It’s Time to Articulate a Mission Grounded in Human Rights Principles[1]
Cherian George, Hong Kong Baptist University
https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-98565-6, PDF
American-dominated Political Communication’s inability to globalise has been so chronic that I’ve argued elsewhere that its networks and publications should rebrand themselves as doing “Western” Political Communication. They should own their persistent provinciality to spare the field further confusion. Colleagues committed to global perspectives can then invest in other networks that have proven more hospitable to non-Western and comparative studies of communication and politics (George, 2022).
I know that this opinion, which I expressed at the 2022 ICA Annual Conference, is easily misinterpreted as a call to decouple the field from what are often called “Western” political values. I welcome this chance to explain why this normative issue is quite separate. Just because liberal democracy as a political system fails to describe most countries outside of the West does not mean liberal democracy, as a set of values, has limited applicability.
A discussion about the field’s normative paradigm is timely. I already see academics using decolonisation discourse to object to journal manuscripts or conference presentations critical of the human rights records of China and India, for example. Having lived most of my life under illiberal governments (in Singapore and Hong Kong), I can smell such apologias for authoritarianism a mile off. I started my working life as a journalist when officials in Singapore and neighbouring countries were championing “Asian Values” to defend their (objectively autocratic) regimes against (objectively annoying) American triumphalism at the end of the Cold War. The Asian Values campaign lost steam after the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s, and when South Korea and Taiwan — two culturally Confucian societies — confounded its advocates by enthusiastically embracing liberal democratic values.
Today, we see a resurgence of counter-democratic rhetoric. China, India, and other emerging powers are challenging the West’s status as the oracle of universal values. To this end, there is plenty of bad-faith citation of decolonisation tropes. Chakravartty and Roy (2023) sounded the alarm, noting that calls for de-Westernisation map “seamlessly onto the spaces of right-wing ethno-majoritarian or authoritarian populist politics in many parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa”. This trend has penetrated academia, with Global South academics triggering charges of Western intellectual imperialism against incoming criticism of their states. Many Western peers sensitised to diversity and inclusion are not sure what to make of all this. Some, conscious of their white privilege, are trying to keep an open mind, which is always a good idea if coupled with healthy scepticism. The challenge for Political Communication, as I see it, is how to throw out the bathwater of Western ignorance and arrogance while keeping the liberal democratic baby.
It may help to think of the globalisation of scholarship at three levels: what we study; how we study it; and why. I, of course, want to see our field diversifying what we study. A scholar should be entitled to write about an election campaign in Indonesia, for example, without being told by a journal to justify this choice or to explain its wider relevance if the editors do not expect the same from someone studying the American case. I’m even more excited by the prospect of diversification in how we study the subject. Political communication’s frameworks, concepts, and methods were developed and refined in the exceptional context of liberal democracy. In many ways, they are ill suited for studying the non-West (Mitchelstein 2023; Waisbord 2023). For example, religious authority has played a much bigger political role in much of Asia and Latin America than in the US and Western Europe, so scholars of the former are more illuminating on this subject than contemporary Political Communication is. Respect for methodological diversity is also a must. Political communication’s bias for sophisticated quantitative methods helps generate strong conclusions about very narrow questions, which may be apt in a crowded American field where much is already known; but most of the rest of the world needs answers to much bigger questions than fine-grained quantitative analysis can address.
It’s on the “why” question — why we should study Political Communication — that I am wary of diversification. This is where I part company with peers advocating normative diversity in political studies as part of a de-Westernisation agenda. I fear that freeing the field from common normative moorings will leave political critique floundering in the zero-gravity emptiness of moral relativism. I favour the search for core, universal standards that allow us to make value judgments about the quality of political institutions and practices around the world.
I can understand why the academic establishment may find it tempting to suspend moral judgments. We are in an age of unprecedented domestic and global polarisation. Interconnectivity and interdependence have outpaced the cultivation of common ground. Many elite universities in the United States, tired of being pulled this way and that in highly divisive debates, are adopting a position of institutional restraint. They will try not to make statements on controversial public policy issues. However, absolute neutrality is a nonstarter. They would have to make exceptions for situations where they are directly impacted. In practice, this might mean universities as such take no position on a distant war, but still speak up against threats to their freedom to conduct independent research or their ability to keep a diverse student body safe, for instance. Drawing such lines is a contentious exercise, but unavoidable. If the institution does not articulate its core values, others will do it for them.
Similarly, academic disciplines must think about what they stand for. These values could have been left implicit when most relevant stakeholders were on the same wavelength, but they need to be articulated (and possibly refined) in a more diverse and contentious intellectual environment. Some sub-fields would find this quite straightforward. In health communication, for example, I doubt anyone would object to a values statement about empowering people to improve their health (as opposed to, say, serving the corporate interests of big pharma). In journalism studies, I can think of no colleague anywhere who would dispute that journalism is normatively distinguished from public relations and marketing by an ethos of public service that is best expressed when it has some autonomy from power, or words to that effect. Journalism studies could adopt this as an article of faith.
As for Political Communication, the field should have no qualms dedicating itself to the development of political communities based on the “inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family”, the recognition of which is the “foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. These are words enshrined in the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948) and which have inspired human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which all but 18 states have signed; China is among its signatories). They hold up freedom and equality — the twin pillars of democracy — as fundamental political rights for all.
It’s easy to be cynical about these principles, which are honoured more in the breach than the observance. But let’s not underestimate their revolutionary elevation over the past century as globally relevant norms. I like how economist and moral philosopher Amartya Sen (1999) puts it in an essay on democracy as a universal right. It’s not that everyone everywhere accepts it, but that everyone everywhere has good reason to accept it. The core idea, that nobody is “perfect enough to rule unaccountably over their fellows” and that everyone needs to be able to respond to the harms of abusive power, is “wisdom of global value”, says professor of politics John Keane (2022: 201) in his history of democracy. He notes how this principle proliferated after 1945, making it “no longer a white-skinned, Western affair”; it underwent remarkable “indigenisation… in environments radically different to the earlier parent electoral democracies of Western Europe, Spanish American and the United States” (Keane 2022, 158–9).
