Rethinking 'The Public' - CiteSeerX

© Public Policy and Administration SAGE Publications Ltd London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi 0952-0767 200702 22(1) 27–47

Rethinking ‘The Public’ in Troubled Times Unsettling State, Nation and the Liberal Public Sphere Janet Newman The Open University, UK

Abstract

This article begins with contemporary concerns about the demise of public institutions and public values. New strategies of governance across Europe and beyond make any clear delineation of ‘the public’ and the public sphere highly problematic. The modernization of welfare states involves a shift of powers from state to market, but also a shift of responsibility from public to personal domains. The liberal values associated with the traditional public sphere seem ill-equipped to address questions of social diversity and deepening inequalities, or to respond to contemporary questions of culture, faith and identity. New spatial flows, bringing cross-national and globalized relationships, are dissolving any simple equivalence between nation, citizenship and the public sphere. How, then, might we better understand the terrain on which struggles around the future of publics and publicness are being played out?

Keywords

culture, diversity, liberalism, public services, public sphere

Introduction Almost every cultural change – from Christianity to printing to psychoanalysis – has left a new sedimentary layer in the meaning of the public and the private. (Warner, 2002: 28)

My concern in this article is with the ‘new sedimentary layers’ accreting as new strategies of governance across Europe and beyond make any clear delineation of ‘the public’ and the public sphere highly problematic. The modernization of welfare states involves a shift of powers from state to market, but also a shift of responsibility from public to personal domains with the increasing emphasis on informal care and self governance (Newman, 2001). The increasing reliance on DOI: 10.1177/0952076707071502 Janet Newman, Faculty of Social Science, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA. [email: [email protected]]

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market mechanisms, including contract and public/private partnership, produce difficulties of coordination which some have described as ‘disorganised governance’ (Bode, 2003; Clarke, 2006; Newman, 2006a). The liberal values associated with the traditional public sphere seem ill equipped to address questions of social diversity or respond to contemporary questions of culture, faith and identity (Cooper, 2004; Lewis, 2000; Parekh, 2000a). At the same time, new spatial flows and sedimentations associated with transnational relationships and a globalized economy are dissolving any simple equivalence between nation, citizenship and the public sphere (Chatterjee, 1993; Clarke, 2004b; Yeates, 2001). Each of these developments exemplifies ways in which notions of publics and publicness have been problematized in recent decades. But each also highlights the poverty of traditional concepts (of public domain, public sphere, public values) to illuminate contemporary developments and to support contemporary political, professional and, indeed, public struggles. Pesch (2005) has rigorously traced the conceptual ambiguity of public administration and of its founding concepts; while Cooper (2004: 99) argues that, rather than separate spheres, public and private should be regarded as a ‘co-constitutive dyad’. For such reasons I use the terms ‘publics’ (implying heterogeneity) and ‘publicness’ (as a normative value) rather than the spatially fixed or institutionally bound notions of public domain and public sphere. Despite its apparent fluidity, notions of the public are rooted in a series of discursive chains that produce different – and often highly problematic – associations, equivalences and oppositions. In what follows I want to sketch three such chains, each associated with a particular dynamic of the unsettling of the public domain. My aim is not to describe such processes of unsettling in any detail, but to highlight the different kinds of politics implicated in the remaking of publics and publicness. The first section traces responses to the dismantling of equivalences between public and state; the second to the disruptions to notions of a liberal public sphere; and the third to the dissolution of the idea of a common public domain based on a common national identity. Many of the observations – for example about the significance of colonial history in both shaping and subsequently disrupting a national imaginary on which the public sphere was based – are specific to Britain, but many also have wider resonances across Europe.

Dismantling the Public in the State? The first discursive chain begins with the state – the traditional embodiment of public values and defender of a common conception of a public interest – and produces the following associations: State = public policy = public services = public sector = public ethos

Here public is defined in opposition to the market on the one hand and civil society on the other, in an image of neatly bounded spheres (see Gupta, 2006, 28

