Editorial #44: Vorauseilender Gehorsam

The Northern Hemisphere is in springtime, which means new life, rejuvenation, and an end to the cold. In nature, that is. In the metaphorical sense, it feels like our world has entered an endless winter that is only getting worse. While a blog post cannot possibly touch on everything going wrong in the world right now, there is one alarming issue that Völkerrechtsblog has become part of: allowing authoritarians to intimidate their opposition into silence. At least that is how I have sometimes felt. Allow me to explain:

Our editorial team was recently contacted by two different authors independently of one another, both asking that their years-old blog posts be taken down. One of these posts was critical of (pre-Trump!) policies of the United States’ government, the other of policies of the Russian government under Putin. Both authors in broad terms justified their requests for deletion with concerns related to their own or their loved ones’ personal safety and security vis-à-vis the US and Russian governments.

Seeing as we ultimately complied with both requests, I cannot go into further detail on the content of these posts, as not to render their takedowns pointless. However, the reasoning behind the requests, our handling of them, and our wider takedown policy deserve public discussion.

Disappearing Dissidents

Anyone who has been following the news in recent weeks has read about the United States’ current government punishing persons exercising their freedom of expression. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio boasted of canceling hundreds of student visas, and people such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk have been arrested and kept in detention for weeks without adequate access to medical care. Neither has been charged with crimes, of course–the basis for their detention is, respectively, participating in pro-Palestine protests and co-authoring an opinion piece in calling for the recognition of genocide in Gaza. Expressing certain views as a noncitizen has become untenable–not to mention the fact that even US citizens are being treated as noncitizens without due process when it serves the government’s agenda.

This is not meant to be Russia apologism. I do not pretend that the US and Russia treat dissidents the same way. Thankfully, as of yet, the US still falls short of actually murdering dissidents on US soil, as Russia has done time and time again. Criticizing the Russian government can lead to 16-year prison sentences or the critic’s family members being sent to the front line in Ukraine.

However, one can understand why authors with personal ties to either country may be getting increasingly nervous about their criticism being public.

Self-Censorship, Good Academic Practice, and Decisions on Principle

That brings us to Völkerrechtsblog hosting the above-mentioned posts critical of the two governments. Our initial reaction to both requests for deletion was skeptical. Drawing first on the Committee on Publication Ethics’ (COPE) Retraction Guidelines, the question of ex-post self-censorship and authors’ fears for personal safety and security are not regulated. Moreover, posts on Völkerrechtsblog are published under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license, which irrevocably grants the public use of them–and, similarly, does not provide for safety and security exceptions.

The secondary issue of removing academic publications is the effect on pieces which cite them. Articles on Völkerrechtsblog are archived by the State Library of Berlin and the German National Library and thus made available in academic databases. They can readily be used as sources in the same manner as journal articles or books. Unilaterally retracting a post breaks the chain of citation and can thereby hurt academic discourse.

Another consideration on principle is that of privilege: is it fair to remove one author’s blog post to protect them from persecution when other critics do not have access to the same protection (for example because they participated in protests or their publications were relayed in other media)? Do retractions by some authors not thereby make others even more vulnerable?

With these considerations in mind, we took the view that such retractions should be allowed when necessary, but remain exceptions to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

This, however, poses the issue of putting the editorial team in a position of assessing what threat level we think authors should have to accept, and what dangers are sufficient to justify retraction. In our internal discussions, there was general agreement that fear of persecution at the hands of the Russian government justified retraction. But what about having your US student visa cancelled? Would that bad enough to justify self-censorship? Our would we ask authors to risk detention or worse before complying with their requests? Who are we to decide what threat level authors must accept? A slippery slope highlighting our own biases and preconceptions about Russia and the US, and a topic easily discussed on principle when one is not personally affected.

Still, even if erring on the side of protecting our authors, do we not make ourselves tools of the respective governments in allowing critics’ voices to be silenced?

Vorauseilender Gehorsam

This brings me to the concept of vorauseilender Gehorsam, or ‘anticipatory obedience’–the notion of acting to comply, in advance, with governmental pressure on certain issues. The German term is inextricably linked to the early phases of Nazi rule, in which public and private institutions acted to implement the regime’s agenda before actually being directed to. This inevitably aided the regime in cementing its power and paved the way for the discrimination of Jews and others that lead to the Holocaust. Vorauseilender Gehorsam has been used to describe Russian academia’s increasing carefulness in criticizing Putin’s government. Translated into English, the term has made a comeback in the context of US universities, newspapers, the Library of Congress and others implementing policies or otherwise acting in line with Trump’s wishes–hurting democracy and hurting other people in order to soften the blow against oneself. Bullying as a form of governmental power brings changes in behavior by those who fear retribution, quick to fall in line to avoid being next.

I don’t mean to criticize individual authors for caving to this pressure, and I certainly do not want to compare their anticipatory obedience with that of large (research) institutions that have the power to stand up and choose not to. Nobody can be faulted for protecting their own in the face of danger. At this point, allow me to assure authors who find themselves in similar positions regarding their posts on Völkerrechtsblog that you can always reach out to the editorial team for help.

Nevertheless, the principle of the matter is worrying. The more posts we agree to delete to protect individuals in anticipation of retribution against them, the more we become a part of this new vorauseilender Gehorsam, the more we legitimize the bullies, the more we play a part in changing the world to the worse.

I am afraid of the developments to come, and I sincerely hope that Völkerrechtsblog can, for a majority of authors, remain a space for open and frank criticism of authoritarians.