Even in controlled societies such as China where citizens are indoctrinated from childhood to accept autocratic rule, I doubt many individuals would say “no” if asked: do you think you should be free to decide how to live your life, and if your society should treat you justly? It’s when people are asked if they think others should be free and equal that they demur. People easily embrace democratic values for themselves; reciprocal recognition of rights is the hard part. This of course why authoritarian populists get mileage from attacking minorities and why surveys and election results show that not all citizens of even liberal democracies are fans of democratic government. But whether you call it the third person effect or plain hypocrisy, such doublespeak is no basis for collective life, nor defensible as normative guideposts for scholarship.
Democratic principles have achieved paradigmatic status, and Political Communication and its parent disciplines need not be apologetic about treating them as default, commonsense normative grounds for scholarship to build on. This does not mean that they cannot be questioned, of course. Any discipline should remain radically open to challenge. But, following Sen (1999), those who agree with democratic principles need not waste their breath explaining why. The onus is on writers who disagree to justify their position.
My suggestion that universal human rights principles provide strong normative foundations for the field has important caveats. Applying such values to a large and complex society through various institutions of representative government has always been an exercise fraught with contradictions. There are also on-going debates about how to balance rights. Even among liberal democracies there are disagreements about how different political rights — free speech, privacy, freedom from discrimination and hate, and so on — should be prioritised. We should not assume that any existing constitutional order has already settled these issues, or that the US, for example, is the benchmark against which other democracies should be measured.
Even granting such caveats, colleagues championing the Global South may have misgivings about elevating human rights values to the commanding heights of the field. It would tend to place countries they care about at a competitive disadvantage compared with most Western democracies. I can only shrug and question whether national prestige has any place in this discussion. Besides, as I have said about and to my own government in Singapore, they can’t have it both ways. Either liberal democracy is an alien, un-Asian idea, in which case they should not get prickly about their democracy ratings — it should matter as little as where they stand in an American Football league table. Or their democratic performance is something they and their citizens care about, in which case they should try harder if they are falling short.
Provincialising democracy as Western does a disservice to the many local human rights defenders I have met across Asia who work in extremely challenging and sometimes dangerous contexts. Their job is difficult enough without academics echoing government propaganda that they are serving a foreign agenda. The theory is also somewhat offensive because it is reminiscent of arguments once deployed by European imperialists against restive native populations — you are culturally and developmentally unsuited for democracy so don’t ask for our liberté, egalité, fraternité. Fortunately, a succession of peoples outside the West, starting with Haitians and including my forefathers in India, chose to embrace democratic values as universal rights, using these appropriated principles as ideological weapons in their struggles against colonial oppression. Some contemporary citizens of these now-independent countries seem willing to give up ownership of these universal rights their ancestors fought hard for, trading that tradition for nothing more than the vainglory of having a retort of some kind when their states are criticised as undemocratic.
Another major reason why some colleagues may resist the adoption of the normative position I advocate has less to do with democracy as such than the toxic baggage in the West’s democracy promotion efforts. It reeks of hypocrisy. It’s a tragic coincidence that some of the societies with the strongest domestic civil and political rights protections and the biggest voice to promote such values on the global academic stage are also states with histories of imperialism, discrimination against people of colour, and shocking contempt for non-white lives abroad.
After the election of Donald Trump as their 47th President, most of our American peers probably have fewer illusions about their moral authority as champions of democracy. However, even if Democrats had succeeded in defeating Trump, the American democracy they were trying to save was hardly an advertisement for universal values. The rest of the world cannot unsee American complicity in Israel’s year-long genocidal war on Gaza. Nor is it possible to take the liberalism of American academia seriously as a moral enterprise after watching how university administrators have treated students and faculty when they try to use their precious freedoms to speak for the weakest and most vulnerable.
This is the ideological landscape on which Political Communication will need to find its normative footing. Perhaps the contentiousness of these times may provoke more rigorous thinking about what the field is for and why it matters. What should be clear is that Western scholarship cannot claim moral or intellectual leadership merely by virtue of operating out of a liberal democracy. It can try to lead, but few scholars of the Global South will follow. But, as I’ve tried to argue, dismantling Western hegemony shouldn’t entail diluting core human rights values. A decolonised Political Communication can meet the needs of our times and grow global relevance if anchored in universal democratic ideals.
References
Chakravartty, P. and S. Roy (2023). Questioning “De-Westernization”. Political Communication Report Fall (2003)(28). http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/refubium-41239
George, C. (2022, May 27). If Political Communication is Western in all but name, why not just rename it? The case for provincialising the field [Roundtable Presentation]. International Communication Association Annual Conference 2022, Paris. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4127203
Keane, J. (2022). The Shortest History of Democracy (Collingwood, Australia: Black Inc.).
Sen, A. K. (1999). Democracy as a Universal Value. Journal of Democracy, 10(3), 3-17.https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.1999.0055
Mitchelstein, E. (2023). Imagined Academic Communities: Three Observations about the De-westernization of Political Communication. Political Communication Report, Fall (2023)(28), Article 28. https://doi.org/10.17169/refubium-41234
United Nations. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
Waisbord, S. (2023). De-westernizing Political Communication: Why? How? Political Communication Report, Fall (2023)(28). https://doi.org/10.17169/refubium-41232
Cherian George is Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University’s School of Communication. He researches media freedom and censorship, intolerance, polarisation and hate.
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