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Newman, 2005a and others for critiques of this imaginary and its consequences). The institutionalization of notions of the public in the form of state institutions had particular consequences in terms of its association with bureaucracy, hierarchy and professional power, making it vulnerable to challenges from both the political left and right. The association between public and state (in the form of public policy delivered through state institutions and a state funded public sector) brought enormous benefits. However, the disruption to this association now raises the question of how we might conceptualize the public in the context of the decentring of the state and the dismantling of the public sector in many European nation states. This is a familiar theme in the public administration literature and elsewhere so will be addressed fairly briefly here. The idea of a shift from government to governance captures many of the processes that have effectively dismantled each link in the chain associating state with public policy, public services, a public sector and a public ethos. One of the impacts of the new public management was to undermine, in a number of ways, the idea of a public sector clearly separated from the values of the market. First, the ‘contracting out’ of services to commercial organizations, the ‘externalization’ of others to the marketplace, and the increasing involvement of the private sector in the delivery of public services through a variety of partnership arrangements mean that the scale and reach of public service organizations has been massively reduced. Second, the culture and ideology of managerialism has introduced business values deep into the core of those services that remain nominally public (Clarke and Newman, 1997), bringing with it new logics of decision-making in which the business values of efficiency and entrepreneurship have, at least in part, displaced traditional public service values. Third, the capacity of managers and staff to work to a particular, codified ethos has been eroded by the assault on bureaucracy as an organizational form together with changing conceptions of the office of the public servant. Du Gay (2000) argues that the fragmentation of the civil service in the UK into a range of agencies and quasi public bodies, together with the appointment of business managers from the private sector, has erased a common ethic of public service. Fourth, we can trace the emergence of a new performance culture and a discourse of transparency that, rhetorically at least, render public service organizations more accountable to the public. However, the public voice is highly mediated (for example through audit and inspection agencies), and new performance regimes produce tensions for public service organizations as they juggle multiple targets and strive to reconcile user or community goals with governmental imperatives (Newman, 2001). Fifth, the discourse of ‘what works’ brings with it not only an agnosticism about whether services should be provided by public or private sectors, but also the subordination of value or ethical considerations to a form of rational pragmatism that increasingly underpins policy, politics and management. Finally, the overlaying of public and private with notions of citizen and consumer has been a central theme in debates on the sustainability of a public ethos (in 29

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the UK, in the context of the recent introduction of policies on choice in education, health and other services). Choice, it is argued by some (e.g. Needham, 2003), assaults notions of citizenship itself, constituting the public as a series of individual, calculating subjects and thus weakening the collective identifications that sustain notions of a public realm and public service. Evidence about how far the discourse of choice produces this effect is highly ambiguous (see for example Clarke and Newman, 2006). However, there are clear implications for the capacity of service organizations to go beyond service ethics to deliver wider concepts of justice in decisions about the distribution of public resources or the pursuit of the public good. Responses: Restating the State? One consequence of the power of the discursive chain set out at the beginning of this section has been to constitute opposition to the weakening of the public domain in terms of a duality between state and market. The introduction of markets and contracts, of private finance and entrepreneurial managers, of business values and public private partnerships, into the public sphere is one that tends to produce responses rooted in nostalgia for the social democratic state. Opposition to dominant modernizing trends often carries an implicit aspiration to ‘restate’ the state, albeit in more transparent and democratic forms. Important work has been taking place on the democratic left that attempts to reconceptualize a public domain of democracy and citizenship (see for example Compass: http://www.compassonline.org.uk). However, such developments tend to be based on a notion of the public itself as unchanged from the social and political settlements of the post-war years that, in many European states, supported the formation of welfare states. The problem of restating a politics of the public in these terms is that it looks back to the golden days of the clarity and simplicity of class based politics, sidelining the incursions of the social movements that redefined the territory on which struggles over publics and publicness were conducted – a point to which I return later. In short, in focusing on one dynamic for the dismantling of the public, it obscures other struggles that can only be illuminated by viewing the position of the public in other chains of discursive association.

Challenging the Liberal Public Sphere Much has been written about the challenge to the public domain produced by neo-liberalism (Clarke, 2004a; Marquand, 2004) and by the turn to policies foregrounding consumerism and choice (Clarke et al., 2007; Needham, 2003). Rather less has been written about the challenge to liberal notions of progress and problem of redefining the ‘good society’ to which public policy is directed in the face of competing definitions of what such a society might look like. This takes us to a second discursive chain: 30

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Public sphere = openness = rationality = transparency = tolerance = equality

This discursive chain offers a view of the public sphere of modern western nations as a domain of rational deliberation that can be clearly marked from the passions and pleasures of the personal and the commercialized relationships of the market (see for example Gamble, 2004; Taylor, 2004). Liberal public values were inscribed in bureaucratic forms of rule that, in principle at least, insulated public institutions from the corrupting power of personal profit and guaranteed formal equality. While such values remain key to the fostering of trust in public actors – including politicians – to behave impartially and to defend the public from corruption, they seem remarkably ill-equipped to address contemporary challenges. ‘Openness’ implies a form of cultural universalism that has been problematized by claims on the part of those excluded from the post-war social settlements, and by social movements and political and professional groups working to address continued inequalities (Newman, 2007). ‘Rationality’ is one of the characteristics of the Habermasean conception of a democratic public sphere that has been widely criticized by feminists and others as excluding particular voices and forms of expression (Young, 1990). ‘Transparency’ was never a characteristic of the social democratic state – for example the distinction between politics and administration was always very muddy – and it has become more problematic in the context of network governance. Even as an aspiration it diminishes the validity of emotional or informal dimensions of public value that do not lend themselves to the job description or contract (Hoggett, 2005); and ‘tolerance’ implies an implicit – and hegemonic – norm against which otherness is defined and rendered problematic (Brown, 2006). These values are all part of the discursive chain that forms the self-understandings of western European liberalism, and as such are culturally specific – and open to challenge from a range of social movements. Civitas, the centre–right think-tank, explicitly seeks to shore the values up against erosion from such movements with their mission of ‘defending the values of the Enlightenment’ (http://www.civitas.org). But Cooper, Brown and others have questioned how far it was ever possible to trace a common public sphere based on common values, and have highlighted ways in which the norms of impartiality and shared interests ‘have worked simultaneously to protect and obscure the interests of dominant social forces’ (Cooper, 2004: 99). Feminism, gay and lesbian, and other social movements have also brought into question the solidity of the boundary between public, private and personal, and allowed us to surface the gendered and heterosexual subtexts of the relationships between them (Warner, 2002). As such, the discursive chain of liberal values offers a relatively narrow politics of the public sphere – one that fails to acknowledge particular claims for voice and justice. It is also open to challenge from the failure of liberalism as a template for achieving equality and progress on the West’s own terms. As Brown comments:

