Homelessness and the Hungarian Story of Criminalisation

Victoria Sztanek

In a bid to control poverty with punitive measures, the Hungarian government recently criminalized one of the most visible manifestations of homelessness: ‘sleeping rough’. A recent October 2018 Constitutional amendment banning sleeping on Hungarian streets, has attracted much domestic and international criticism on the basis of human rights violations and infringement of the European Pillar of Social Rights. However, despite recent attention, such discourses, which place the blame for poverty on the individual, have been present for many years in Hungarian politics. The path to the criminalization of homelessness was laid decades ago.

Since the late 1980s, the Eighth District of Budapest, Józsefváros, has been considered one of the capital’s poorest neighbourhoods, though like many areas in Budapest, it has undergone gentrification in recent years.[1] The former mayor of Józsefváros, Máté Kocsis (who was also responsible for addressing homelessness on a national level) launched a public order campaign in 2011, banning ‘dumpster diving and rough sleeping’  in conjunction with a wider local law that forbade living in public spaces in Budapest.[2] Unsurprisingly, hundreds of homeless people have subsequently been detained for routine daily actions like ‘living in public space, public urination, consumption of alcohol, picking through garbage and begging’.[3] In April 2012, the Hungarian Parliament went further and made living and keeping one’s belongings in public spaces illegal, effectively furthering the ban of visible homelessness.[4]

The Hungarian Constitutional Court, in an effort to uphold the values of human dignity and property it had established during a period of judicial activism in the early 1990s, declared this ‘anti-homeless’ legislation unconstitutional, annulling it in November 2012.[5] In response, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán amended the Constitution, allowing local authorities ‘the right to decide whether homeless people can live permanently on their streets or not’, reflecting both Orbán’s increasingly authoritarian leadership, and the diminishing authority of the historically progressive Constitutional Court.[6] As a result, many local authorities passed decrees in line with Orbán’s anti-homeless agenda. This agenda was justified by the aims of protecting ‘public order, public security, public health and cultural values’. With a two-thirds majority in its support, the amendment passed in 2013, and it has subsequently been scrutinized by international watchdogs as an indicator of a deteriorating democracy.[7]

An example of ‘sleeping rough’ in Budapest’s Fifth District, taken November 2016. Image provided by the author.

This punitive anti-homeless legislative agenda belongs to a broader political and media discourse regarding ‘the “undeserving” and delinquent poor populations’.[8] The media tends to report on ‘cases where homeless individuals are allegedly involved in gruesome crimes’, portrayals which dehumanize them, and marginalize them from ‘mainstream’ society. [9] Eoin Devereux highlights this discourse of differentiation in media where sensationalist reality TV shows such as now-cancelled ‘The Big Chance’, have homeless contestants compete in a style akin to that of the TV show ‘Big Brother’. Devereux’s research demonstrates how the homeless of Budapest are portrayed as addicted to alcohol, gambling and smoking, and in need of moral salvation, which can be attained only by owning up to their own personal laziness.[10]

The emphasis on explaining ‘poverty and exclusion in terms of individual weaknesses’ not only contributes to a culture inopportune for cultivating real solutions, but also reflects a certain continuity with socialist times, when citing structural reasons as an explanatory factor for homelessness was forbidden as a critique of the socialist system, which should have rendered social inequality obsolete. [11] Socialism proposes principles of collectivism and a more equal society, with a remit that involved the central distribution of public housing and nationalization of apartment buildings.[12]  In the hands of Hungary’s twentieth-century leaders, this programme also included significant limitations on personal freedoms, including criticisms of the state. Instead of state responsibility, personal deviances were blamed for social inequality and homelessness, and in the 1950s poverty was declared non-existent.[13]

During this period, however, government programmes for social housing and work were set in place, including shelters to accommodate workers. Once social welfare policies were employed, alcoholics or individuals deemed to be living idly were subject to punitive measures.[14]   These punitive measures included work therapy institutions that resembled a jail workhouse as well as ‘deportation to correctional facilities’. Individuals charged and ‘arrested for the ‘dangerous avoidance of work’ faced fines and compulsory work.[15]

The transition from socialism in the 1990’s included an economic crisis that left many people unemployed and homeless. Inequality in the distribution of wealth also widened, where privatization afforded already ‘wealthy and, above all, educated people’ with ‘better housing at the beginning of the privatization wave’[16]. The political transition saw a re-stratification of society and made homelessness and poverty more visible, as the Hungarian economy suffered. The legacy of socialism and the thirty-year-old transition into capitalism is therefore incredibly relevant to understanding the context of the housing crisis today. Now, similar policies and ideas are used under Orbán’s increasingly authoritarian reign, where the aesthetics of presenting an orderly country are paramount and freedom of speech suffers.

