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A tyranny of experts (专家独裁)

A tyranny of experts (专家独裁)

A tyranny of experts

In outsourcing their authority to international institutions, governments are bypassing the democratic process and reducing their publics to simpletons who must be guided by Enlightened Ones.

by Frank Furedi   


Since it became a buzzword in the 1990s, ‘globalisation’ has acquired all the properties of a magical incantation. People use this mysteriously powerful word to explain all the big issues of our time.



Cover illustration by
Jan Bowman



Although it is used promiscuously, the main idea behind the term ‘globalisation’ is that the era of the nation state has come to an end, and national sovereignty no longer counts for very much in our changed world. In the 1990s, globalisation theorists focused on economic arguments. They claimed that powerful global economic factors had rendered the nation state impotent, and governments had become too feeble to manage such globe-sweeping forces. More recently, those who believe that the authority of the nation state has been eroded have focused on international threats: they claim that the big problems facing society – global warming, environmental degradation, super-bugs, terrorism – can only be tackled through international cooperation. Apparently, the traditional state is powerless to deal with these threats. The rise of ‘global risks’ is said to expose the irrelevance of national sovereignty.

Looking back at the debate about sovereignty and globalisation over the past 20 or 30 years, it is astonishing just how swiftly governments and their officials embraced the idea that their institutions were no longer fit for purpose. Today, elected politicians and civil servants frequently say that they are powerless to deal with this or that problem. Many of them seem to accept the need to downsize national sovereignty – that is, their own authority. So, have the forces of globalisation made the nation state irrelevant?

“World market forces have wreaked havoc in the domestic sphere for a long time”

We should note that world market forces have wreaked havoc in the domestic sphere, and caused problems for domestic policymakers, since the early days of capitalism. The unpredictable ebbs and flows of the world economy often threatened to tear apart the integrity of small and weak states. Long before the word ‘globalisation’ was invented, many thinkers and writers recognised that the world economy worked in ways that undermined national policies. So it is unlikely that the contemporary retreat of sovereignty, the argument that the nation state has had its day, is a direct consequence of a quantitative or even qualitative expansion of international economic activity.

Unlike most globalisation theorists, Zaki Laїdi, author of The Great Disruption, does not treat our period as a new era founded on the expansion of the world market. Rather, he notes that ‘globalisation is not just a set of identifiable, measurable processes’ but is a ‘representation of the world’, one which he describes as ‘imaginary’. From this viewpoint, globalisation is a kind of phenomenological tool for making sense of the world. Laїdi argues that ‘globalisation brings out a phenomenology of the present’ – in other words, ‘globalisation’ is more than an economic category; it is also a cultural statement about the times we live in. If globalisation is indeed imagery, a way of imagining the present, then the question must be asked: why has the Western political realm so readily assimilated the theory of globalisation into its arguments and outlooks? Unfortunately, Laїdi’s The Great Disruption does not pursue this potentially rewarding line of investigation; it does not interrogate why Western societies have become overwhelmed by a consciousness of globalisation.

It is not the external impact of international forces, but rather a loss of confidence in the authority and legitimacy of the contemporary state that explains the rise and rise of the globalisation thesis. For some time, the state and public institutions have been suffering a crisis of legitimacy. As far back as the 1970s and into the 1980s, it was clear there was a widespread loss of trust in authoritative institutions in the Western world. Back then, one British observer noted that there was ‘disturbing evidence’ of a decline of ‘public confidence in the police’, which he considered to be a symptom of a ‘crisis of authority’ that affected the ‘most elemental relations of state power and the citizen’ (1).

Lacking confidence in their authority, political elites have started looking for other ways to authorise their actions. For example, they have embraced the authority of science and expertise. With the rise of ‘evidence-based policymaking’, a buzzphrase in Western political life today, traditional electoral authority has been replaced by the authority of the dispassionate expert. Increasingly, national government policies are authorised by external institutions and conventions. Such outsourcing of authority is especially striking in the European Union. Governments that have joined the EU no longer have to take direct responsibility for certain policy initiatives and measures; instead they point out that these policies emanate from a technocratic, supra-national body: the EU. In earlier times, national governments jealously guarded their policymaking processes and prerogatives. Today, they are eager to subordinate themselves to international protocols, and to ‘share’ authority with others. Often, the globalisation thesis provides a political rationale for this outsourcing of authority.

Laїdi is aware of today’s powerful tendency towards outsourcing authority. But he tends to present it in a positive light. Throughout The Great Disruption, he uses terms like ‘redistribution of sovereignty’, ‘pooling of sovereignty’ or ‘sharing sovereignty’. He seems to view the outsourcing of authority as a benign and constructive process. ‘It is the recognition of the principle that authority over a given territory is more effective when it is shared jointly by actors of the same rank, who entrust the responsibility for its exercise to a supranational actor, than when it is confined within a territorialised national space’, he argues. He’s enthusiastic about the ‘process of extension of legitimate authority to actors other than the state’. Yet in the real world, through the very act of being shared, pooled or extended, authority loses its meaning. Authority that is given away is very different to authority that is earned or fought for over a period of time.