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Undermined by historical as well as intellectual events in the late 20th century, the seamlessly egalitarian social whole constituting liberalism’s vision of the future now appears problematic both theoretically and practically. (Brown, 2001: 20–1)

Liberal values have been challenged from a number of positions, three of which are traced in the following sub-sections. Responses: Claims for Citizenship and Justice One set of responses to the limited notions of publicness associated with liberal discourse has been a series of claims calling for the extension of administrative justice. This has produced, in the UK and beyond, a succession of legislative attempts to inscribe formal equality – for women, for black and ethnic minorities, for disabled people, for gay and lesbians, and others. Some such legislation has required public bodies to adjust their own practices to enable access by previously marginalized groups to public institutions, producing a proliferation of equal opportunity policies. The formalization of new claims in legislation and in bureaucratic rules has, however, not necessarily resolved the claims for recognition and justice. Mainstream cultures and institutional practices have often remained relatively unchanged, leading, in the case of the Stephen Lawrence murder in London, to the conclusion that the police force in question had been characterized by ‘institutional racism’ (McPherson, 1999). One weakness of the formalized response to equality of opportunity is that it is oriented towards individual rather than collective justice. As such it is open to claims from members of majority groups claiming discrimination by procedures regarded as favouring minorities: for example the legislation of sex discrimination in the UK has been used as much by men as women. Equal opportunity guidelines and procedures are also concerned with access by excluded groups to the liberal public domain of citizenship and democracy. As such they fail to problematize the values of the public domain itself, and leave unchallenged the way in which the boundaries between the public domain and the ‘private’ realm of personal and domestic life are drawn. Responses: Redefining the Public Sphere Feminist work in particular has challenged the separation between a public world of citizenship and justice from the private world of relationships and care, noting how such a separation has traditionally marginalized women from full contribution to the public domain and bracketed care and other contributions to social wellbeing from wider public recognition (Lister, 2003; MacKinnon, 1989; Uberoi, 2003; Williams, 2000, 2005). One result has been the attempt to expand a ‘feminist ethic of care’. Tronto (1993) and Sevenhuijsen (1998) argue for the expansion of such an ethos from the private sphere of personal relationships to a new conceptualization of the public sphere, dissolving the binary opposition between justice (as a public value) and care (as a private act). This has drawn strong critique from the more traditional left, with Marquand (2004: 80) arguing ‘if the personal 32

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is politicised, or the political personalised, the public and private domains are both likely to be twisted out of shape’. This, I want to argue, is organized around a state/market binary that brackets the personal; that collapses the complexity of the ways in which lives are lived; and that returns us to essentialist conceptions of individual identity and subjectivity. Responses: Redefining Equality The attempt to challenge the public/private boundary and to re-inscribe the public domain with values associated with the private and personal spheres is not, however, confined to feminist politics. There has been a series of attempts by ‘modernizing’ governments of both the centre left and right to redefine the public domain through new discourses of social inclusion, opportunity and choice. Such developments tend to depoliticize new claims and to substitute material for more culturally inflected notions of inequality. Access becomes a problem for the individual – how to develop one’s own capacities and skills so as to be allowed access into a public domain in which citizenship is increasingly linked to employment as a means of equalizing opportunity. The state’s role shifts from policies of redistribution to those of enabling citizens to develop their capacities. Welfare states are currently being defined across many European countries in terms of social investment, social development and the production of social cohesion. At the same time, the work of Putnam, Etzioni and others associated with the turn to communitarianism has produced a trend towards redefining the public domain around citizen and community, rather than state, capacity. This serves to narrow the political imaginary on which notions of a liberal public sphere, however flawed, were based (Newman, 2005b, 2006b; Walters, 2002). Discourses of responsibility and respect – associated with communitarian and ‘Third Way’ perspectives – are paradoxically now taking centre stage in the modernization programmes of many welfare states, producing a new (and not so new) moralism in public life that is in considerable tension with the economic discourses associated with neo-liberal governance.