In 2011, Hungary introduced a similar, highly controversial compulsory work program that forces long-term unemployed individuals, including some homeless, to work at a rate lower than the minimum wage.[17] In 2019, the gap between public workers earnings and the minimum wage widened when the government froze wages for the third year in a row. The program contributes to a flawed statistic of decreasing unemployment, which the Hungarian government cites to insist poverty is decreasing substantially.

While an average of 200,000 participants are considered ‘employed’ under the public works scheme, these numbers don’t capture the lived experience of those in poverty nor the full picture of employment. It also acts as a scapegoat for the government, as the unemployed technically have the opportunity to find employment through these work programs. However, it does not address practical barriers like mental health issues, addictions and physical disabilities. Additionally, those who earn such meager wages still live in poor conditions and while they may not be so visible on the streets, they are at risk of dying in their homes due to the effects of poverty. Moreover, the statistics used to justify the reduction of poverty highlight the glorification of a program that is punitive and exploitative in nature.

The leading grassroots advocacy organization for homelessness and housing rights The City is For All (A Város Mindenkié), reports that there were almost 600 criminal cases between 2013 and 2016 involving homeless people arrested for ‘sleeping in public spaces’, with the majority resulting in the ‘warning of mandatory public work’. On the ground, those subjected to punitive measures are not offered viable or practical alternatives to the housing insecurity they face. Institutional responses to homelessness have mostly consisted of emergency solutions and an ineffective shelter system, neglecting to focus on exit strategies or the diverse needs of the homeless. Shelters that do exist are usually dangerous, causing many people to avoid them and further contributing to the visibility of people living on the streets.[18]

Efforts to decrease the visibility of people living on the streets have been extended by the October 2018 Constitutional amendments. These amendments strip away the choice of individual municipalities to criminalize the act of habituating public premises in their jurisdiction. In effect, if those identified by police refuse to go to shelters or enroll in the compulsory work programme, they can face jail and have their belongings confiscated.

A “homeless” camp in Hungary. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

While homeless people are being pushed outside of visible spaces to help create an image of order on Hungarian streets, social justice groups like A Város Mindenkié are visible in their active petition against the government.  In the media, organizations that serve the 1,200 homeless in Budapest bring awareness to the issue of poverty, despite a government that strives to hide it.[19] Perhaps offering a glimmer of hope for more liberal politics, a recent October 2019 city election saw the victory of Gergely Karácsony as mayor of Budapest. Karácsony provides an encouraging alternative to the far-right and increasingly authoritarian reign of Orbán’s Fidesz party. Karácsony has proposed a plan to improve homeless shelters before winter approaches, and his election invokes a cautious sentiment of hope in the capital of a nation that has seen the encroachment of authoritarianism and a backslide in democratic values for decades.

The tendency to blame individuals and their ‘poor choices’ for their current socioeconomic positioning is a phenomenon not unique to Hungary. It is however, important to note that Hungary is the first nation where criminalizing homelessness is ‘explicitly enacted in the highest law of the nation.’[20]  It is also a country with inadequate and short-term institutional solutions for homeless people. When coupled with punitive legislation, poverty is reinforced and reproduced, punishing an already vulnerable population. These punitive measures coincide neatly with blaming individuals and their personal choices to avoid a critical analysis of the system, like under socialist times, structures and policies that contributed to their circumstances. The public works program and the criminalization of homelessness operate as an expression of power and authority, to keep statistics of unemployment favorable as well as to ensure tidiness and order on Hungarian streets.

Victoria Sztanek is a writer with an M.A. from the University of Toronto, Centre for European, Eurasian and Russian Studies. She has worked in the due diligence industry and is a Certified Anti Money Launderer. She  specializes on topics such as financial crime and is passionate about the environment and social justice issues. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

References

[1] Marton Czirfusz, Vera Horvath, Csaba Jelinek, Zsuzsanna Posfai, Linda Szabo, ‘Gentrification and Rescaling Urban Governance in Budapest – Jozsefvaros’, Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics, 4, no. 1, (2015), pp. 62, 72.