“‘Evidence-based policymaking’ elevates the expert over the elected politician”

Although it is frequently justified in terms of powerful states becoming more humble and open to new ideas, the ‘sharing of authority’ is fundamentally anti-democratic. Outsourcing authority is a top-down procedural project, which breaks policymaking from democratic accountability. By coming together with other elites in international institutions, governments become more accountable to one another than to their own citizens. In recent years, it’s become commonplace for governments to avoid responsibility for certain policies by claiming that the policies were imposed on them by their ‘institutional obligations’. Laїdi describes this process as follows: ‘The sharing of sovereignty is akin, then, to a kind of joint ownership, from which it is always more difficult to extricate oneself from co-tenancy.’ This metaphor of ‘co-ownership’ is, of course, a caricature of true sovereignty. It represents a new form of sovereignty that is divested of any popular pressure or accountability.

Both the critics and supporters of the EU frequently raise concerns about its formal and bureaucratic nature. However, it is no accident that the EU governs in such a slow, clunking fashion. The EU, like other international institutions, was specifically created with a view to bypassing democratic and popular pressure. As Laїdi concedes, ‘Europe is thus, fundamentally, a normative construction that draws, depending on the particular case, on standardisation, harmonisation, voluntary convergence of incentives’. Voluntary for technocrats and policymakers, perhaps, but not for the European masses. As Laїdi notes, in the EU the ‘high degree of normativity leads, at times, to a certain formalism of procedures, which generates a democratic deficit’. Yet for Laїdi, this erosion of democratic accountability is a small price to pay for a form of governance that is based on ‘globally responsible’ rules, and which is reflective of ‘global civil society’.

Today’s celebration of global civil society is motivated by a loss of faith in the public, and by a search for new forms of authority that are insulated from popular pressure. Ultimately, the shift of authority from the national sphere to the global sphere represents the outsourcing of authority to the expert. According to Laїdi, the main source of legitimacy of international civil society – that is, non-governmental organisations and formal international institutions – is its expertise. But there is a big problem with governance through expertise: it renders political choice redundant.

Laїdi fails to note the anti-democratic implications of expert authority. He even hints that such authority is not ‘prejudicial to the sovereignty of the state’. However, international civil society invariably prefers the view of the expert to the view of the democratically elected representative. ‘Expertise is an element of power wielded by the knowledgeable against decision-makers’, says Laїdi. A political drama in which the tension is between the expert and the decision-maker has little room for ordinary people. Instead, the public is expected simply to accept and live with the wisdom of decisions taken by experts and government regulators. Expert consensus, rather than public consensus, is the driving force of new forms of governance.

The main strength of The Great Disruption is that it shows how the outsourcing of authority to the expert and to international bodies leads to today’s peculiarly risk-averse and regulation-obsessed policymaking. Laїdi argues that the new, post-national governing bodies are drawn, almost spontaneously, towards talking up environmentalism as the principal political issue of the twenty-first century. He believes there are three reasons why the issue of the environment is being relentlessly politicised in Europe. ‘First, it is one of the fields that best lends itself to the production of new norms and standards’, he says. Second, it is a field where the ‘political construction of Europe can acquire greater legitimacy’. And third, ‘the environment is the pre-eminent area of shared sovereignty’. Thus, it is in this domain, in the area of the natural environment, that the outsourcing of authority to the scientist, expert and international organisations brings its greatest rewards.

“Expert consensus, rather than public consensus, underpins today’s political outlook”

Unfortunately, Laїdi’s valuable insights into political sociology are undermined by his tendency to place faith in enlightened experts. He seems to be imprisoned in the contemporary technocratic imagination, which views the expert as the solution and the people as a problem. As a result, you will find little sympathy for populism or public debate in The Great Disruption. Instead, the argument seems to be that, because our world is so complex, we must place our allegiance in international civil society rather than in the people. Populist movements are dismissed out of hand. Laїdi believes that they arise ‘out of the desire to reduce the complexity of the world to simple issues’. Apparently, the simpletons in these populist movements must not be trusted in our ever-more complex globalised world.

There is another way of making sense of the trends discussed by Laїdi. The voluntary relinquishing of sovereignty by European elites does not show that they are high-minded, forward-looking, enlightened internationalists. Rather, it is an attempt by an insecure oligarchy, which senses that its authority is feeble and falling apart, to disavow full responsibility for its actions. That is why governments today feel so much more at home hanging out in international civil society than they do engaging with their own ‘populist’ public.

