not only the central bank. Some of the cost of such a default of course would again be inflicted on the country itself. Italian banks hold a lot of Italian government bonds. A repudiation of the latter would weaken the Italian banks substantially and for some of them would lead to a bailout by the Italian government …   But even if the default had no direct financial impact on the country itself, it would still be problematic. Financial markets would lose trust in the government and refuse to lend to it, or lend at very high rates, for a number of years. This means that the government would have to more or less balance its budget overnight, which it has not done for a while (almost 50 years in France) and would definitely not be advisable in the forthcoming recession.   CJLPA : What about inflation?   JT : Inflation is a concern when a crisis occurs: the glut created by central bank injections of liquidity may in theory translate into inflation, too much money chasing too few goods. However, deflationary expectations and high precautionary savings by households and banks may reduce the spending and counter this natural trend. Indeed, the quantitative easing policies implemented by the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the ECB in the last decade did not lead to inflation and the jury is still out for what will happen this time.   Post-crisis management   CJLPA : You are a specialist in behavioural economics. In that regard, do you think economic agents will change their habits of consumption and lifestyles?   JT : To be honest, we don’t have a good answer to this, only a few hints. Ideally, having learnt about our collective fragility, we should come out of the crisis more prone to solidarity and more eager to substitute investment for consumption to prepare our common future, which includes being more respectful of our environment. But such a reckoning, such an embrace of a more forward-looking society, is not a foregone conclusion.   Part of the reason is that our beliefs are motivated. To give some analogy, we like to think that accidents and illnesses only afflict others, not ourselves or those close to us. This can lead to harmful behaviour, such as driving carelessly or not looking after our health (though this may not be entirely negative since worrying less also improves our quality of life). We dream of a world in which the law would not have to encourage or constrain people to behave virtuously, a world in which companies would stop polluting and avoiding their taxes, in which people would drive carefully even without police officers around. That is why movie directors invent endings that meet our expectations.   Just as in the case of driving and health behaviour, motivated beliefs, by making us more optimistic about the future, may lead to bad policies. Many people are (correctly) convinced that climate change is an existential threat, but they repress these thoughts. Or they believe that they should not have to incur a cost themselves to reduce their emissions: it is up to the others to do so. Or else they hope that the problem will solve itself thanks to phenomenal technological progress. In a similar spirit, nations which have had serious financial problems and have thereby lost their economic independence to the markets and the international official lenders and seen their growth vanish, most often have been oblivious of the incoming threats.   Will we behave differently with others after the crisis? Whether civil, international, or sanitary, wars leave their mark on society. Faced with anxiety-provoking events, people may reconsider their goals in life. Research in the social sciences shows that our individualistic tendencies decline, and we display more empathy. We behave more cooperatively and altruistically and are more likely to join social groups. Much of this new altruism however is parochial—it is directed toward those who are ‘on our side’. But unlike internal wars, external warfare generates common interests that bridge the gaps across groups. In the war against COVID-19, the in-group extends to all mankind and there is no out-group other than the virus, provided that ‘every country for itself’ fails to prevail. If this crisis exhibits the same gap-bridging pattern, this might be good news given the recent trend toward populism, nationalism, and ethnic and religious intolerance.   CJLPA : The current pandemic has resulted in an increased gap between the globalised élites and the left-behinds. How could these growing inequalities be managed?   JT : Inequality, which had already grown substantially (with differences across countries: they have grown much more in the UK and the US than in France), has been exacerbated by COVID. The young and the workers in gig jobs in particular have suffered: many self-employed workers in the service sector have been struggling to make ends meet.   But inequality is not limited to income or labour market inequality. One of the most detrimental forms of inequality is the educational one, as it underlies the equality of opportunity—a really fundamental one. Prior to the sanitary crisis, access to a good education was already highly socially determined. Things have gotten worse during COVID. In France or in the UK, top schools, from primary schools to higher education, have overall kept a relatively normal functioning, while pupils in disadvantaged ones often lost proper access. Covid has reinforced the impact of parents and housing conditions on school performance. This won’t have immediate consequences, but does not bode well for future growth rate and especially for a better access to good jobs, except for the happy few.   