[2] Eva T. Udvarhelyi, ‘“If we don’t push homeless people out, we will end up being pushed out by them”: The criminalization of Homelessness as State Strategy in Hungary’, Antipode, 46, no. 3, (2014), p. 821.

[3] Ibid., p. 821.

[4] Ibid., p. 823.

[5] Deena A. Zakim, ‘Housing over Handcuffs: the Criminalization of Homelessness in Hungary’, Suffolk Transnational Law Review, 37, no. 1, (2014), p. 146.

[6]  Orbán’s amendment is cited from Zakim, ‘Housing over Handcuffs’, p. 148. Historically the Hungarian Constitutional Court has played a pivotal role in the development of democratic practices through the country’s transition from socialism. Legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele notes how since the early 2000s, structural changes have immobilized the Court’s independence and effectiveness, with recent rulings showing ‘a strong tendency to defer to the new government’. Kim Lane Scheppele, ‘Guardians of the constitution: constitutional court presidents and the struggle for the rule of law in post-Soviet Europe’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 154, no. 6, (2006), p. 1786.

[7] Ibid., p. 163.

[8] Czirfusz, Horvath, Jelinek, Posfai, Szabo, ‘Gentrification and Rescaling Urban Governance in Budapest – Jozsefvaros’, p. 72.

[9] Udvarhelyi, ‘“If we don’t push homeless people out, we will end up being pushed out by them”’, p. 820.

[10] Eoin Devereux, ‘Thinking Outside the Charity Box: Media Coverage of Homelessness’, European Journal of Homelessness, 9, no. 2 (2015), p. 268.

[11] Eva T. Udvarhelyi, “‘You People Would Keep on Dwelling’: Twentieth-Century State Responses to Homeless in Hungary from Above and Below,” Journal of Urban History, 41, no. 4 (2015) p 700.

[12] Bence, Rita and Udvarhelyi, Eva T, ‘The Growing Criminalization of Homelessness in Hungary – A Brief Overview,’ European Journal of Homelessness 7, no. 2 (2013), p. 134.

[13] Udvarhelyi, ‘”You People Would Keep on Dwelling”’,p. 700.

[14] Housing Rights Watch. “Mean Streets A Report on the Criminalisation of Homelessness In Europe” http://www.housingrightswatch.org/sites/default/files/Mean%20Streets%20-%20Full.pdf p. 103 (accessed January 9, 2020).

[15] Győri, P. (2010) Fedél Nélküli Emberek (Részlet).

[16] Judit Bodnar, ‘”He That Hath to Him Shall be Given”:  Housing Privatization in Budapest after State Socialism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 20, no. 4, (1996), p. 631.

[17] T.E. Budapest, ‘Public works in Hungary – Do as the Chinese do’, The Economist http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2011/06/public-works-hungary (accessed December 20, 2015).

[18] Udvarhelyi, “‘If we don’t push homeless people out, we will end up being pushed out by them’, p. 816.; Zakim, “Housing over Handcuffs”, p. 138.

[19] Than, Kirsztina, ‘Sandwiches and Hope for Christmas’, December 11, 2019, Reuters https://www.reuters.com/article/us-christmas-season-hungary-bikers/budapest-bikers-hand-out-sandwiches-and-hope-for-christmas-idUSKBN1YF1RB (accessed December 11, 2019).

[20] Udvarhelyi, “‘If we don’t push homeless people out, we will end up being pushed out by them’”, p. 824.

Neo-Pentecostal Power in Brazil – Democratic Decay and the “Purification” of Politics

Rafael Antunes Padilha

Jair Messias Bolsonaro, a former Army Captain of the Brazilian Army, was recently elected President of the largest Latin American nation. Wielding the motto ‘Brazil above all, God above everyone!’, Bolsonaro has achieved infamy worldwide due to his bigoted, xenophobic and openly homophobic statements. On top of that, he reached the newspapers headlines over his anti-conservationist approach towards Brazil’s natural resources.

Recent investigations uncovered an active stance of the Executive in Chief, that ended up providing institutional backup to cattle and soy farmers and their eerie intentions of setting the Amazon rainforest in flames, in what has been called in Brazil ‘a day of fire‘. The country’s current trend of far-right populism and attacks against minorities has thrown Brazil into the international spotlight, sparking public debates over human rights and democratic decay. Despite claiming to be Catholic, the president typically peddles violent discourses to his most hardened supporters: the neo-Pentecostal Christians.

