Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy: Temporal Othering in International Relations by Cathy Elliott

Author:Cathy Elliott [Elliott, Cathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Public Policy, Cultural Policy, Democracy, National, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Nationalism & Patriotism, American Government, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, General
ISBN: 9781317209799
Google: oAZ6DQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 32957819
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Governance as a machine?

The metaphor of the government as a machine was something new, an idea that had emerged with the Industrial Revolution’s faith in science. It would have been anathema to a late eighteenth-century sensibility that viewed government rather as an organic process. A generation of men who had been brought up in a more Burkean age frequently employed metaphors of machines breaking down or running out of control.

Macaulay, for example, worries that absent the governing structures of the Company then “the whole machine of state would stand still” (Macaulay, 1833). For Henry Tucker, the idea that governing the whole vast Empire could be done by one centralised body is “visionary and impractical”: “The machine will be overloaded and will not move” (Tucker, 1833a: 344). Meanwhile, the prospect of government from a distance in London, abstracted from the everyday concerns of life in India, would, he states, “make us something like a steam engine, which the hand of the engineer is wont to stop or put in motion at pleasure […] unlimited power without responsibility” (India Office, 1833c: 129). This is echoed by the Court of Directors, which worries about the Company being reduced to a “mere machine” (India Office, 1833a: 63). This is not to say that they reject the metaphor of government as a “whole […] complex machine” (India Office, 1833c: 41), but they are wary of the dangers machines bring with them.

For Macaulay – contra Mill – representative institutions are desirable not because they function mechanically and make a rational break with a confused present. This is because reason for Macaulay is not a disembodied, ahistorical force, but rather an organic process, rooted in a particular history, that reminds us of the Burkean polity in which he had spent his whole life. British institutions, he says, are the product of “all our habits, all the reasonings of European philosophers, which all the history of our own part of the world would lead us to consider as the one great security for good government”. If “[r]eason is confounded” in India, then it is not because there is no adequate machinery, but rather because history gives no guidance as to how to proceed: “We interrogate the past in vain” (Macaulay, 1833). Representative institutions are, by this account, the endpoint of a long history: a history that has evolved organically, accumulating wisdom through time.

Intriguingly, Holt Mackenzie, who played a key role in drafting the Charter Act, uses a tellingly different sort of metaphor to talk about governance: “to disjoin the several parts of government, in a country which is not self-governed, is like placing the different members of the body in the charge of different physicians” (Wilson, 2008: 134). Whilst Wilson claims that this is analogous to a mechanical trope, it is actually different in important ways. A body is a self-regulating system that grows, develops, heals and revitalises itself without conscious direction. This metaphor of the body bespeaks a sort of uneasy reconciliation between the two temporalities of Burke and Mill.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.