CJLPA : What do you think of the idea to implement a universal basic income? Could it be a solution to the growth of inequalities and to the ongoing upheavals brought by artificial intelligence (AI) to the job environment?   JT : Every country has some form of minimum income already, although not for everyone (the RSA jeune  in France for the under 25 has strict conditions). I find the debate rather confusing, in part because of semantic issues. It is crucial to specify how the tax structure would change in reaction to the introduction of a universal basic income. There is no reason to give access to this income to middle-class or well-to-do households, keeping the tax schedule as it is. This would be as senseless as was, on a smaller scale, Trump’s $2,000 COVID check for all. It would be extremely expensive for public finances and would not serve the goal of protecting citizens in dire financial straits. But if one offsets this transfer by altering the tax structure, de facto taking the money back from middle-class or well-to-do households, this is no longer a universal basic income. I therefore imagine that advocates of a universal basic income have in mind social protections and social transfers rather than a universal basic income.   There are two potential issues with a sizable universal basic income: its cost for public finances, that can crowd out other public expenditures such as education or health; and a potential lack of incentives to re-enter the labour force. (There are other issues in the case of very asymmetric incomes within the household—should the state provide the spouse of a well-to-do individual with a minimum income?—which can be solved by making the allowance means-tested.) One should preserve incentives to work. That may imply a combination of a lower minimum wage and a more generous negative income tax ( la Prime d’activité  in France, and the Universal Credit scheme in the UK), because too-important social transfers at the bottom discourage workers from taking poorly paid economic activities. In France, there are cases in which people prefer to be unemployed and to receive social benefits rather than taking a job which would, in the end, be less financially advantageous than not working at all.   AI is bringing new challenges and crucially, it is making the labour market even less welcoming to unskilled people. Here, the universal basic income is not the solution either because work is a source of dignity, a means of social recognition, and a structuring occupation. Places where unemployment rates are high exhibit more social trouble and crime. That is why more governments should be eager to develop continuing education programmes for the unskilled and those whose jobs will be affected by the AI revolution.   Finally, there is the issue of the youths—students, apprentices, etc. There could be support measures that are conditioned on milestones, such as passing the exams—in France university scholarships are too often unconditional. One can also envision low-cost loans to be reimbursed later on (up to some limits, to avoid over-indebtedness), with again the money handed out conditional on progress in the selected track. One of the major forms of inequality among students, together with the lack of information about the skill premium and the good tracks at school and university, is the need for poor students to have a part-time job on top of their studies.   CJLPA : In the UK, there are calls to set up a wealth tax to reimburse the COVID debt. In France, the wealth tax is a recurring source of debate. What do you think of a wealth tax and how effective is it in bringing new sources of revenue for the states?   JT : I am not an expert on this, and will content myself with a couple of remarks. First, regardless of one’s stance on the issue, there is agreement that the recent abolition of the wealth tax in France involved only small amounts of money: the cost of the switch to a tax on real estate wealth is estimated at around 2 or 3bn € per year, about a thousand times smaller than GDP. One may be in favour of or against the wealth tax on symbolic grounds, but the economist has little to say on that. Second, to have a better idea about the implications of a wealth tax, other issues need to be discussed, such as its relationship to other existing taxes such as capital taxation and the inheritance tax, as well as the likely fraction of successful citizens who emigrate to escape the wealth tax, a fraction on which we don’t have good estimates. We don’t have international agreements that would allow us to levy a uniform tax, say, in the West. Most economists concur on the idea that taxing better would be facilitated by international cooperation.   CJLPA : How has the COVID crisis impacted the gap between the Souths and the Norths, within the EU and beyond? Do you think the pandemic has accelerated the divergence between China and the West?   JT : Like traditional wars, the pandemics will redistribute the cards, although we have little knowledge on the magnitudes. So, if you are willing to take the following with a grain of salt, I would expect Germany to strengthen its economic role within the European Union. It entered the pandemic with much stronger public finances than most other member states, and so it could afford spending much more money to protect its firms, which were already more successful than European firms.   