Neo-Pentecostal churches are a relatively recent episode in Brazil’s religious history. Pentecostalism emerged in the country throughout the 1970s and has had a steady membership growth of 7.9% a year; Neo-Pentecostals constitute 65% of all self-proclaimed evangelicals.[1] The rise of Neo-Pentecostal denominations in the country brought a new political force into the mainstream, in the form of several political parties created directly by, or with support from churches in the last twenty years.

Bolsonaro today is perceived by pastors and followers as a catalyst of change in a corrupt Brazil. Bolsonaro’s middle-name is Messias (Messiah) and his social media followers nicknamed him ‘the Myth’. Such a movement evokes the historical phenomenon of messianism in Brazilian politics, which has seen two civil wars attempt to suppress messianic popular figures in the countryside (namely the Canudos War in the 19th Century and the Contestado War in the 1910s).[2] The figure of a savior that shall free the poor masses from their sorrow and finally fulfill the national destiny of glory is an ever-present topos in the Brazilian popular imaginary.

In the present day, there is a profusion of different churches, denominations and eclectic liturgies in the local Pentecostal spectrum. No central authority has been established to bring coherence to the Evangelical Neo-Pentecostal movements’ desires and aims. However, there are among the notorious Televangelical denominations a comprehensive set of successful evangelising tactics that are similar in shape or form.

Figure 1. The multimillion Universal Church of God’s Kingdom Temple of King Solomon in Sao Paulo State. Source: Wikipedia

The Neo Pentecostals in Brazil differ from the Charismatics in the USA by their successful business model that produces strong geographical capillarity. Brazilian neo-Pentecostal megachurches not only manage to organize political parties but have also reached the highest echelons of the State’s administration, from army generals to rank-and-file nominees of ministerial cabinets. Today, local churches like the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God  (IURD in the Brazilian Portuguese acronym), founded by the Rio de Janeiro born Edir Macedo in 1977, and the International Church of God’s Grace, acquired diplomatic passports for their pastors through their connections in the Ministry of Foreign relations, as well as privileges to expand their operations beyond the country’s borders.

As founder of the IURD, Edir Macedo is the precursor of the neo-Pentecostal movement in the country in its present form, and also the architect of the managerial culture within the religious structures. Macedo is vocal in his defense of the ‘Gospel of Prosperity’, according to which, the church’s mission is to obtain happiness and material gains in the earthly life for its flock. A huge component of the church’s activities lies in encouraging generous monetary donations from the followers of the church, which it presents as one of the ways to fall into God’s grace. Those financial gifts are commonly named tithes and can collectively amount to millions of dollars or even to real estate properties.

Figure 2. Edir Macedo, owner of the Universal Church. Source: revistaforum.com.br

Such economic power afforded the IURD a powerful institutional leverage during the 1990s and 2000s that has been built, brick by brick, with the support ofthe center-left Workers’ Party. This alliance between the social democratic left and the largest evangelical groups to pursue electoral victories, ended up opening the gates of the public debate to more conservative discursive repertoires, like the rise of homophobic discourse in Brazil. The former head of the Executive branch of the government for the Workers’ Party, Luis Inácio (Lula) da Silva – a Catholic whose views were influenced by his brother, a friar in the Theology of Liberation – saw in the evangelical demographic an opportunity to advertise outside the oppositional, elitist mainstream media to a more left-leaning administration.[3] Using pastors and TV channels under evangelical ownership, the Workers’ Party managed to advertise its governmental agenda to the poor masses.

With such a formidable institutional framework boosting their religious infrastructure, the largest evangelical churches developed a robust model of conversion and congregation that allowed them to project power overseas, facilitated by the leniency of the State. From Africa, Europe and North-America, the IURD alone now has a foothold in 180 countries and claims to have 12 million active members. In order to amass large numbers of followers, they tend to focus on marginalized and disenfranchised groups (economically and racially).

In the cases of Brazil and Mozambique, religious traditions such as Candomblé (and other animist expressions) are cast as scapegoats for all the evils and hardships that people face in their lives. I witnessed this phenomenon when accompanying a relative in one IURD church service. On the ‘Altar’, the pastor summoned a family from the region whose son was addicted to drugs. Socio-economic problems like violence, substance abuse and poverty are then treated as the work of Exú, an important and traditional figure for religions of the Yoruba matrix in Brazil. The young man, according to the pastor, had attended a ritual in a terreiro (a religious space for Afro-Brazilian beliefs) because of a girlfriend who forced him to partake in ‘demonic’ Candomblé practices and rites. That contact allegedly let the evil spirits take his soul and led him to use cocaine and other substances.