Frank Furedi’s Invitation To Terror: The Expanding Empire Of The Unknown will be published by Continuum Press in November. He will be speaking at the Battle of Ideas festival in London on 27-28 October.

The Great Disruption, by Zaki Laïdi is published by Polity Press (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

(1) Samuel Beer (1982) Britain Against Itself, W.W.Norton & Company, New York, p.218

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专家独裁

弗兰克•菲雷迪 著 吴万伟 译 

刊发时间:2007-10-11 15:05:30 光明观察


  政府在把权威外包给国际机构的过程中,越过民主程序,将公众贬低为必须接受专家指导的傻瓜。

  “全球化”自从1990年代成为时髦词汇后,已经成为充满魔力的化身。人们使用这个具有神秘力量的词来解释我们时代所有重大问题。

  虽然“全球化”这个词被胡乱地使用,其背后的主要含义是民族国家的时代已经走到尽头,国家主权在我们变化了的世界已经不再重要。在1990年代,全球化理论家关注的是经济理论,他们声称强大的全球经济因素已经让民族国家丧失能力,政府在处理全球性问题时显得无能为力。最近,那些相信民族国家权威已经被削弱的人把注意力集中在国际威胁上:他们宣称世界面对的重大问题如全球变暖、环境恶化、超级病毒、恐怖主义等只能通过国际合作才能对付。显然传统的国家在对付这些威胁时力不从心。可以这样说“全球威胁”暴露出国家主权的无足轻重。

  回顾过去20年和30年关于主权和全球化的辩论,让人吃惊的是政府及其官僚是如何迅速地拥抱政府已经不再适应新要求的观点。当今的民选政治家和公务员常常说他们在处理这个或者那个问题的时候无能为力,他们中的许多人似乎接受国家主权减弱的需要,也就是削弱他们的权威。可是,全球化的力量已经让民族国家成为可有可无了吗?

  “世界市场力量已经长时间给国内领域造成大破坏。”

  我们应该注意到自从资本主义早期开始,世界市场力量已经给国内领域造成巨大破坏,给国内政策制订者制造了问题。世界经济的难以预测和起伏不定常常威胁、破坏弱小国家的完整性。在“全球化”这个词被创立之前很久,许多思想家和作家都认识到世界经济是在以破坏国家政策的方式运行。所以主权的暂时性撤退是不大可能的,那种认为民族国家有前景的观点,是国际经济活动的质量甚至数量上扩张的直接的后果。

  和众多全球化理论家不同,《大分裂》(The Great Disruption)的作者扎基·拉迪(Zaki La?di)没有把我们的时代看作建立在世界市场扩张的基础上的新时代。相反,他注意到“全球化不仅仅是一套可以辨别出来的可以测量的过程,而是他描述的“想像”的“世界的代表”。从这个观点看,全球化是个认识世界现象的逻辑工具。拉迪认为“全球化产生了目前的现象学”,换句话说,“全球化”不仅仅是经济上的范畴,它还是关于我们生活的时代的文化命题。如果全球化确实是形象,是对现在的想像,那必须提出的问题是:为什么西方政治界这么乐意接受全球化理论的观点和世界观?不幸的是,拉迪的《大分裂》并没有这个潜在的有价值的调查,它没有询问为什么西方社会被全球化的意识所吞没。

  不是国际力量的外来影响,而是当代国家在权威和合法性上的信心的丧失解释了全球化主题的兴起。有一段时间,国家和公共机构一直遭遇合法性的危机。早在1970年代和1980年代非常清楚的就是大众对西方世界权威机构的信任的普遍丧失。但是一个英国观察机就指出有让人担忧的证据显示公众对警察的信心的下降,他认为这是影响“”国家权力和公民最核心的关系”的“权威危机”的症状。

  因为对自己的权威性缺乏信心,政治精英开始寻求其他的途径来为自己的行动赋予权威色彩。比如他们拥抱科学和专家意见的权威性。因为当今西方政治生活中最时髦的词汇“以证据为基础的决策”的兴起,传统的选举的权威已经被没有激情的专家权威所替代。国家政府决策越来越多地授权外来的机构和规范来处理。这种权威性的外包在欧盟显得特别突出。加入欧盟的国家不再需要直接为某些政策倡议和措施负责,相反它们指出这些政策来自技术专家组成的,超级国家组织—欧盟。在早期,国家政府坚决地捍卫自己政策制订的过程和特权。现在则迫切希望把自己归属于国际协议的下面,与其他人分享权威。当然,全球化的主题为这样的权威外包提供了政治上的合理性。

