Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 1 | Scholarship for Social Change, page 2 (low bandwidth)

Once on the books, such laws can be difficult to live with or to repeal, Donohue reports. Even when there is little evidence of terrorism—she found only four occasions of violence in Northern Ireland between 1922 and 1972—the mere possibility of violence feeds a popular preference for safety over civil rights. This is especially true if the loss of civil rights falls heaviest on minority groups, such as Catholics in Northern Ireland. The civil rights campaign that exploded in the province in the late 1960s grew out of the uneven application of extraordinary state powers. The campaign led to the suspension of Northern Ireland’s parliament in 1972 and reimposition of British authority—and yet most of the counter-terrorism laws were reintroduced. Donohue says that political expedience often keeps counter-terrorism laws alive; for to repeal them requires the claim that some level of violence is acceptable or that terrorism is no longer a threat. The former is politically untenable, and the latter impossible to prove.

In general, Donohue theorizes that inappropriate state responses to terrorism run the risk of triggering a “counter-terrorist spiral,” which involves “inroads into civil liberties, the alienation of minority groups, the radicalization of extreme elements, the estrangement of foreign governments, the generation of an increase in terrorist threats and the increased effectiveness of terrorist acts.” But she has more questions than answers. When is a terrorist crime properly considered an act of war? At what point in a conflict do certain measures exacerbate the situation and at others mitigate the tension? What sorts of countermeasures are most effective for different types of threats? And what is the tradeoff, if any, between security and freedom for liberal, democratic states faced by terrorist challenge? “These questions are at the heart of what I’m working on,” Donohue says.

Surprisingly, not many other scholars are studying counter-terrorism; most research has focused on terrorist organizations and their activities. “Her work is defining a new field,” says Dorothy S. Zinberg, a founding member of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. During 2000 and early 2001, Donohue was at the Kennedy School as a teaching and postdoctoral fellow. There she conceived of an ambitious project: analyzing international responses to terrorism, developing a model of counter-terrorism’s impact and making recommendations for how democracies might balance security and freedom. To support her research, Carnegie Corporation named her a Carnegie Scholar in June 2001. Donohue’s project, scheduled for completion as a book manuscript in late 2003, will provide what she calls a taxonomy of counter-terrorism. It will provide a detailed history of terrorism in a half-dozen countries as well as their political, social, economic and military responses. She will assess which actions diminished terrorism, short-term and long-term, and which actions had no effect or made the situation worse.

While conducting the research, Donohue is based at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. As an acting assistant professor in the university’s political science department, she is incorporating the research into her course, “Security, Civil Liberties and Terrorism.” She says teaching helps her process and organize the research into lectures, which will become book chapters, and that the collegial atmosphere in the center and the department provide an “ideal” intellectual environment, one that is both supportive and challenging.

After the terrorist attacks on September 11th, Donohue began tracking the government’s response and believes the U.S. is overreacting domestically and abroad. “My concern is that we don’t need to go through all the learning pains that afflicted Europe in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. We know the predictable patterns that liberal, democratic states fall into when confronting terrorist challenges. Simply borrowing counter-terrorist measures from these states isn’t a good idea unless we understand what effect they had. If we’re going to take a page out of their history, we need to read the whole book.”

Michael J. Sandel
On a winter break from graduate school, Michael Sandel set off for the south of Spain with a book bag of philosophy and, in a way, never returned. “I became immersed in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I returned to Oxford and took seminars in political philosophy and haven’t really emerged since then,” recalls Sandel, now 49, a professor of government at Harvard University and a political theorist in his own right.

Sandel says he has been interested in politics since growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but became immersed in philosophy when a scholarship took him to Oxford. His planned two-year program at Oxford stretched into four years, with Sandel teaching politics during his last year and obtaining a doctorate in 1981.

Then that rarest of rarities occurred: his dissertation was published and became a classic in the field. In Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, published by Cambridge University Press in 1982, Sandel explored the philosophic roots of liberalism and criticized its development into a doctrine that not only detached individual rights from considerations of the common good, but also separated political discussions from those on moral and religious issues that animate democratic life. In this form of liberalism, government is expected to provide a neutral framework of laws so that citizens can pursue the good life in any way that individuals define it. But Sandel argued that democratic politics cannot be neutral on moral questions; instead, it should nurture the civic virtues that inspire citizens to seek the common good.

The book helped shape the communitarian movement, which has, since the 1980s, sought to temper the American obsession with individual rights with a stronger sense of civic responsibility for the common good. (Sandel, for his part, resists the communitarian label, finding fault with some of its positions.) Reprinted many times, with a new edition in 1998, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice has now been translated into seven languages. The tension between individual and community is of worldwide interest, and every country comes from a different perspective; in Japan, for example, many readers are interested in introducing more individuality into a culture some consider to be too community-minded.

After Oxford, Sandel joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor, became an associate professor in 1983 and, in 1999, was named a Harvard College Professor in a special recognition of his teaching skills—best exemplified by his undergraduate course, “Justice,” which has to meet in the university’s Sanders Theater because it attracts 700 to 800 students each term. The course relates the classic works of Aristotle, Kant and John Stuart Mill to contemporary issues such as affirmative action, hate speech, gay marriage and income inequality. Modestly, Sandel attributes the course’s popularity to the students, who are provoked and inspired by class debates to sort out their own moral and political positions. Among his other professional activities, Sandel was recently appointed by President George W. Bush to the President’s Council on Bioethics, which is now focusing on the issue of cloning.

Sandel’s second book, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Belknap Press), appeared in 1996, and was featured as a cover story in The Atlantic Monthly. Another measure of its impact was the publication, a few years later, of Debating Democracy’s Discontent (Oxford University Press, 1999), a volume with more than a dozen scholarly responses. Sandel’s book struck a chord because it linked his first book’s philosophic inquiry to a new interpretation of the American political tradition. In digging into American political history, Sandel happily discovered that our “public philosophy,” or mainstream political tradition, did not always embrace a liberalism that is narrowly focused on the rights of the individual. Among speeches and writings of prominent thinkers from the time of the American Revolution to World War II, Sandel found evidence of a rival public philosophy—one that he called civic republicanism because of its greater emphasis on promoting civic virtues for the common good.

But after the World War II, Sandel says, the civic republican public philosophy was crowded out by rights-based liberalism and its two offshoots: an egalitarian liberalism—with mostly Democratic adherents who call themselves liberals—that advocates a nonjudgmental government but, inconsistently, makes exceptions by also championing selected values like tolerance and fairness; and libertarian liberalism—with mostly Republican adherents who call themselves conservatives—that advocates for a small government that lets individuals use the free market to define the good life for one and all. Sandel warned that both egalitarian and libertarian liberalism give inadequate weight to the obligations of citizenship and the claims of community. He called for an American revival of civic republicanism.

Next page: “Democracy needs certain public spaces and shared experiences that give citizens of all socioeconomic backgrounds a common ground.”—Michael J. Sandel

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