This approximation of different beliefs to evil is neither a novelty, nor usually authentic. These ‘testimonies’ or rituals of cure and exorcism are very often a ‘make-believe’ played by hired actors that appear in different churches or televangelical shows. In a not so remote past, Our Lady of Aparecida (Patron Saint of Brazil and one of the Saints with the largest group of followers in the world) was also associated by IURD with the devil and pointed out as the ultimate cause of all Brazil’s underdevelopment and suffering. The clear message of Pastors and evangelical churches’ leadership is to demonize any competitor in the religious marketplace.

The heavy emphasis of IURD churches on planned parenthood (here meaning the usage of birth control pills, imposition of one single child for each couple and going further to support abortion in some cases) and the tithe can be explained as an attempt to convert marginalized individuals into economic agents for the church, that being, a way of controlling the followers’ family budget expenditures in order to keep the money flow to the institution as strong and stable as possible. The tithe is a source of direct income transfer from the members, like a pension, that enable the religious organisations to design services to improve the quality of living of many of the churches’ members.

In a country like Brazil, where despite the average global real increase of wages above inflation has improved millions of peoples’ lives, the economic toll in middle-income families is still expensive. The high costs of private healthcare and education are the main destination of families’ incomes, considering the poor quality of the public services available. In that manner, the church (IURD) sees larger families as a challenge to their campaigns for large sums of tithes. If one has too many mouths to feed, by the end of the month they will not have enough to give as a contribution to the church.

For the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chauí, the mixing of the spiritual and the economic, and the heavy focus on the entrepreneurial ideology of late capitalism, have guaranteed the survival of the Gospel of Prosperity. According to the IURD’s ‘Theology of Neoliberalism’, the world we live in is the final work of God, and we should therefore manage it in order to unleash prosperity and wealth to all.

One aspect usually disregarded by the Brazilian Left (represented by the Workers’ Party and Socialism and Liberty Party, the main left in Congress), is that the church has successfully empowered commonly marginalized communities with this ideology. With the economic growth of the 2000s, the harnessing of those groups by the evangelical denominations – through the proliferation of small devotional spaces and an evangelical-only network of clothing, food, and furniture, accompanied by the decline of the Catholic Church that refuses to further its reforms and compete in equal standards with the new Christian options in the religious market – produced a circular exchange of money and goods strengthening the new religious organisation itself. Whereas Catholics tend to support more charitable and donation-driven practices, evangelical denominations dedicate resources and efforts in developing a welfare system for their followers under a tight and authoritarian grip of the church’s leadership.

However, the economic boom that Brazil experienced during the years of the  Workers’ Party government (2002-2016) was depicted by the churches not as a direct consequence of a robust democracy and progressive policies, but rather as the result of strictly individual-centered efforts. In a broader sense, whilst the Left decided to relax their grassroots strategies and working-class commitments of the past, even departing from their alliances with progressive Catholics, Neo-Pentecostal televangelical groups used the Left’s traditional anti-hegemonic strategies to conquer a bigger flock. Garages were converted into small temples in every favela, and pastors began to occupy a central role within social-movements (trade unions, prison community rights organisations and anti-poverty groups) and institutions like the notorious Landless Workers’ Movements.

On the surface, the doctrine of ‘brother votes for brother’ implemented by the Evangelical coalition subsumes national politics into a theocratic system that disables the secular qualities of the Brazilian State. However, in reality, the strategic positioning of Neo-Pentecostal candidates (usually bishops), comes as a necessary step in the acquisition of financial resources or tax deductions for the churches’ benefit. The last stage of the political neo-Pentecostal movement pursues the steering of the presidential nomination for the Supreme Court of Justice. Success in this objective could enable ultra-conservative Brazilians to appoint someone who supports their votes as a judge under the Confessional Practice, which is the conscious decision of a policy-maker or judge to make decisions based on the bible rather than the constitution and liberal civil rights.