At the international level, the monetary and economic hegemon, the US, has suffered a blow through its mismanagement of the pandemic, and a much higher blow still from the Trump years more generally. The policies of the last four years have been very short-termist: denial and inaction on the climate front, loss of international credibility and undoing of the world multilateral order, protectionism, high public spending, tolerance of high inequality. The US has resources though, in particular access to the world’s top universities and a flourishing innovation ecosystem. It also has much leeway in raising taxes to stabilise public finances, and its currency is still internationally dominant.   But China will probably emerge strengthened on the international scene, and it has been massively investing in education and R&D so as to become an innovation powerhouse. The times are long over in which it focused on commodities. Emerging and less-developed countries will be penalised if they don’t gain quick access to cheap and easily deliverable vaccines. This is really a concern. China and Russia have noted this and are using soft power by providing vaccines (they had earlier provided medical supplies) to a number of countries in Latin America, the Middle East, Turkey, Brazil, and the Balkans. Vaccine diplomacy is also used by India with its neighbours. In contrast, the WHO COVAX initiative of vaccine procurement for poor nations has had a slow start.   CJLPA : This pandemic has shed light on the EU and the UK industrial dependency on China and other emerging economies, with all the consequences we know. Some politicians have called for a targeted reindustrialisation. But is it really possible in practice?   JT : Globalisation progressed very rapidly from the seventies to the global financial crisis. This growth is due to a number of factors: technological evolution (the ICT revolution, containers), multilateral and especially regional trade agreements, and the accrual of a new labour force from communist countries (China, Eastern Europe…).   There have been many calls, especially since COVID, to re-localise the value chain. I doubt that this will happen on a large scale. Indeed, the fixed costs of offshoring have been incurred already. They are in large part sunk: the value chains are in place and they are sticky. Besides, the solutions to supply disruption can often be found abroad: even in the health sector, French citizens benefit substantially from their access to foreign vaccines. Relocation is not synonymous with resilience: disruptions in France were linked to China in January 2020, to Europe in April 2020.   CJLPA : Are the benefits of globalisation worth the cost?   JT : There are two distinct issues that are often confounded. The first relates to globalisation in general. Globalisation is overall beneficial, but it creates winners and losers. It provides consumers with access to the best the world has to offer; it frees them from being captive to powerful domestic producers and distributors. It creates jobs in exporting industries. But it also destroys jobs in exposed sectors, as workers in the US, the UK, and Europe have learnt the hard way with the ‘China trade shock’. The new jobs that are being created often are not created in the same region, or necessitate different skills. Furthermore, we have not been very good at protecting workers after they lose their jobs, and also before they do (by reskilling them), again with differences: continental Europe has a more extensive welfare system than the UK and especially the US. The problem, therefore, is that trade has major distributional effects that are salient, more so than technological progress, and lead to bad politics.   Advanced countries must move upmarket. They cannot compete on wages, so they need to go for high-value-added segments, what Germany has done better than anyone in Europe (or what the US has done in the tech and pharmaceutical segments). But this requires substantial R&D, worker training, a better education, top universities, making industrial jobs more attractive in school…   The second issue is that of bringing back home a number of ‘essential activities’ that were offshored in the last 40 years. The goal of such ‘reshoring’ is to protect ourselves from disruptions in the value chain, geopolitically motivated or resulting from a natural disaster. For me, ‘home’ means Europe, which has a more reasonable scale than member countries. Production is often subject to high returns to scale, and member states often do not have the required scale to sustain a competitive industry.   We need to make a distinction between supplies that are essential in times of crisis, and ordinary consumer goods. For the former, the market just doesn’t work. It generates extremely high prices and market power in periods of shortages. Those familiar with electricity systems will note the analogy with power plants which are used for a few hours—ultra peak—a year. For the latter, the diversification of the supply chain is the prerogative of companies.   The issue for public policy will be to resist lobbies, which will seek either protection or preferential treatment in public procurement, claiming that their activity is ‘essential’. It is not clear to me for example that food or supermarkets are part of countries’ sovereignty, especially in Europe which has maintained its agriculture. But of course, military equipment and critical healthcare resources may allow our countries to be less subject to geopolitical blackmailing or be more resilient in case of a world shortage of supplies. My point here is that we need to be flexible. Do we need to relocate or simply constitute stocks to protect ourselves against temporary shortages? Is the supply chain sufficiently diversified across the world? Can we use refitted equipment or 3D printing to make up for a temporary shortage? There is no universal answer and a case-by-case approach must be used.   