Dissolving a Common People? The focus on diversity in the previous section takes us to a rather different discursive chain that starts with the presumed equivalence between nation and state (Clarke, 2004b): Nation-state = common people = citizenship = public domain

Here the notion of a common people united in a shared national citizenship forms the basis for collective belongings and identifications, and a rationale for the common provision of public goods. The associations in this chain produce, however, not an emphasis on a public sector but on a common people united in a common public domain. Notions of national citizenship and a common people 33

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formed the basis for the social and political settlements of the post-war years that supported the development of welfare states. But the boundaries of nation and people came under challenge as those excluded from the settlements – especially, in Britain, the colonial ‘others’ who had contributed to nation building – began to play increasingly significant roles in the economy of post-war reconstruction. As the previous section noted, a succession of political and social movements in the 20th century problematized the neutrality and rationality of the public sphere and brought into question the notions of liberal citizenship on which classic conceptions of the public domain were founded. Yet nationhood, and therefore admission to the national settlement, was the terrain on which such struggles took place. As a result the notion of a public domain circumscribed by a national imaginary draws on an uncomfortable overlaying of peoples and publics, and suppresses the colonial ‘others’ against which these imaginaries are defined. This discursive chain, then, occludes the specificities of the formations of people around which inclusions and exclusions to the public domain are drawn. Unlocking it highlights the difficulties inherent in notions of a public sphere based on the boundaries of national citizenship. The development of ‘faith schools’, is one example of these difficulties: do such schools challenge the fundamental principles that unite citizens in a common public domain, or do they suggest that those very principles are unsustainable in the context of multi-cultural, multi-faith societies? The rise of what Nilüfer Güle calls the ‘new visibilities and new imaginaries’ of Islam are at the centre of debates about how to conceptualize western societies in the context of new lines of fracture and dissent. Here it is argued that Islam is acquiring new forms of visibility in both Muslim and European societies, triggering, ‘new ways of imagining a collective self and common space that are distinct from the Western liberal self and progressive politics’ (Güle, 2001: 174). But the unsettling of the national public sphere is, the author argues, accompanied by an unsettling of the Islamic movement itself. This reminds us of the dangers of viewing ‘other’ cultures as both unitary and fixed. These ‘new visibilities and imaginaries’ have challenged the idea of a common public sphere characterized by common national belonging. Responses have taken a number of different forms, from the bureaucratic ethos of ‘colour blindness’ in public policy and public institutions to the emergence of both multiculturalist and assimilationist policies. Responses: A Multi-cultural Public? The liberal values of the public domain noted earlier tended to produce a ‘colour blind’ position in response to the disruptions of social diversity. This can be viewed as an attempt to sustain the image of neutrality and formal equality associated with the liberal public sphere and norms of bureaucratic practice – though the ‘colour blind’ position was later appropriated by strands of new right politics (Powell, 1999). ‘Colour blindness’ was of course only ever an aspiration, and there is ample testimony to the racism inherent in policies and in policy execution 34

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in housing, education, social work and policing, as well as in the operation of immigration policy itself (Lewis, 2000). It operated – and still operates – in recruitment practices as well as in service delivery, reproducing the white norm in many professions and in senior ranks of public bureaucracies. It drew powerful reactions from anti-racist movements, fuelled by key events such as, in Britain, the disturbances initiated by black youth in several major cities in the early 1980s and the emergence of racial unrest in northern cities in the late 1990s. Multi-culturalism and anti-racism can be viewed as rather different responses to the failures of models of liberal equality to address growing evidence of the disadvantages experienced by many black and ethnic minority groups. Multiculturalism was promoted in public policy and supported by many public service professionals concerned to make services more ‘relevant’ to the diverse needs and experiences of different ‘minority ethnic groups’. Multi-culturalism has, however, drawn a number of critiques. Anti-racist discourse highlights the sidelining of ‘race’ and racial discrimination and challenges the weak, celebratory view of cultural difference (Donald and Rattansi, 1992). Left and feminist critiques have drawn attention to the inherent assumption of homogeneity within a particular group: such constructions do not allow for internal power conflicts and interest differences within the minority collectivity: conflicts along the lines of class and gender, as well as, for instance, politics and culture. Moreover, they tend to assume collective boundaries which are fixed, static, ahistorical and essentialist, with no space for growth or change’ (Yuval-Davis, 1999: 118).

Cultural differences, alongside other forms of difference, tend to be institutionalized in forms that categorize publics into discrete groups for the purpose of participation or targeted initiatives. In the process, as Wendy Brown (2001: 39) suggests, publics are detached from the politics that produced them: ‘historical conflicts are rendered as essential ones, effects become cause, and “culture”, religion, ethnicity or sexuality become entrenched differences with entrenched interests’. And, as Yuval-Davis and others have argued, multi-culturalism can have particularly deleterious consequences for women, especially in contexts where gender identities and familial practices associated with particular ethnicities are measured against an assumed white norm. This enables, for example, the poor educational achievements of some black youth to be attributed to culturally specific and deficient models of masculinity while erasing acknowledgment of potential racisms within – and beyond – the classroom (Lewis, 2000). Nevertheless multi-culturalism produced new ways of conceptualizing the public sphere and public culture: ‘Recognition of cultural diversity widens a society’s range of options and increases its freedom of choice, for it brings different cultural traditions into mutually beneficial dialogue and stimulates new ideas and experiences’ (Parekh, 2000b: 48). Multi-culturalism enabled new voices to be heard and new claims to be made; it challenged mainstream professional practice 35