This demographic shift in the judiciary could result in the blockage of the relatively progressive current nominated bench of the Court, that during the last years criminalized homophobia, approved the bill on same sex marriage, and is about to vote on the decriminalization of cannabis. The most dangerous aspect of this intertwining of Church and State is the presumption of a fixed Christian morality above all. The dynamics of liberal democracy are based upon the balance of forces and different opinions meeting halfway. If the laws, customs and desirable behaviours are written in stone by some kind of ‘enlightened’ authority, diversity is then rendered as deviance. The new social-political landscape of Brazil poses a threat not only to the rules of the democratic game, but also to other religious minorities or dissident voices within Christendom.

Rafael Antunes Padilha is a Bachelor in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo, with majors in Sociology, Political Science and Cultural Anthropology. His bachelor’s thesis was in Rural and Political Anthropology, focusing  on the economic dynamics of Italian Settler’s descendents in Brazil. Last August, Rafael graduated from the Pennsylvania State University in a Masters in Labour and Global Worker’s Rights (with a thesis on the Oaxacan labor movement and their struggle for broader democracy) after a brief period working in South America with Corporate Social Responsability, and freelance research for organisations such as the ILO. Currently, he is preparing to start a second masters, this time in Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Porto.

References

[1] P. Semán, ‘¿Quiénes son? ¿Por qué crecen? ¿En qué creen?: Pentecostalismo y política en América Latina’, Nueva Sociedad, 280 (2019), pp. 26-46.

[2] For more on the War of Canudos, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0205w53; For the Contestado War, see https://www.imdb.com/videoplayer/vi3716720153 and T.A. Diacon, Millenarian vision, capitalist reality: Brazil’s Contestado rebellion, 1912–1916, (Duke University Press, 1991).

[3] The ‘Theology of Liberation’ is the embracing by some Roman Catholics priests in Latin America of Karl Marx’s critique of Capitalism. According to this theology, the Church should have a ‘preferential option for the poor’ and first satisfy their physical, social and economic needs before attending spiritual necessities. For more information, I cannot recommend enough the book Introducing Liberation Theologyby Leonardo Boff and his brother Clodovis Boff.

Blog Round Up!: March-April 2019

Tom Shillam

Round Up March/April 2019

Britain, Protest, Colonialism

As the beleaguered British government lurches from one constitutional fracas to another, it seems apt again to begin with Brexit. Despite the appearance of torment – in a recurring theme for this month’s round up – the political actors involved are perhaps behaving more rationally, for better or worse, than imagined. Aaron Ackerley notes the disturbing proximity of leading ‘Brexiteers’ to ostensibly independent think tanks and brings to light a deeper history of hapless British politicians forming influential pressure groups behind the scenes.

The British government has overlooked a recent petition to revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU, which garnered over 6 million votes. But are petitions as contemporary and ineffective as we might think? As the 200^th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre approaches, Richard Huzzey and Henry Miller contend that petitioning acts ‘as a tool for building a broader campaign and an enduring instrument for popular politics beyond and outside elections’. Ruth Mather explores the contributions of female reformers to early 19^th-century protest, emphasising their ingenuity in negotiating with a ‘tyrannical government’ which was claiming to ‘offer paternal protection to its citizens’ while actually behaving violently towards them.

Shirin Hirsch sets this violence within a broader imperial context, reminding us of how black revolutionary Robert Wedderburn drew comparisons between atrocities abroad and the oppression of the working class at home. Similarly, on the anniversary of another colonial atrocity – the Amritsar Massacre of 13 April 1919 – Oliver Godsmark remarks on how political actors today continue to treat such violence as an aberration rather than a means through which to initiate difficult conversations about Britain’s past.

Anti-Colonialism, Decolonisation, Memory

A number of writers have considered how scholars of different backgrounds and disciplines can help begin these conversations. Eva Schalbroeck – perhaps offering a model for historians of other regions – explores how students of Belgium and the Congo can write revisionist and challenging histories which help establish ‘more culturally diverse post-colonial relationships’. Meg Foster highlighted the problems that can result from the uncritical portrayal of the histories of indigenous societies. In her review of an exhibition of Oceanic art held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last year, Foster argues that such exhibitions often index indigenous artworks as objects of intrigue, distracting us from reckoning with their continued affective importance for the producers.

Speaking of the imperial mind and its affinity for ‘exotic objects’, Tom Harper of the University of Surrey studies how China has been variously depicted in the Western world as ‘a uniform mass with little or no individuality and prone to extreme cruelty’ and more recently as a neo-colonial power comparable to ‘the Great Powers of the Past’. Today, China is using its growing geopolitical clout to try and reshape these depictions.

