Debatte

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    • Author: Julia Eckert

    • India’s undeclared state of emergency

      Arvind Narrain: India’s Undeclared Emergency : Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance, Chennai (Context, an imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited) 2021.

      “The Dual State” is being rediscovered. Ernst Fraenkel’s study of the Nazi state, written in Germany in 1938 and adapted while in exile in the US, offers an analytical tool for understanding current processes by distinguishing between the normative state and the action state. In Die Zeit, Heinrich Wefing refers to an essay by Aziz Huq, which applies Fraenkel’s concepts to the US under Trump. A Polish constitutional lawyer had already drawn Wefing’s attention to the “dual state” in order to understand the restructuring of the Polish state.

      In fact, the US under Trump is not the first in the shift that some describe as authoritarian and others as fascist. It does have a special charisma and therefore serves as a model for the new order elsewhere. But the US example also distracts attention from the more quotidian and familiar processes near us. In many ways, the measures taken by other governments, less spectacular and theatrical, can draw our attention to how the transformation into a dual state is taking place.

      Arvind Narrain, an Indian lawyer, employed the concept of the dual state in his book “India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance” to describe developments in contemporary India. India under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi could be considered the most successful and internationally least problematized example of the establishment of a dual state.

      Narrain argues that India’s constitution has always combined both tendencies of the dual state, but that under the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), which has been in power since 2014, the prerogative state has increasingly overshadowed the normative state – made possible by laws such as the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act), which expand executive powers, and executive measures that are increasingly exempt from judicial review.

      Narrain defines the concept of the prerogative state, following Fraenkel, as field within the state in which the executive acts without restrictions and outside or above legal constraints and constitutional processes. He sees the Indian prerogative state particularly in the use of (legal) preventive detention, in national security laws, and in extraordinary executive orders. The latter increasingly override judicial reviews of executive actions, but also fundamental safeguards in criminal law. The police carry out arbitrary arrests and detentions without any significant judicial control. The executive branch issues ordinances and administrative orders that circumvent legal safeguards. The reluctance of the judiciary to control such abuses leads to a situation in which institutions and individuals are subject to arbitrary state oppression. This establishes the prerogative state in Fraenkel’s sense.

      Narrain advocates a strategy of “constitutional resistance.” In 2021, he was still confident that citizens, civil society, lawyers, and democratic institutions could and would defend the normative state.

      Now, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the dual state promises not only the dismantling of judicial review of executive powers, but also impunity for offenses and crimes committed by civil society actors, always and everywhere. In India, these include lynchings of Muslims and pogroms against them. The dual state is always a state of complicity. And it can certainly be democratic. The Indian example also points to this. There is no need for the Modi regime to abolish democracy, because the Indian dual state enjoys broad support among large sections of the population, which is also reflected in the elections. The authoritarian or fascist turn does not require a dictatorial form of government. This is precisely what makes Fraenkel’s concepts so relevant and important for the German and European present.

    • Moral failure – Gaza, knowledge, and responsibility

      Didier Fassin: Une étrange défaite. Sur le consentement à l’écrasement de Gaza, Paris (Editions La Découverte) 2024, 198 pp. Englische Übersetzung: Moral Abdication. How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza, translated by Gregory Elliott, London/New York (Verso Books) 2025, 128 pp.

      Didier Fassin says it all. In eight chapters, he talks about the destruction in Gaza, about the approval of it, and about how talking about it is made impossible and words are given new meanings: “Language is damaged when demands to stop killing civilians are ‚antisemitic‘, when an army that dehumanizes its enemies is ‚moral‘, when an enterprise of obliteration is a ‚riposte‘, when a military operation openly conducted against civilians is the ‚Israel-Hamas war‘. Thinking is suffocated when debates are prevented, lectures banned and exhibitions cancelled, when police enter institutions of higher education and prosecutors are imposed to ensure orthodoxy.” (p. 87)

      Precisely because Didier Fassin says everything that everyone can know, everything that is accessible everywhere in the media: about the dead, the hunger, the bombs, the destruction, the blockade, the arms deliveries, the history of violence—the immediate violence of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and the violent long history leading up to it, back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917— the justifications, the declarations of intent… he leaves us with a deep sense of the futility of all words. We know what he is reporting here. And it changes nothing.

      In fact, there is a lot of talk, and almost always deliberately avoiding what is happening in Gaza, so that the talk erects a kind of sound barrier between Gaza and our knowledge. “The language to describe it seemed somehow dead. Or rather, an attempt was underway to induce its death by imposing a vocabulary and grammar of facts, by prescribing what must be said and condemning what must not be said (…).” (p. 5/6) And yet the reality is obvious, and everyone knows: whether you call it genocide or not, tens of thousands of people have been deliberately killed in Gaza, hundreds of thousands have been displaced and displaced again, and the survivors have suffered severe physical and psychological damage and had their livelihoods destroyed in the long term.

      What does this insignificance of knowledge about what is happening before our eyes mean? We are witnesses without testifying. Didier Fassin regards the moral failure of the West, its “consent” to destruction, which lies both in allowing it to happen and in actively supporting it, as a profound historical turning point. And indeed, with the knowing silence about the destruction of Gaza, a point of no return seems to have been reached. Even if the normative order that at least claimed to value every human life has always been hypocritical, the open rejection of its values and principles opens up an even deeper moral abyss. The inequality of the value of human life is not only accepted and no longer metaphysically confined, but has become the new principle of a completely lawless world. But Fassin believes that one day history will be told differently: “A voice will be restored to the Palestinians and with it a language will be reborn. Words will find their true meaning again. (…) People will no longer dare to claim that some people’s lives are worth less than others’, and that the death of the former is not as grievable as that of the latter. It will be understood that the dehumanization of the enemy entails the loss of humanity of those who articulate it.” (p. 92).

      ↗ https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/une_etrange_defaite-9782348085369

      ↗ https://www.versobooks.com/products/3370-moral-abdication

    • Neo-liberal release of fascism?

      Zeynep Gambetti: Exploratory Notes on the Origins of New Fascisms, Critical Times (2020) 3 (1), 1–32.

      To what extent do the concept and theories of fascism help us to understand today’s fascist phenomena? I find Gambetti’s text very clever. She takes up Hannah Arendt’s reflections on fascist power and totalitarianism and discusses how they can be transferred from the then “imperialism-fascism-totalitarianism nexus” to today’s “biopolitics-security-neoliberalism nexus”. For Gambetti, what is essential is the reproduction of the devaluation of the “weak” and the “useless,” ultimately born of fear, a fear that turns against them and dehumanizes them as a threat. In this, totalitarianism and fascism “seize” the individual “from within” – also today.

      However, I also struggle with the text. I find Gambetti’s transference of fear in totalitarianism to fear in neoliberalism too imprecise. I don’t think Arendt would have gone along with that – even if she assumed the possibility of personal responsibility in every situation. But above all, fear doesn’t really explain to me what I observe as fascist tendencies in Brandenburg or in Bombay and Delhi. This focus on the production of insecurity and fear in neoliberalism obscures what is all too apparent in ethnographic observation: the joy and sense of empowerment felt by those who are convinced by fascist ideas. Now, of course, one could say that you have to feel powerless to experience joy in a self-empowerment. But is that it? Is the experience of powerlessness enough to explain the joy of power? Such “deficit” analyses of the possibility of fascistization processes may overlook essential moments. And that, in turn, diminishes the strategies of resistance.

      ↗ https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article/3/1/1/165497/Exploratory-Notes-on-the-Origins-of-New-Fascisms