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and, in the UK, produced new legislation requiring public bodies to address institutionally embedded forms of racism. But the cost has been not only the sidelining of ‘race’ itself but also the suppression of difference within so-called minority ethnic communities produced by the neat mapping of such communities as internally homogeneous and mutually exclusive groups. Such mappings have produced, in some European states facing the perceived challenge to social cohesion of immigration, responses such as the inclusion of ‘representatives’ from specific ethnic groups alongside more conventionally elected politicians in local government; and the (failed) attempt, in the Netherlands, to promote the formation of a new political party based on ethnicity that could form an addition to the ‘pillarized’ structure of welfare governance. Multi-culturalism, while producing new mappings of the public sphere, failed to address the problematic delineation of the public/private boundary itself. I want to highlight two such problems. One is how far cultural identifications and belongings associated with ‘minorities’ can have a presence in a public sphere based on liberal, western and Christian traditions, other than in clearly demarcated spaces. Coutin (2006: 318) notes how, in the USA, ‘state based categories of membership have traditionally been assumed to be exclusive, and . . . “difference” has taken the form of private ethnic affiliation rather than a public national one’. The carnival, the religious festival, the ‘Asian wedding’ are all benevolently tolerated – and perhaps even celebrated – so long as they stay within tightly drawn temporal and spatial boundaries. The second problem is that any definition of a public sphere is, as I have argued, delineated through a gendered opposition with a private sphere. The familial, domestic and indeed community formations of the private are highly diverse, producing multiple – and contested – notions of what is properly public and what should remain private. Notions of the body, dress and comportment in the public sphere, of what is and is not a proper image to be displayed in public, and of what can – and cannot – be publicly voiced are all increasingly troubling issues in western European societies.1 Responses: A New Assimilationism? The rise of racially inflected new right politics across much of Europe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has produced troubling challenges to both anti-racist and multi-cultural policy and practice.2 These have tended to centre on the need to bolster national identity by both curbing inward migration and by rejecting multiculturalism in favour of a new emphasis on the assimilation of minorities into the ‘mainstream’ culture. Such policies can be traced in the UK (for example in the policies of the Home Office on social cohesion and citizenship),3 in the Netherlands (in publications from the Scientific Council for Government Policy),4 in Denmark and beyond. Parekh (2000b) sets out a number of critiques of the ‘civic assimilationist view’, among which is the requirement that the public sphere into which minorities are to be assimilated is itself a product of history and must be open to challenge and change arising from new claims: ‘“We” cannot integrate 36

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“them” so long as “we” remain “we”; “we” must be loosened up to create a new common space in which “they” can be accommodated and become part of a newly constituted “we”’ (Parekh, 2000b: 204). Such a challenge can be presented to public institutions and public service organizations, and those who staff and support them, as much as to the wider polity. Nevertheless assimilation models are at the core of new attempts to foster social cohesion in the face of concerns about the presumed challenge to the ‘solidaristic’ public sphere that had supported the welfare settlements of the post-war years. Public service professionals are sometimes blamed for having emphasized the importance of responding to cultural difference rather than promoting integration and assimilation (Duyvendak et al., 2006), while the problem of the sustainability of welfare states has been laid at the door of migration policies that have weakened national identity and ties of mutuality. Giddens and Diamond (2005: 167), for example, argue that ‘Immigration requires a clearer and more overt contract between new immigrants and the host society, and welfare too requires a more overt contract between established citizens and society’. Such contracts would involve a shift to more conditional and transparent entitlements in order to enable citizens of the ‘host’ society to continue to support state welfare. These observations form part of a wider debate about the sustainability of public welfare in the face of the weakening of collective identifications produced by increasing social heterogeneity – what Alesina and Glaeser (2004) term the ‘ethnic fractionalisation’ of society, a phenomenon that, they argue, explains differences between popular levels of support for state welfare in the USA and in Europe.5 Goodhart’s (2004) development of this thesis in respect of the UK was widely taken up, producing a new orthodoxy in which the values of solidarity (that support a generous welfare system) are assumed to be in tension with increasing social diversity, especially ethnic diversity. Such formulations of the problem of the future of the welfare state have been challenged by Taylor-Gooby, who, drawing on Alesina and Glaesner’s own statistical methodology, argues that: when a left wing influence is established and has influenced political institutions, as is the case in Europe but not in the US, different patterns of development and of pathdependency are set in train. In effect, the presence of the left appears to insulate welfare systems against the impact of greater diversity among citizens. (Taylor-Gooby, 2005: 671)

However, the politics of the left have, in recent years, been significantly weakened as popular concerns about immigration have intensified, producing new political fissures across many European nations and the rise of parties of the right. Concerns about social cohesion are leading a number of European states to embark on programmes of welfare reform that shift the focus towards social inclusion and capacity building and away from income transfer. They are also producing an intensification of assimilation policies and the weakening of multi-cultural discourse. For example the EU, following on from an earlier Dutch initiative, is 37

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currently planning an ‘integration contract’ which new immigrants will be expected to sign (Watt, The Guardian, 24 March 2006: 21). The overlaying discourses of ‘race’ and migration have been particularly strongly felt in Britain because of its colonial past and the visibility of migrants from the Caribbean, Africa and the Asian subcontinent; however, the expansion of the EU and opening up of borders within Europe has brought questions of migration to the top of the political agenda in many other countries. The orchestration of a populist politics that views Islam and other faiths in terms of threats to the security of nations, coupled with the rise of new right politics, can be viewed as an attempt to re-seal the old elisions between nation and people. This seems an unlikely prospect in the context of the fluidity of identities and mobility of peoples in a globalizing world.