Mark Fathi Massoud and Hussein Omar both offer hope in the face of authoritarian retrenchment. Omar shows how uprisings which occurred across North Africa and the Middle East 100 years ago comprised not isolated protests but an early ‘Arab Spring’ in which local actors exchanged ‘slogans, ideas, ideals and personnel’ in resisting European imperial intrigue. His emphasis on how history might have turned out differently had alternative ideas entered the ascendancy is replicated by Massoud, who demonstrates that a democratic conception of Sharia – which comprises ‘a broad set of values and ethical principles’ rather than the rigid code of law implied by Islamophobes – predominated among many politicians and intellectuals in early postcolonial Sudan.

Reason and Resistance

For those more interested in modes of political control in authoritarian states, in December Elena Goukassian penned a fascinating piece in Lapham’s Quarterly about the associations between time and power. She argues that the standardisation of time zones from the mid-19^th century onwards has provided a means for authoritarians across the world to assert control over populations and manoeuvre towards important geopolitical allies.

As she suggests, as political power consolidated within the state, actors on the periphery resisted. Quan Nguyen offers some context for the recent attacks of prominent politicians on schoolchildren protesting about climate change, reminding us that the ‘understanding that emotions must be tamed for the sake of rational discourse…stands in a long tradition of Western philosophy’. Victoria Brooks goes into much greater detail about this Cartesian tradition, emphasising its gendered character, and calling for new philosophies which do not ‘value ideas over bodily sensations’.

Of course, developing new philosophies of life in an increasingly authoritarian and xenophobic global political climate demands intercontinental networking. On this note, it is worth rounding off this blog with the movements and arguments of two very different but equally determined internationalist activists in the mid-20^th century. Samuel Zipp argues that Wendell Willkie – a little known Republican nominee for President in 1940 who later travelled across Africa and the Middle East observing the spread of nationalist movements – engineered an egalitarian and anti-imperialist vision of international order which is worth re-examining today. Carolien Stolte looks into an anti-imperialist actor with greater affective and symbolic reach among decolonising African and Asian peoples – African-American singer and activist Paul Robeson. Despite the US State Department preventing him travelling over a period of 8 years through the 1950s, by 1958 Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was calling for ‘a widespread celebration or Robeson’s sixtieth birthday’. This was thanks to the ingenuity of countless Global South activists and internationalists many of whom were inspired by Robeson’s music. Their refusal to be bowed by censorious states and a global atmosphere of growing political cynicism perhaps offers hope today.

Tom Shillam is PhD student at the University of York who holds a Departmental Scholarship from the Department of History. His research considers how mid-20^th century South Asian intellectuals synthesised anti-authoritarian ideas of their own with those of writers elsewhere to propose a different decolonising politics to the dominant developmentalist dogmas of the time. Catch him on Twitter @tomshillam.

An Emotional Break-Up: Historical Pathos Rhetoric in the Brexit Debate

By Liz Goodwin

In an impassioned speech to assembled campaigners in Leeds on the eve of the EU Referendum, Ukip leader Nigel Farage tried to convince his audience to #Vote_Leave. His argument was not new to the campaign as a whole – focused on encouraging ordinary people to make a stand against the lazy European elite – but the way in which he phrased his case was even older.

In suggesting that ‘this is our chance as a people to get back at a political class that has given away everything this nation has ever stood for, everything our forebears ever fought for and everything we want to hand to our children and grandchildren’, Farage employed one of the most deep-rooted and consistently utilised rhetorical talents – that of pathos.^[1]

In this roaring speech, intended to invoke and elicit feelings of patriotism, love and loyalty to family, and anger at a sense of disenfranchisement and anti-elitism in his audience, Farage used language to appeal firmly to the heart – yet his linguistic mode of doing so is inherently linked to a pan-European intellectual tradition going back millennia.

