"bridge", was Re: VS: [governance] Summary Report of IGF MAG

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alejandro Pisanty [mailto:apisan at servidor.unam.mx] 
> 
> Tim and Ian have said the rest succintly enough. And they 
> didn't have to use the word "sectarian" so I bow to their 
> powers of expression too.
 

I think it's totally unfair to call Parminder "sectarian"; having dealt
with truly sectarian people in politics (including the Spartacist Youth
League in Berkeley California in the 1970s) I can only laugh at the
accusation. What Parminder is, or wants to be, is political, which is a
legitimate aspiration. 

By this I mean that he wants this caucus to be an effective and
independent political force, able to advocate positions and give
direction to the dialogue, and offering some countervailing power to the
institutions and people who already hold power. This means that it needs
to settle on some kind of common ground, when possible.

P. and I often have severe disagreements on policy and even values but
we agree on that. 

I am not sure this whole debate is productive, but the issues it raises
go much deeper I think than some people involved suspect. 

The endless debate about the boundaries of civil society simply displays
how how uncritically many of us have fallen into the conceptual trap
presented by naive "multistakeholderism" (an awful word which we can
abbreviate as MS -- but personally, I prefer the acronym MuSH). By
definition, MS ideology requires stakeholders to be categorized into
groups to achieve representation, but of course since we are dealing
with people who hold various overlapping roles in society the categories
are not and cannot be mutually exclusive. 

Once you recognize that inherent contradiction in MuSH ideology, it's
frankly hypocritical for people to invoke MS as some kind of good and
wonderful thing that we should all work for, and then at the same time
be completely cavalier about the way people are categorized and
represented in a MS consultative or advisory regime. 

It's obvious to any politically astute observer of these exchanges that
the people who are cavalier and always talking about blurred boundaries
are the ones who are adequately represented or have privileged access to
representation. And it's equally obvious that the ones demanding more
rigid, and careful and exclusionary definitions that are balanced across
the arbitrary categories are the ones who feel relatively excluded from
representation. Plus ca change....

We probably wont' move far beyond that impasse, but can I at least ask
the dialogue to be clarified: if you conceive of MuSH as a mechanism of
representation, then you've got to accept putting people into categories
in ways that make sense; i.e., which balance power across interest
groups and maximize the ability of the public interest to be voiced. And
if you reject effective stakeholder categorization then don't run around
calling yourself an advocate or practitioner of MS governance and don't
sing its praises. 

The liberal democratic nation-state of the 18th-19th century solved this
problem of representation by making the political unit the individual --
the citizen -- and all citizens equal under the law and afforded the
same opportunities and rights. MuSH is a very poor, uninspiring
substitute for that noble stage of political development; it's only
virtue is that it breaks the monopoly of states in the international
dialogue. 

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