Conclusion: Towards a Politics of Publics and Publicness This article has highlighted a number of reasons why it has become increasingly difficult to speak about a universalist public domain, and to think about how we should act in it. The three discursive chains I have delineated in the preceding sections fix notions of publics and publicness into particular sedimentations and institutional forms. These have to be understood as separate ‘settlements’ that are being disrupted in different ways. They are complexly interwoven; but the tendency to merge them into a singular narrative of growing neo-liberal hegemony has at least two deleterious consequences. First, it sidelines the role of ‘struggles from within’ – from social movements, radical professionalism and other forces – to challenge the liberal values and paternalistic practices that have long characterized the public domain. It is true of course that neo-liberalism has proved itself to be highly adept at co-opting such struggles to its own ends. But the collapse of diverse forces and movements into a hegemonic story of neo-liberal triumph just will not do. Second, such a narrative constitutes a particular form of resistance characterized by attempts to ‘restate the state’ through resisting the imperatives of the market. Such a project is important; but it is not the only project, and not the only form of politics that matters. As I have argued, the disruptions to publics and publicness are played out around a number of different struggles. It is not one logic (privatization) but a plurality of competing logics that create multiple spaces that social actors can engage with. Each renders the idea of a public domain clearly separated from private passions or political interests problematic. My aim in sketching a plurality of responses and resistances has been to highlight the range of political debates and struggles with which the remaking of publics and publicness is associated, and to argue for a constructive and positive – and public – engagement with them. In this conclusion, I want to suggest ways in which questions of publics and publicness are being redefined in contemporary debates. In terms of publics, how far can liberal values be redefined to take 38

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account of questions of difference and diversity? And how can ‘publicness’ be conceptualized once its connection with the state is unsettled? Rethinking Publics: Beyond the Liberal Public Sphere In struggling to delineate a territory on which a new politics of the public might be set out, calls to reassert the liberal values of a public sphere provide less than sufficient intellectual resources. But this does not mean rejecting them out of hand; rather, the task is to deconstruct them in order to make the choices more visible and to indicate why they matter. Cooper (2004: 100) notes how multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism have formed two lenses through which the public has been reinterpreted and ‘articulated to norms of openness, heterogeneity, accountability, stimulation and excitement’. It is important to note that two of Cooper’s norms look back to the values of liberalism – those of openness and accountability – but are taking on new kinds of meaning in the present. ‘Openness’ raises important challenges given the impact of information technologies that in principle – as we often read in policy texts – have the capacity to equip publics with new information and new powers to act in the public domain in ways that challenge the supremacy of public professionals and public bureaucracies. However, as with the critiques of the ‘old’ inflections of openness, this capacity is rarely realized, in part because of the limitations of information as a resource, and in part because of the tendencies of old sedimentations of power to reproduce themselves in ways that sideline new challenges and threats. ‘Accountability’, too, is taking on new inflections as policy discourse involves the public itself in new forms of scrutiny and evaluation, producing a complex field of power that professionals and managers must navigate as best they can. It is the increasing heterogeneity of the public, however, that produces particular challenges. How can notions of difference not get reduced to a relativist conception in which all claims must be considered to be of equal value? Cooper (2004: 60) offers three principles for assessing such claims: the social production of unequal positions; the ways in which principles of inequality shape, and can be read off from, other modes of power and institutions, such as the state, corporations, education and law; and the processes by which principles of inequality sustain and are reproduced by particular social dynamics.

So, for example, we need to be attentive to the complexity of the interactions between gender and ‘race’ in discourses of multiculturalism; and to a sense of the historical conditions – of colonialism, of the patriarchal family, of cycles of capitalist production – that have marginalized particular voices that are now struggling to get heard. In particular, as Cooper (2004: 65) argues, we need to ‘explore a way of thinking about social inequality that moves away from the tendency to treat all forms of disadvantage as homologous, and instead differentiates in the basis of their structural character’. Such an approach would avoid the tendency to produce the kind of list that permeates public and social policy, lists in 39

