The first Holberg Debate took place at the House of Literature in Bergen on Saturday 3 December 2016. The evening took its starting point in an interview with Professor Timothy Garton Ash and central themes from his most recent book, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World (2016). Garton Ash is Director of the European Studies Centre at St. Antony's College at the University of Oxford. He is also one of the great political writers of our time, with regular contributions in The Guardian, The New York Review of Books and The Washington Post and elsewhere.

Following the interview, Professor Garton Ash joined in a panel discussion with Jostein Gripsrud, Professor in information and media studies at the University of Bergen and Kari Steen-Johnsen, from the Institute of Social Research at the University of Oslo. Anine Kierulf, Research fellow at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo was moderator for the evening.

From behind the Berlin Wall

In his early career, Professor Garton Ash has focused a lot of his attention to the political developments in Eastern and Central Europe and has witnessed many of the most significant turning points in modern European history at close range. He explains how these experiences has shaped his approach to the free speech debate.

“I had the great good fortune to chronicle the liberation of Eastern Europe from the late 1970s. I lived in East Berlin in the time before the revolutions of 1989 and knew many of the political dissidents and the the leaders of the solidarity movement. The Stasi compiled a file on me, which later became the subject of one of my books. (…) My personal experience of censorship has certainly contributed to my interest in issues related to freedom of expression. I still have a Polish censor’s verdict, censoring one of my articles about Poland in 1989 hanging on my bathroom wall in Oxford, as a reminder of that time.”

Given recent developments and the dismay about Europe these days, Ash reminds us, it is important to remember what an amazing achievement the unification of Europe after 1989 was, and how important the European Union was for the political development in the east bloc countries.

Free speech in the global neighborhood

Following the political changes in Europe and elsewhere, mass migration and technological developments over the last few decades have fundamentally changed the terms for how we communicate and exercise our freedom of speech.  “We live in an extraordinary moment”, says Garton Ash, “where the internet and particularly the smartphone, in principle makes it possible for us to be in direct contact with more than half of the total world population. Potentially everyone is becoming the neighbor of everybody else.”

In the process of writing Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, Garton Ash has been dedicated to include non-western perspectives and material in the project. The ten principles he sets forward in the book have been presented and discussed in 13 different languages at the project website freespeechdebate.com, which is administered by Garton Ash with support from his colleagues in the Oxford University research group. The process has been both challenging and exhausting, Garton Ash explains, yet the multilingual approach has also been essential to the value of the work.

“We can no longer go out as we did in the 1990’s and say: Hey world, we’ve worked it all out. The Indian, Russian and Chinese are no longer ready for that. They are no longer ready for readymade solutions by white, middle-aged men. (…) If you look at the accessible literature on free speech, how many examples do you find from Russia, China, Brazil or India? Almost none. The discussion is overwhelmingly western. Yet, the front line in the global struggle for free speech, are not here in Europe, and certainly not in the United States, it lies in what I refer to as the swing states of free speech, countries like India, Brazil and South Africa. To fully grasp the complexity of issues related to free speech in our time, a multilingual approach is crucial.”

“One of the interesting things about the internet,” Garton Ash points out “is that in a way political frontiers are transcended, but linguistic barriers are still incredibly strong. We all stick to our own “wikinations” on the internet. There is an amazing lack of overlap between for example the German and English Wikipedia. (…) At the same time, we find that there is a lot of overlap in what people care about. Wherever I go, people are concerned about privacy, they’re concerned about anonymity, about closing down free speech in the name of national security, about how we speak to each other, and how we can establish and preserve robust civility.”

“If you read the press coverage, you would think that the only debate about free speech in the Islamic world is religion, but no, there’s a whole range of issues on which we agree, and then there are a few very important ones on which we do not agree, that we need to home in on.”

Law, the state and civil society

The internet represents both a huge unprecedented chance, and an unprecedented risk, according to Garton Ash. “Part of the risk is that there is just so much hate, abuse, stupidity and insult flowing across the internet. (…) So what do we do about this absolute explosion of hate speech, facilitated by the internet?”

“In Europe, we too often immediately look to the state, the law and the police to handle these challenges. My basic liberal principle is, that in a free society we should try to do as much as possible ourselves in the realm of civil society, and only the minimum necessary by law. (…) Then what is the minimum necessary? Particularly in this context, where even the minimum is a huge amount of speech, it is necessary for the state to concentrate its efforts. I suggest that the law should concentrate on a narrower category of hate speech, which I call dangerous speech. That is, forms of expressions that either directly or indirectly might lead to actual violence, physical harm, or serious psychological harm.”

Aiming for Robust Civility

To meet the challenges of our time, Garton Ash argues that we must collectively work to bring about a culture of robust civility that do not silence problematic voices, but encourage a broad spectrum of opinions.

“Robust civility is what we should be aiming for in all our interactions. Domestically, nationally and internationally. The reason you have the adjective and the noun, is that civility alone tends to say too little. It is tea with the Archbishop of Canterbury. (…) Too much civility and we don’t get it said. Too robust, and we start punching one another on the nose, so it’s that balance we need, where we can manage to talk about everything, including the most difficult topics.”

In this work, a huge responsibility rests on our schools and universities, which is often where we first encounter opinions that are different from our own. These institutions, says Ash, functions as training grounds where we can learn the necessary methods of discussion. For example, the exercise of constructive controversy, where you take shifts in arguing for opposite positions. “Everything that is about closing down, or shutting people up, we have to look at three times to see if it is really necessary? Usually it isn’t. But there may be a lot more we can do to enable voices.”