  拉迪认识到当今强大的权威外包趋势,但是他倾向于从积极的方面描述它。在整个《大分裂》中,他使用的术语是比如“主权重新分配”“主权联营”或者“主权共享”等。他似乎认为权威的外包过程是有利的和建设性的。他说“这是对把权威实施的责任委托给超越国家的人员共同分享比权威被局限在国家领土范围内的人可能更有效的原则的承认”。他对“合法性权威延伸到国家之外的人的做法”充满热情。但是在现实世界,权威一旦被分享、联营和扩张,就丧失了它的意义。权威的放弃和权威的获得或者在一段时间内争夺权威是截然不同的。

  “以证据为基础的决策”让专家凌驾于民选政治人物之上。

  虽然“权威的分享”让大国变得更加谦恭,对新观点更加开放,似乎是可以被合理化的,但是它从根本上说是非民主的。权威外包是颠倒了的程序工程,破坏了决策的民主的责任追究制。政府通过结合国际机构中的其他精英,变得更加对这些机构负责而不是对自己的国民负责。在最近一些年,常见的情况是政府推卸自己的责任,声称这些政策是“国际义务”强加在他们头上的。拉迪用下面的方式描述了这个过程:“主权分享类似于共同所有权,一旦进入,再把自己从合伙中抽身就往往非常困难。”这个“共同所有权”的比喻当然是真正主权的模仿。它代表了可以摆脱大众压力和责任追究的新式主权。

  但是欧盟的批评家和支持者常常提出对其形式和官僚本质的担心。决非偶然的是,欧盟就是以这样低劣和笨拙的方式管理的。欧盟像其他国际组织一样,就是为了绕过民主程序和大众压力而成立的。正如拉迪承认的,“欧洲从本质上说是规范的建造,在标准化、程式化、充满奖励的自愿融合基础上建造起来的。”这或许是技术专家和政策制订者的自愿,但决非欧洲群众的自愿。正如拉迪注意到的,在欧盟,“高程度的规范性有时候导致程序化的模式,从而成为民主的负债。”但是在拉迪看来,这种对民主的责任追究制的破坏是不得不付出的微小的代价,换来的是建立在“全球性负责任的”规则基础上的管理,它是“全球公民社会”的反映。

  当今对与全球性公民社会的赞美来源于对大众失去信心,想通过寻找可以避免大众压力的新形式的权威。最终,权威从国家领域向全球领域的转变代表了权威外包给专家的做法。按照拉迪的说法,国际公民社会——也就是非政府组织和正式的国际机构——的合法性的主要来源是它的专家机构。但是通过专家来管理存在一个大问题:它让政治选择成为多余的东西。

  拉迪没有注意到专家权威的反民主含义。他甚至暗示这样的权威“能避免国家主权产生的偏见。”但是,国际公民社会毫无例外地更喜欢把专家的意见而不是民主选举出来的代表的意见。拉迪说“专家意见是知识用来对抗决策者的权力影响因素。”专家和决策者紧张关系的政治剧本对于普通人没有多少空间。相反,公众被期待简单地接受和生活在专家和政府管理者采取的决策的智慧里。专家的共识而不是大众的共识成为新形式的管理的驱动力。

  《大破坏》的主要优势在于它显示权威外包给专家和国际机构如何导致当今特别明显的避免风险和沉溺规范模式的决策。拉迪认为新的、后国家的管理机构几乎自发地把环境保护作为21世纪主要的政治议题。他相信环境问题成为欧洲不断的政治议题有三个原因:“第一,它是最容易产生新规范和标准的领域之一,第二,它是“欧洲的政治建设能够获得更大合法性”的领域,第三,“环境是分享主权的最主要领域”。因此,正是在自然环境这个领域,把权威外包给科学家、专家、和国际机构能够带来最大的回报。

  “专家共识而不是大众共识决定了当今政治的外观。

  不幸的是,拉迪的对于政治社会学的宝贵观点被他把信心放在开明专家身上的做法给破坏了。他似乎陷入当今技术专家治国的误区,把专家看作解决方法,而把大众当作问题。结果,你在《大分裂》中将发现他对民粹主义或者大众辩论的很少同情。相反,其观点好像是因为我们的世界这么复杂,我们必须把忠诚放在国际公民社会而不是人民身上。民粹主义运动应该被抛弃。拉迪相信它们根源于“把复杂的世界简化为简单议题的愿望”。显然,民粹运动中的简单化倾向是越来越复杂的全球化世界中不可信赖的东西。

  还可以从另外一个方面认识拉迪讨论的话题。欧洲精英主动放弃主权并没有显示他们是思想高贵的、或者向前看的、开明的国际主义者。相反,这是缺乏安全感的寡头精英的尝试,他们认识到自己的权威性陷入衰落和分崩离析之中,因而要为自己的行动推卸全部的责任。这就是为什么当今的政府跻身国际公民社会中比面对本国大众感到更自在和舒适的原因。

  译自:“A tyranny of experts” by Frank Furedi

  http://www.spiked-online.com/ind ... books_article/3853/

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