[governance] Bloomberg - The Overzealous Prosecution of Aaron Swartz

[parminder]

Bill

The history of the term "US exceptionalism" that you relate is truly 
illuminating (no irony intended).

However, I have to disagree with you when you come to the contemporary 
moment and the contextual space (global IG).

" The jaw dropping assertion that everyone around the world who supports 
multistakeholderism a la ICANN or is skeptical that UN-based 
alternatives would be better is a proponent of US exceptionalism 
(whatever that means) is just another, and one you can only get here, so 
enjoy. " (Bill)

No one has called support to ICANN multistakeholderism as US 
exceptionalism. (Please show one instance.) Only the ICANN oversight 
model attracts the label of US exceptionalism.

Why would you want to confuse/ conflate the two. (I do however 
understand why the US government works overtime to confuse/ conflate the 
two.)  They are very different things - the ICANN's multistakeholder 
model and ICANN's oversight model. Dont you think they are very different.

I am hundred percent sure that US exceptionalism has never been 
mentioned on this list in relation to ICANN
multistakeholder model. However, it has often been applied to the ICANN 
oversight model, and to those who support it.

I support ICANN's multistakeholder model, and have in fact often, on 
this list, called for it to be institutionalised through a treaty.

I consider support to ICANN oversight model as supporting US 
exceptionalism. In principle, it is no differnet than supporting US's 
global expansionism and unilateral actions in other areas that you describe.

Also, when you speak of 'sceptical that UN based alternatives will be 
better' again you need to explain whether you are talking of

1. UN based alternatives for running the domain name systems, and 
Internet technical standard systems (something which a 'very few 
countries' want ITU to do, and an overwhelming majority does not)

or

2. UN based alternatives to US oversight of the ICANN. (almost all non 
US countries really seek some kind of a non US, multilateral oversight 
of ICANN, whether UN based or not)

Again, ICANN own work and its oversight have to be seen as two very 
distinct issues.

I think if we undertake a category and 'boundaries of an issue' 
clarification exercise first, something that Norbert seems to be 
attempting, we can actually do a useful discussion on these issues. Who 
knows,  maybe we can even agree on some issues, and make valuable 
contribution to the evolution of global IG.

parminder


On Sunday 20 January 2013 06:14 PM, William Drake wrote:
> Hi Adam
>
> On Jan 20, 2013, at 10:30 AM, Adam Peake <ajp at glocom.ac.jp 
> <mailto:ajp at glocom.ac.jp>> wrote:
>
>> I understood the term "US Exceptionalism" to mean something along the 
>> lines that US culture was in some what superior.  Guru, your comment 
>> encouraged a search, and finding a result on wikipedia "American 
>> exceptionalism is the proposition that the United States is different 
>> from other countries in that it has a specific world mission to 
>> spread liberty and democracy." And this would fit with Riaz's use, 
>> given the context. 
>>
>> To the first, hard to think how US culture is superior (special and 
>> often great, and often not so great). Second, idea that the US has 
>> some god given mission to spread liberty and democracy does seem to 
>> live on in the US State department and they seem blind of the 
>> hyprocacry of (etc etc) Bradley Manning, SOPA, Guantanamo Bay... and 
>> (IG/IGF context) sale by US companies of software/hardware that 
>> enables repressive regimes to block/track/monitor etc (as discussed 
>> at the 1st IGF, when Google and Cisco were criticized.)
>>
>> I don't recall support the notion of US Exceptionalism from anyone on 
>> this list.
>
>
> The first sentence you quote from the Wikipedia article is a 
> reductionist misrepresentation of not only the actual history of the 
> concept but the rest of the article itself. The piece moves back and 
> forth between distinctly different uses of the term without 
> comment---it could use more editing and integration—and that sentence 
> picks up on just one of them.  For social theorists from de 
> Tocqueville and Tom Paine to Louis Hartz and Seymour Martin Lipset, 
> the concern was to understand why the US appeared not to follow some 
> high-level generalizable patterns of social organization and 
> development found particularly in Europe, e.g. with respect to 
> property rights, money making, the balance between groups and 
> individuals, state/society relations, soccer and socialism, etc.  As 
> the article notes, factors like the lack of a transition from 
> feudalism to capitalism, republicanism and the revolutionary rejection 
> of the British model (sorry), puritanism and the frontier (real and 
> imagined) have been among the proposed causal variables, depending on 
> the analysis, but the core concept is an attempt to explain an 
> 'exception from a pattern'.
>
> Then you have all the agenda-based misappropriations by various 
> analysts and political actors that take you further and further from 
> the original concern.  One step taken by some was to add on the 
> normative judgement of not only different, but 'better'.  Another was 
> to draw the programmatic implication that exceptionalism had to be 
> protected from the meddling 'old world' and its wars and social 
> upheavals via an isolationist foreign policy.  Yet another was to draw 
> the opposite programmatic implication that exceptionalism provided a 
> mandate and even a moral responsibility to promote US values and 
> visions of social order around the world through an expansionist 
> foreign policy.  There have been liberal (in the US sense of the 
> word—another instance an exception from the pattern) and conservative 
> versions of this notion, as well as multilateralist and unilateralist 
> versions, etc.   In the past decade or so, the neocon foreign policy 
> establishment took another step farther out with this totalizing 
> construct where expansionism is wedded to gun toting preemptive 
> warring world changing hubris. So that's one agenda-driven 
> misappropriation. The jaw dropping assertion that everyone around the 
> world who supports multistakeholderism a la ICANN or is skeptical that 
> UN-based alternatives would be better is a proponent of US 
> exceptionalism (whatever that means) is just another, and one you can 
> only get here, so enjoy.  It's a fair bet though that de Tocqueville 
> might be a little confused…
>
> Bill
>
>

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