The necessity of privacy

I’m thinking, privacy is essential for your ability to form views in the first place”, says Anine Kierulf “In the sense that you need to have privacy to think through different perspectives and try them out in a safe space, within your family or amongst your friends. This space is being challenged by the internet and also by some of the superpowers, as we’ve seen with the case of NSA and Edward Snowden. What are your thoughts about this?”

“The internet has certain absolutely basic existential features. One is, that it compresses time and space in an unprecedented way. Previously we could assume that something said or printed in Bergen would not be there in London or Berlin, and that it would probably be forgotten in ten years’ time. Now, something said in Bergen twenty years ago is still there in Bangalore today.”

“Another existential feature of the internet is that it makes it much easier to make something public, and much more difficult to keep something private. And privacy is not just something that has to be balanced against free speech, it’s a precondition for free speech. Why was it so ghastly living in East Germany? Because you could never be sure the Stasi weren’t listening. (…) If we are not sure that anything is private, that is so massively inhibiting to free speech.”

“In this light, let us note that what Facebook and Google know about their users today goes way beyond a Stasi general wildest dreams. The Stasi was nothing compared to Facebook, and the way we use social media today relies on an enormous trust in the new private superpowers. It becomes doubly dangerous when the private superpowers are covertly sharing that information with public superpowers such as NSA and the other state intelligence agencies. (…) If you put together private superpower and public superpower you get a terrifying and potentially very dangerous totalitarian regime. Pushing back on that is essential for free speech.

Status quo for free speech in Norway

Kari Steen-Johnsen is Research Director at the Institute for Social Research. Her current projects include «The state of freedom of speech in Norway 2015-2017. » At the debate, she commented on the status of free speech in Norway based on both qualitative and quantitative data and experiences from this project.

“Overall, the Norwegian context provides good preconditions for free speech. We are in a country that is affluent, democratic and stable, with a relatively consensual political system and strong protection of free speech by law. (…) The main attitude is amongst out informants is that hate speech should be allowed, and that we should not use the court system and legal sanctions to deal with these issues. This indicates some traits of robust civility.”

Based on the more general data from the project, Steen-Johnsen in particular points out two areas of concern for free speech in Norway. “The first is related to self-censorship. There seems to be a general fear of offending other people. Only 9% say that they would be willing to utter a statement that was important to them, if there is a risk of offending someone else. (…) We also looked into the ethnic and religious minorities in particular. Even though their presence and willingness to speak has increased strongly in the past few years, there is still a reluctance due to the curse of representability: the fear of being reduced in others’ view to   a particular ethnic stereotype, makes the ethnic minorities hold back with their views. There is an interesting paradox with those who are critical of immigration: It seems that they are in general more willing to speak out if there is a danger of being perceived as racist or to offend other people, but less willing if there is a risk of being harassed or made fun of. In other words, there is a parallel development of increased offensiveness, but also increased vulnerability in this group.”

The other challenge, says Steen-Johnsen, has to do with the dynamics of political debate in social media. “Overall we see more politically segmented views on tolerance now than before. The problem is perhaps both a result of echo chambers and of what we call trench warfare. Our informants report that they often discuss issues with people of a different opinion, but only very rarely change their minds after having done so. Which means that even though we have this sphere where opinions are tested across the spectrum, it might not contribute to a greater mutual understanding across the political spectrum.”

The right to be informed

Jostein Gripsrud points to another important point in the debate, which is that freedom of speech is not only about the freedom expression, but also about the freedom of information. That is, the rights, not only of the speaker, but also of the listener and the general public.

“There’s always a need for what Cass Sunstein would call general interest intermediaries”, Gripsrud says, “This has traditionally been the role of public service broadcasting and newspapers, but we also need such spaces internationally and online, (…) public spheres where people leave their filter bubbles and safe spaces to meet and talk.”

“It is getting increasingly difficult to define the borders between the public and private sphere. When discussing these topics I find it is helpful to talk less about cultures and more about countries, since the term culture is often used very vaguely and in sweeping statements. An illustrative example can be the case of official tax records. In Norway and the other Nordics it has been common practise for that tax records are open and made official, while it would be illegal to publish the same tax records for individuals in Britain. (…) It is interesting to note how two so culturally similar countries can have so different opinions about where to draw the line between what is public, what is private and what is publishable.”

With regard to how we can ensure freedom of information, Garton Ash again underlines the role of schools and other educational institutions, along with public broadcasting services. “If you have good public service broadcasting, then hang onto it for dear life! Make sure it has enough money and enough freedom.”

“All the same, it is important that we realize the extent of the changes we see in the media landscape. When 30-40% of people’s news input comes from their Facebook feed, the impact of social media and privately owned public spheres (POPS) is undeniable. (…) And it has all happened so fast. It is as if Lichtenstein had become a superpower in two years. Even if the people in charge of these new private superpowers are good liberal people, it is near inevitable that they are struggling with the power they have.”

“Rather than taking a confrontational stance I think we need to engage in a conversation with the private superpowers. To offer advice and engage in the conversation about how they can handle the position and power surplus they have now obtained”.

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(Please note that the above is a partial, not complete transcript of the conversation that took place. The full discussion can be viewed in the video above.)

The Holberg Debate is inspired by Ludvig Holberg as man of the Age of Enlightenment and seeks explore pressing issues of our time. The debate will be held annually on 3 December, Holberg’s birthday, starting this year.