Printable PDF File

Global challenges to the value of free speech

Review by
Wendy Swanberg
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Freedom of Speech -- Abridged? Cultural, Legal and Philosophical Challenges.  Gothenburg, Sweden: Nordicom, 2009.  ISBN 978-91-89471-76-4.  151pp.

In their 2009 assessment of press freedom worldwide, Reporters Without Borders gave top ranking to five countries -- all of them in or near Scandinavia. Nordic nations maintain robust protections for speech and press, even as pressures of globalization and threats to security have prompted other democracies to tighten controls on free expression.

So, this collection of essays by media scholars from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden brings a set of distinctive voices into current debates on the value of free expression.  Freedom of Speech - Abridged? is an album of eleven essays by twelve scholars.   Collectively they address the “implications of free speech in new contexts” from three broad provinces: Philosophical, legal, and cultural.  Those are vast territories, and the book does not try to be a complete guide to any of them. Rather, the essays offer detailed sketches of the present-day state of speech freedom, each from the perspective of a culture that clearly holds such freedom in high regard. 

In his opening essay, Norwegian scholar Helge Ronning finds post-Cold War human rights movements in a state of crisis, as some non-Western cultures recoil from what appears to them a new incarnation of Western imperialism.  In addition, the Internet has enabled exponential growth of surveillance capabilities by both state and non-state actors, putting free expression in familiar jeopardy.  By Ronning’s lights, freedom of speech increasingly is constricted by these two forces -- both distrustful of speech liberty and both capable of rolling back democratic gains. 

Two essays follow from the view of philosophy.  Swedish lecturer Ulf Petaja surveys five theories of free expression, and emerges with a three-dimensional argument about the core value of free speech.  He refines the marketplace of ideas concept with a theoretical analysis, concluding that democracies must actively protect free expression in order to create a communicative environment of diverse perspectives.

In their essay on expression and discourse, scholars Holst and Molander examine a recent amendment to the Norwegian constitution which recasts the legal protection of speech in Norway.  The amendment is grounded in a philosophical argument that freedom of speech is justified as a precondition for truth-seeking, autonomy, and democracy.  The authors drill further into the theories of philosopher Gunnar Skirbekk, who took part in creating the amendment, sifting through his ideas in detail and challenging his distinction between freedom of expression and freedom of discourse.  (This distinction parallels Meiklejohn’s core distinction between private speech and political speech.)  They find such philosophical bases limiting, and see freedom of speech as a negative right conditioned only by its interference with others’ freedom of speech.

The next three essays address free speech in the realm of law.  Anine Kierulf uses Norway’s experience to examine the role of nation-states as regulators of media and expression, a role that is changing as “supranational” legal frameworks – like that of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) – become more established.  Kierulf sees a critical role for nations-states in safeguarding free expression when pressures of global laws and markets serve to curtail it.  Oluf Jorgensen’s essay looks at the same global/national tension in the realm of privacy law.  Since boundaries between the public and private spheres are culturally based, legal forums like ECtHR are being called on increasingly to review national laws addressing conflicts between press freedom and privacy.  Thomas Bull contrasts Sweden’s unique approach to speech regulation with that of European and other courts.  The primacy of Sweden’s free speech and press statutes in protecting publications and source anonymity sets Swedish law apart from other systems, and removes many free-speech conflicts from the legal arena altogether.  Bull also highlights some of the “blind spots” inherent in the Swedish formalist system with respect to speech-acts, privacy, and technological change.

The next cluster of three essays is the most relevant and the most accessible.  Joakim Hammerlin makes a forceful argument that post-9/11 trends of increased state surveillance and national security paranoia are significant threats to democracy worldwide, and that failure to resist such threats to political discourse and civil liberty may have rapid consequence.  Swedish journalist Arne Ruth brings a welcome reporter’s voice to this academic collection of essays.  The religious fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, launched by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeni in 1991, was an early challenge to free expression in global context, and Ruth reprises Rushdie’s gripping tale for a new generation of readers.  Rushdie has regained much of his freedom today, but Khomeni’s “strategy of politics by symbols” is still very much alive, particularly with respect to cross-cultural conflicts in the realm of religion.  Ruth ultimately rejects the accommodation of any cultural relativist approach that would permit religious orders to restrict free expression in global contexts.

The most cutting-edge essay in the book comes from a Yemeni journalist pursuing his Ph.D. in Sweden.  Walid Al-Saqaf writes from within the most contentious sphere of global free expression: the Internet under restrictive Arab regimes.  He studied over 50,000 news articles on Yemini Web sites gathered through an intrepid search engine and news aggregator, YemenPortal.net.  Near the end of his data collection the government of Yemen blocked YemenPortal – prompting Al-Saqaf and others to launch an anti-censorship campaign.  His essay articulates the unique threat to free expression posed by Internet censorship, but also expresses confidence that resistance to such censorship is not only possible – through the use of circumvention tools and other technologies – but may be inevitable.

The final two essays address recent conflicts that arose starkly in Denmark, particularly with the “Mohammad cartoon controversy.”  Danish scholar Frederik Sternfelt challenges descriptions of the underlying tensions as being between “old standards of enlightenment . . . and aggressive religion.”  He sees more political nuance along a left-right continuum in Denmark and elsewhere, noting that some observers situate the conflict in terms of civil discourse rather than press freedom.  Sternfelt explains that Denmark’s center-left willingness to curtail the press freedom of the cartoons’ publisher, and the center-right’s insistence on forcing tolerance of that same speech, both spring from the double-sided impulse of “culturalism” which seeks to nail individuals’ rights to a cultural platform.  He rejects both forms of culturalism as incompatible with an individual right to free expression. 

And last, Finnish scholar Risto Kunelius draws a tighter focus on the Danish cartoon controversy.  With an argument based in both history and media theory, he shows how the mass media, through their various roles in the transnational and transcultural conflict, have been repositioned on the global stage.  Through a complex weaving of five themes – domestication, carnivalism, professionalism, rationalization, and fundamentalism – Kunelius brings a highly theoretical analysis to bear on the controversy.  This essay may be impenetrable to some readers but its central question is a critical one:  At what point does adherence to the notion of “free speech” become itself a kind of intolerant fundamentalism? 

If there is fault in this book of essays, it arises from methodology and arrangement.  The essays share a concern with “free speech” but each relies on a distinct body of literature and understanding.  Some of the essays are more grounded than others.  There is a sprinkling of factual error.  Undergraduate students might gain from the essays separately but will struggle with the text as a whole.  In addition, the essays might have been arranged differently, placing the concrete legal and cultural examples first and leaving philosophical pieces to conclude – as the title suggests.

Even as they employ different research methods, all of the essays in Freedom of Speech - Abridged? are underpinned by the common conviction that freedom of expression is a fundamental human value.  With this assertion, the writers are staking a philosophical claim that is being contested on the modern global stage in increasingly varied ways – in the Danish cartoon controversy, the French ban on veils and burqas in certain locales, the citizen-driven movement in Switzerland to ban construction of minarets.  More such controversies are sure to arise.  With the research and insights set forth in this collection, serious scholars can gain perspective for future work, and rich fodder for comparison in what are sure to be expansive future debates about the fundamental value of free expression.