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which women, black and ethnic minorities, disabled people, and a host of others are constituted as distinct categories. Such lists not only assume an equivalence of oppressions that ignores the specific historical roots of each, but also assumes that the categories are somehow mutually exclusive. They also open up the possibility of an endless succession of new claims: should smokers, hunters, fathers denied access to their children, and other new and vociferous voices be added? And if not, what are the principles that exclude them? Cooper’s final two principles – those of stimulation and excitement – express, perhaps, the challenge of engaging with a public culture in which identities and practices previously confined to the private domain come to be publicly celebrated, and in which public spaces and cultural sites confront the challenges of heterogeneity. The challenges to the liberal – and bourgeois – public sphere produced by carnival, by the new visibility of multi-cultural publics, by the celebration of gay and lesbian sexualities, by the claims of disability activists, by the emphasis on youth, fashion and performance, are all highly disruptive presences. Such disruptions pose new – and not so new – challenges to the norms and practices of public governance and raise important questions about the design and management of public space. In particular, they open up new sites of intergenerational and inter-cultural conflict as the management of behaviour comes to the fore of the public policy agenda. What are the limits of definitions of antisocial behaviour, and who is it that defines the ‘social’ against which such norms are evaluated? What are the boundaries of liberal tolerance in the face of minority claims for access to public resources and public space? And who defines the majority against which such minorities are constituted? Questions of faith and culture are at the centre of such troubling questions, and form the backdrop to contemporary debates about the remaking of publics. However, older struggles – around gender, class, sexuality, disability and so on – have not been successfully resolved, and are likely to continue to disrupt any attempt to reassert narrow conceptions of the liberal public sphere. Any attempt to rethink the public, then, must be based on the fostering of a public imaginary that is: • differentiated – but in a way that neither ‘essentializes’ differences (as in many public participation strategies) nor strips them of the politics through which differential claims have been made (as in ‘assimilationist’ approaches to creating social cohesion); • capable of dealing with ‘hard cases’ – such as questions of culture and identity, equality and difference, claims for recognition and redistribution – by fostering public debate and enlarging the spaces in which deliberation takes place, both within and across lines of difference.

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Rethinking Publicness: Beyond State and Nation The three discursive chains elaborated in this article each produces – constitutes – its own set of responses. Some of these responses are oriented towards reasserting traditional meanings, while others attempt to disrupt them – but each works within the discourse, changing the relationships between concepts and at times introducing new terms producing new sets of articulations, in the process subtly shifting the meaning of publicness itself. At this point I want to suggest some different ‘emergent’ inflections of publics and publicness that are helping to shape these new articulations, at least among academics. These take the form of concepts rather than discursive chains – and, as concepts, have the capacity to be mobilized in different ways. However, each forms a way of ‘rethinking’ the public that disrupts the traditional taken for granted meanings inscribed in social democratic, liberal and national discourses of publics and publicness. The first dimension of rethinking publicness beyond the state clusters around the notion of ‘public value’. This comes from a text associated with the Kennedy School of Government in the USA that is widely used in UK management and leadership programmes; it has also been the focus of a discussion document commissioned by the Strategy Unit of the UK government in 2002.6 The author of the original text, Mark Moore (1995: 293), promotes the idea of the public manager as someone engaged in creating public value: ‘They focus on increasing the value of the organisations they lead to the broader society.’ It is recognized that the idea of public value is ambiguous, and that in setting out such a role for public managers they may be viewed as usurping the role of politicians. Yet the text is redolent with advice on how public managers can engage in ‘organising for coproduction and responsiveness’ (Moore, 1995: 287) or ‘acting for a divided, uncertain society’ (Moore, 1995: 293). Although the original text concerned the role of the public manager, the concept of public value neatly enables a disassociation with a public sector and public institutions. What counts is the value being created, not the institutional base that produces the value. As such, it is readily aligned with ‘modernizing’ discourses; yet, through its possible alignments with alternative political strategies, it also opens up possibilities of reconceptualizing notions of publicness. So far, however, evidence from the UK suggests that while it forms a mobilizing discourse for public managers, enabling them to go beyond the rational pragmatism of Blair’s modernization programme (Newman, 2005c), it has not been readily appropriated in policy discourse – the 2002 Strategy Unit seminar in the UK produced little response. But it has not been adopted by alternative or counter hegemonic actors either. We might conclude, for the moment, that public value most readily forms a link in some emergent professional, managerial and organizational discourses of publicness. A rather different response to ‘rethinking’ the public beyond state/market dualities has been to focus on ‘local publics’. This is linked both to communitarian strands of politics but also to thinking on the left about alternatives to the market liberalism that has dominated modernizing reforms in recent decades. The 41

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response has taken different forms in different nation states. In Britain, a network of policy and political actors has clustered around the idea of a ‘new localism’ in which the centralizing thrust of government might be reversed; in Italy, a centre– left coalition successfully brought about a constitutional change involving a greater delegation of powers to local and regional tiers of governance; while in the Netherlands reforms of social assistance and social care services involved further delegation to local government. These are not of course equivalent developments; each has to be understood in terms of the political struggles and tensions within nation states. However, ‘the local’ is increasingly a site to which formerly central functions are devolved, fragmenting a (supposedly) unitary public in the name of flexibility, responsiveness and other goals. Localization can also be viewed as a strategy through which the strains of delivering welfare services can be delegated away from the state itself. However, it is viewed by many on the left as a site in which publics can be most successfully mobilized through a range of activation, participation and involvement strategies. Charles Leadbetter, speaking in a Radio 4 discussion on 10 May 2006, spoke about the failure of what he termed the McKinsey state, in which government was viewed as a big business delivering a series of products. Jonathan Friedland, speaking in the same discussion, commented in a Guardian column later that week that the next stage in the journey will be nothing less than a re-fashioning of the state – replacing the top down, centralized behometh of today with a looser, more diffuse, even ‘organic’ . . . network of services that fit the people who use them. Citizens won’t be passive recipients, but direct participants (Friedland, The Guardian, 10 May 2006: 27).