CJLPA : Are economic activity and action against climate change compatible?   JT : Almost 30 years after the Rio summit, we still have done little to address the truly existential threat of global warming. Solutions exist, and I do not believe in the end of growth, but we must accept some temporary cost in our standards of living. At the opposite end of the spectrum in the debate, I do not believe in the concept of green growth, according to which we could have our cake and eat it too, either. If such a win-win were to hold, why is almost every country in the world concerned about reducing its carbon imprint? Let’s have the courage to say that our planet is worth some effort.   The solution will come primarily from incentives. A sizable carbon tax will induce households, corporations, and administrations to do something serious for the planet: even a relatively small carbon price can have large effects in some cases, as the UK’s exit from highly polluting coal since 2013 demonstrates. To be certain, some of these actors have already started to act because they are afraid that their assets end up stranded when carbon will be phased out totally. But this is not sufficient.   And pricing carbon must be complemented with multiple measures. These include compensation of households who lose from carbon pricing (the absence of compensation played a role in the ‘ gilets jaunes ’ revolt in France), the use of standards whenever carbon   pricing is difficult to implement, a very intense R&D effort, and of course a multilateral approach. ‘My country first’ is a sure recipe for an ecological disaster.   CJLPA : How do you understand the role of the economist in the polis?   JT : Economics is a deeply normative field. To produce a policy framework and try to make this world a better place, it analyses situations in which individual interests are in conflict with the collective interest and how to set these individual interests to music so that they work for the common good.   But public policies require voters’ support, and therefore information about the tradeoffs involved in the choice of specific policies. The second role of economists, and experts more generally, is as conveyors of knowledge. This is not an easy task, as many policies are complex and have unintended consequences. Most academic economists spent their entire life in a research environment and, with their jargon and caution in the presence of complex effects, do not always communicate well. And because, like all scientists, their DNA is doubt, they are not at ease with the soundbites and certainties characteristic of much communication today. In any case, a properly functioning democracy is one in which citizens have sufficient knowledge of tradeoffs. There is a role for acculturation. It is therefore important to make economics widely accessible and even fun, for economics resembles any culture. Like music, literature, or sports, the better we understand it, the more we like it.   Before the Nobel, I spoke to economists and experts in ministries, regulatory authorities, companies. The Nobel was a tipping point. I met quite a number of people, sometimes just unknown people in the street, who simultaneously demonstrated a real interest, but had many questions about what economists do, whether they are useful, whether economics is a science, whether the key challenges we face can be solved. This made me aware of my responsibility to get out of my laboratory, explain my job, and share more of my knowledge, not being a news commentator but simply talking about what economic research has to say about our world.   CJLPA : But experts can also fail…   JT : Experts’ judgment may be impaired by money, friendships, a desire to become a ‘public intellectual’ and occupy the media space, a political agenda. A ‘neutral expert’ is of course a bit of an idealisation. Transparency rules about financial conflicts of interest are useful but necessarily imperfect, and the other forms of conflict of interest are even harder to detect. So in the end, individual and collective ethics—including the obligation of not saying in the public space things one would not stand for in a seminar room in front of peers—are needed. But experts are the best we can avail ourselves of for our democracies to function well. Without them, any argument, any narrative, goes.   In these times of populism, people with expert knowledge are dismissed. Populists exploit the ignorance and prejudice of voters. They fan widespread hostility to immigrants, distrust of free trade, and xenophobia, and play on people’s fears. They excel at exploiting real and justified anxieties about technological change and employment, the financial crisis, the slowdown in economic growth, rising debt, and increasing inequality. No wonder that all over the world their speech often echoes Michael Gove’s pre-Brexit ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’. And of course, populist programmes have contempt for elementary economic mechanisms. Hence, whatever their field of study, experts—provided that they are humble and transparent about what they know and don’t know, that they recognise they are not familiar with everything but have a rather specialised knowledge—are more valuable now than they have ever been. Gabrielle Desalbres, the interviewer, is a first-year undergraduate in History at Trinity College, Cambridge, interested in politics, the arts, and early modern history.