Both campaign sides were characterised by emotional rhetoric: the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition were frequently criticised for lacking passion in presenting their Remain case.^[2] Leave financial backers like John Caudwell of high street retailer Phones4U denounced ‘Project Fear’ on the opposite side, branding such claims made by experts as ‘subjective’ and ‘hysterical.’^[3]

Even campaign tweets were aimed at provoking emotional responses – in an analysis of language used in both camps’ social media, ‘fear words’ relating to immigration and the economy were shown to be demonstrably more frequently in use than across Twitter as a whole.^[4]

I’ve just started work on the use of pathos as a rhetorical tool in Reformation debates in sixteenth-century Germany, and it strikes me as appropriate, following a campaign so imbued with emotionally-charged language intended to move the voter to action, to examine the context of this tried-and-tested rhetoric device. Emotional rhetoric is something that, somewhat ironically, connects politicians and political regimes across the spectrum – it’s a linguistic tool that works for the authoritarian and the liberal.

Pathos was theoretically recognised and utilised by some of the greatest European minds of the Medieval world. Aristotle established it as one of the three modes of persuasion: alongside ethos (a kind of charismatic authority on behalf of the speaker) and logical explanation (or proof), it was the emotionally-charged pathos, appealing to something in the listener, that was the most highly valued.^[5]

In a highly Farage-esque move, Cicero advised the orator ‘to prefer emotion to reason’, so that the audience is ‘so affected as to be swayed [by emotion]… rather than by judgement or deliberation. For men decide far more problems by hate, or love, or fear, or illusion… than by reality.’^[6]

Abbess Caritas Pirckheimer frequently employed pathos in her writings

St Augustine would justify this rhetoric concept for the Christian Middle Ages, stating that emotionally-laden language appeals were key to ‘moving the minds of listeners, not that they may know what is done, but that they may do what they already know should be done.’^[7] He even used pathos to explain that fundamental, Medieval theological issue, the Fall of Man – it was an emotional appeal from Eve that caused Adam to be persuaded, rather than that of logical reason.^[8]

Throughout the Middle Ages, pathos can be seen within preaching, aimed at moving the audience through emotionally-loaded language to be better Christians. In his thorough and influential preaching ‘manual’, near-anonymous fourteenth-century writer Robert of Basevorn defined the role of Christian sermonising to be to move the listener ‘to meritorious conduct.’^[9] Fire-and-brimstone preachers like Savanarola in Florence would frequently incite audiences with apocalyptic visions of Godly judgement if they didn’t change their ways – surely the most emotive of language is that which threatens Hellish punishment to listeners.

During the religious upheavals of the Reformation, Abbess Caritas Pirckheimer utilised pathos throughout her Journal, detailing what happened to her convent amidst Lutheran attacks. She was one of many active, Classically-inspired, highly educated Humanists to engage with this emotional language as a form of defensive Catholic argument; her work aimed to move the reader to empathy and compassion for the plight of those in the religious life, threatened by new Protestant doctrine.

The use of emotional language in the construction of political argument, then, is nothing new. Nor is it the preserve of the right, or those with more ‘authoritarian’ worldviews. Whether this altered the vote outcome or not – and many media think pieces have claimed one way or the other – the fact remains that the moving rhetoric that broadly characterised the Brexit debate was built on the linguistic practice of pathos.

In light of Michael Gove’s assertion that ‘the British people have had enough of experts’ in the run up to the EU Referendum, it seems worth pointing out that the language used and the arguments utilised were actually built on centuries-old, highly intellectual, philosophical and, crucially, pan-European rhetoric tradition. Then again, our charismatic and Classics-educated new Foreign Secretary could probably have told you that already.

Liz Goodwin recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Sheffield on the impact of reform on female monastic communities in sixteenth-century England. Find her on Twitter @ElizMGoodwin.

[1] Nick Gutteridge, ‘Nigel Farage: Vote Brexit to take UK back from ‘contemptible’ Cameron and his rich cronies’, The Telegraph, 1/6/2016.

[2] Andy McSmith, ‘Brexit: Project Fear had reason on its side, but anti-experts caught public mood’, The Independent, 24/6/2016.

[3] ‘Project Fear gets personal: Cameron equates Brexit to ‘self-harm’, RT, 5/4/2016. 

[4] Ashley Kirk, ‘EU referendum: Remain uses Project Fear more in tweets than Leave’, The Telegraph, 22/6/2016.

[5] Gary Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (Pennsylvania, 1996), p. 20.

[6] Ibid., pp. 20-21.

[7] Ibid., p. 21.

[8] Eric Jager, The Tempter’s Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature (London, 1993), p. 114.

[9] Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance (Illinois 1997), p. 91.

Image credits

Banner: Wikicommons

Abbess Caritas Pirckheimer: Wikicommons