But what are the conditions that enable such participation? And what forms of identity or political imaginary are invoked by different governmental strategies of involvement? Across Europe we can trace an increasing emphasis on public participation – through consumer consultation exercises, user involvement strategies, deliberative forums, local area committees and so on. Barnes et al. (2007) highlight ways in which public institutions actively constitute their publics for the purpose of participation, and the constrained ‘political imaginary’ associated with official spaces and practices of participation. They also argue that marginalized or politically less powerful publics are more likely to be mobilized, and their voices heard, through autonomously organized groups than through ‘official’ forms of consultation and participation established by governmental bodies. This takes us to a third concept around which the work of rethinking is taking place: that of ‘public action’. Again this is a wide reaching concept, encompassing a range of forms of social agency – from local campaigns to anti-globalization movements and publicly supported interventions into crisis situations (famines, environmental disasters, the plight of refugees, human rights abuses) across the globe. Notions of public action suggest the possibility of new forms of alliance between academic, activists and policy actors in a number of areas: in social policy (for example the ‘empowerment’ of previously marginalized groups to act 42

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on their own behalf); in local initiatives (for example those that promote community action); in institution building (including by ‘third sector’ and advocacy groups); in ‘activation’ policies that draw on republican, rather than liberal, notions of citizenship, and so on. Each of these ideas is readily incorporated into dominant discourses; notions of community, capacity, empowerment and activation pervade the policy literature across much of Europe, but in ways that detach them from any ‘public action’ inflection. However, they also lend themselves to more radical or progressive appropriations. One such example can be found in the work of Sui Generis – ‘Laboratio di sociologia dell’azione publicca’ (the Centre for Public Action) – in Milan.7 ‘Activation’ here is inflected with ‘rights for voice’ for publics implicated in local or urban development policies, as well as policies to overcome the dependency relationships fostered by paternalistic welfare institutions. The question, then, is not how to combine the traditions of social democratic or ‘third way’ politics with the traditions of liberalism, but to use the challenges and responses traced in this article to generate something new: a public imaginary that is: • Transnational – a site of ethical and political claims that are not restricted to national boundaries (as in many protest movements) and a site of new social imaginaries (as in the new identities and relationships produced by media representations of crises and emergencies). Both are associated with more vibrant and lively forms of politics than can be found within many nation states. • Constituted through social and political practice – both on the part of state and non-state actors. In particular, attention must be paid to the identifications and relationships inculcated through ‘modernizing’ reforms, public participation strategies, the turn to consumerism, the delegation of responsibility to ‘local’ tiers of governance and so on, and their potential consequences for the formation of publics and the expression of publicness. • Not bounded by the limited political imaginaries associated with ‘community’ as a site of governance, ‘consumerism’ as a principle of public service reform, or ‘responsibility’ as an emerging discourse of citizenship. Each of these has implications for ‘rethinking the public’ in ways that disassociate it from the conventional associations with public sector and public sphere. Such a disassociation enables us to think of the public in terms of an emergent property, constituted through action (Bifulco and De Leonardis, 2005), and as an imagined identity, held in tension with other identities. However, emergent properties may fail to emerge, especially in the face of strong countervailing pressures towards market liberalism and consumerist individualism. There is, then, a crucial task for public institutions, public services, and public policy actors – that of providing the infrastructure, resources, spaces and forms of action that mobilize a public imaginary and that foster public action.

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Notes

1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

For example the publication in 2005 by a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed produced demonstrations by Muslim populations and non-Muslim supporters in many European cities. See for example Patrick West on The Poverty of Multi-culturalism, London: Civitas. See for example Home Office publications Community Cohesion (Cantle, 2006) and Strength in Diversity (Home Office, 2004). Norms and Values, and The Study of Religion in the Public Domain (http://www.wrr.nl). The conceptions of ethnicity and of solidarity espoused by Alesina and Glaeser are critiqued by, among others, Clarke (2007). http://www.strategy.gov.uk/seminars/public-value Among other activities the Centre runs a masters programme in Social Development and Social Quality that aims to enable experts to intervene in critical situations (see http://www.sociologica.unimib.it/mastersqs).

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Janet Newman is Professor of Social Policy at the Open University. She has published widely on changing state forms and their impact on public services, drawing extensively on the experience of those working in the public sector. Publications include Remaking Governance: Politics, Policy and the Public Realm (Policy Press, 2005); Modernising Governance: New Labour, Policy and Society (Sage, 2001) and The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare (with John Clarke: Sage, 1997). Recent books include Power, Participation and Political Renewal (with M. Barnes and H. Sullivan) Policy Press, 2007; and Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Relationships and Identifications (with J. Clarke, N. Smith, E. Vidler and L. Westmarland) Sage, 2007.

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