The origins and definition of the word ‘Americanitis’ are opaque at best. It is generally believed to have appeared in medical journals of the late nineteenth century, describing a particular nervous ailment found in the inhabitants of the United States of America. Thought to cause disease, heart attack, nervous exhaustion, and even insanity, Americanitis was seen as a serious threat to the American public. In fact, in 1925, Time  Magazine reported that Americanitis was responsible for claiming up to 240,000—white—lives a year.[1] Nevertheless, with the passing of the Great Depression, its position as a legitimate disease faded in the public eye. Now virtually forgotten, I wish to resurrect it, and propose that it be used to describe a disease that truly does claim lives: white supremacy.   Currently, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines ‘Americanitis’ as ‘excessive nervous tension’ and an ‘enthusiastic or aggressive advocacy of Americanism’.[2] In my reinterpretation, I would like to expand upon this definition to describe Americanitis as a structural disorder which plagues American society at large, as opposed to a disease that merely infects individuals. I will argue it is an entanglement of power, fear, and amnesia that writhes under the surface of the American landscape. The foundation upon which white supremacy stands is a polarised sense of white identity as virtuous yet vulnerable to the supremacy of Black identity, which is regarded as impure and violent. It reinforces hierarchies by instilling a fear—indeed, an ‘excessive nervous tension’—of Black assault on white structures, people, and spaces. It fabricates a link between the upward mobility achieved by Black Americans with the violent invasion of white spaces. What belies its tactical purpose is that it has been repeatedly harnessed by white supremacist hate groups— ‘aggressive advocates of Americanism’—to endorse racial violence as a defence strategy. Paired with mass media and its falsified depictions of Black violence, they seek to use this to justify attacks against Black communities and their spaces.   Mutative expansions of Americanitis have cycled since Reconstruction. In the twentieth century, cinema, television, and the Internet have emerged as effective platforms to spread a fear of encroaching Blackness through representations of architectural destruction. Cinema’s maturation in the early 1910s transformed the Neoclassical architecture of Southern plantations into a symbol of white supremacy and confederate nostalgia. Half a century later, at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, the television was used to associate the Civil Rights Movement to the dread of imminent nuclear annihilation of racially segregated neighbourhoods by Soviet forces. Half a century after that, during the Obama era and the Trump era, the Internet and its social media platforms have allowed an association to be constructed between increased diversity, as well as movements like Black Lives Matter, with social discord and detriment to America’s structures. In this essay, I will explore each of these expansions, and the resulting white supremacist violence, in an effort to show how the through-line of Americanitis has been an essential tool for spreading and maintaining white supremacy. I will conclude with the recent white supremacist attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, to illustrate how this ‘disease’ very much affects the nation to the present day. Fig 1. Lincoln Memorial (Nicolas Canal Tinius 2021, from photograph by Martha Raddatz 2020).

Imagine Boris Johnson ordering the bombing of Edinburgh because the Scots voted for independence in a referendum, or the British Government declaring war against Northern Ireland because it wished to join the Republic of Ireland. Unlike the political dialogue and the search for legal remedies that dissatisfied nations of the United Kingdom utilise to resolve their conflicts, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, who have been natives of the territory for centuries, have been the target of years of demonisation in Azerbaijan for voting for independence in 1991 as the Soviet Union was collapsing. Karabakh was a ‘devolved statelet’ within the Soviet legal system. Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan, has on numerous occasions declared that ‘Karabakh is Azerbaijan’.[1] But one wonders: why would a leader of a country bomb its own people, a region of its own territory? The simple answer is that from a legal perspective Karabakh has never been part of the Republic of Azerbaijan.   On 27 September 2020, Azerbaijan—with substantial Turkish military involvement and thousands of mercenaries from Syria— attacked the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh to ‘liberate’ it from the control of the self-declared Republic of Artsakh. By the end of a 44-day devastating war, the Armenians not only lost control of significant parts of Karabakh, but also the seven regions around Karabakh, which they had controlled since the first Karabakh war in the early 1990s, as a security buffer zone and as a bargaining chip in the negotiations process for final status.   After the recent ‘historic victory’, President Ilham Aliyev declared that ‘there is no Nagorno-Karabakh conflict anymore’. It was resolved militarily. Nevertheless, the conflict—the core of which has been Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and the Karabakh Armenians right of self-determination—remains unresolved. A ceasefire agreement was signed on 9 November 2020 with Russian mediation (2,000 Russian peacekeepers have been deployed in Karabakh), but the absence of a final settlement or a peace treaty keeps this oldest conflict in the former Soviet Union unresolved for the foreseeable future. Baku has portrayed the war as a ‘last resort’ response to decades-long Armenian intransigence to negotiate a settlement. Yet, since 1994, the only ‘status’ the Azerbaijani leadership was willing to grant to the Karabakh Armenians was ‘highest form of autonomy’—more or less similar to the status Karabakh had during Soviet times. Neither self-determination nor independence were ever on Baku’s agenda. Yet the legal and political developments that occurred towards the end of the Soviet Union are still relevant to the final political and legal solution of the Karabakh conflict.