Last week David Miliband made a speech at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. He called for mutual respect between Britain and Muslim majority countries and to this end urged an effort 'to understand the Muslim world better'. To try to understand better, in its genuine - epistemological - meaning, is always a worthwhile exercise. At the same time, where one's purpose is dialogic, aiming at an understanding that is reciprocal, it is as well to be clear what one's own values are and how they differ from other values. A passage from the foreign secretary's speech (the full text is here) seems to me to obscure two important points. Referring to 'our commitment to politics and the rejection of violence', he said:
It is always when silent consent for violence is withdrawn - in favour of politics - that the actions of diplomacy have the chance to stick. Even in countries which are not democratic, the actions of governments are constantly conditioned by the demands of their people. This, a deep belief in politics, is the bedrock. The nobility of politics is contained in the negotiation of conflict through conversation, the replacement of dispute by compromise and of force by persuasion.
This is not an evangelical impulse. Politics begins where people, with whom we share a world, disagree, sometimes on matters of fundamental importance. Between the secular liberal and the person whose faith is inseparable from their politics, there is no easy assimilation. Neither is [there] any way of judging who is "right". There is just a dialogue and a search for common ground.
Dialogue with others who do not subscribe to the same values is, indeed, the stuff of politics and it is an indispensable mode of living with others in a morally tolerable way. That emphasis is to be applauded. But in the first of the above paragraphs, David elides the fact that the practice of politics qua conversation, compromise and persuasion is not evenly shared between democracies and non-democracies. The former have a greater, as it were a definitional, commitment to politics conceived in this way; the latter have a much less robust commitment to it. Equally, in the second of the paragraphs quoted above, David's contrast between the secular liberal and 'the person whose faith is inseparable from their politics' leaves obscure whether 'inseparability' for this latter figure betokens an attachment to creating or sustaining a polity in which everyone is to be subject to various of the requirements of that person's faith. If so, then though dialogue and a search for common ground are still to the point, the secular liberal would do well to remember that secular liberalism permits more of a conversation than certain types of politics-faith inseparability do; and he should be willing to defend the contention that secular liberalism is right in doing so, rather than conceding that no one can judge right and wrong in this matter. If no one can judge who is right, how come David seems so sure about the merits of politics as conversation?
