The six members of the Olympia city council on the panel that evening were
themselves conflicted as to the proper scope and purpose of sister city
relationships and the appropriate roles of local authorities and citizens in
relation to sister cities. Furthermore, their responses indicate that most, if not
all, had held firm beliefs about the desirability or otherwise of the proposed
relationship prior to hearing the citizens’ testimonies. As noted above, for
councillors Johnson and Ware, there appeared to be little by way of a boundary
separating matters of personal conscience and their duties as public officials.
Berezin (2001:83) equates political identities with public identities, noting that
they are often subordinate to private identities, but for these two councillors
they appeared to be as one; their support for the sister city proposal was part of
their all-encompassing moral commitment to addressing global peacelessness
at all scales. Both spoke of experiencing difficulties in maintaining ‘face’ in a
world of ubiquitous violence, whether by looking in the mirror, facing the day,
facing children, or telling a child that it was worth facing the day. Both
accordingly felt a strong imperative to set an example to others in their
capacities as local officials, by formally committing the city to an initiative that
spoken at the hearing, they understood the sister cities model to be a tried and
tested structure for achieving this goal.
Indicating that ‘her heart was ready to make a motion’, Mayor Pro Tem
Ware situated her support for the proposal within the context of the two violent
incidents that had occurred earlier in the week of the hearing. This councillor
framed terrorism as a global problem to which no country was immune,
whether from within or from without. Therefore in her estimation, any means
for finding global solutions, such as the sister city relationship under
discussion, deserved to be supported. To her mind, it was the courageous
citizen group the ORSCP and its supporters that were leading the city of
Olympia forward with a peace building, global agenda, and she understood any
negative response on the part of council to be an obstruction of that necessary
project.
LW: I cannot, in good conscience, do anything but make a motion tonight to make an official sister city relationship with Rafah. We are not going to change the world if we don’t honour the person to person relationships in our local cities. People said, well, we’re talking about relationships with terrorists. Yes, there are terrorists in Rafah. No-one’s denying that. There are terrorists in this country. I don’t want to be judged by Timothy McVeigh and I don’t want to be judged by George Bush. This is about just everybody finding out where the common ground is and starting to have dialogue so we can go forward, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If it can happen with Japan, after they bombed Pearl Harbour and we dropped the bombs onto two of their cities, we can have a relationship here, and it’s the only hope we have in the world that we live in today. The stuff in Vermont this week and the mayor in Japan being assassinated – it’s sometimes hard to get up in the morning, and it’s sometimes hard to face our kids and say it’s worth going on. And till you get with a group like this that’s willing to go to a place where it’s dangerous - and absolutely it’s dangerous, I don’t want to pretend that it’s not - but there
are people willing to go across dangerous borders in order to try and change the world. And I am not going to stand in anybody’s way, and if having an official city sponsored relationship gets you the resources through Sister Cities International for interpreters and other services, then so be it, we need that.
Councillor TJ Johnson also had no doubt as to the legitimacy of the sister city
proposal under discussion, or the desperate need for sister city relationships in
general as a means of addressing pervasive violence at a global scale. His
response was the longest of all speakers, and he introduced it by expressing his
moral aversion to violence and hope for a sister city alternative that could, in
the terminology of the Eisenhower story, bypass the constraints of the nation
state. His response also accorded with Cr. Ware’s in the degree of personal
subjectivity and emotional intensity it conveyed.
TJJ: I’m absolutely sick of the violence in the world, and I don’t know how to get up every day and face the day, or to tell my kid that it’s worth facing the day. So when I approach this question, it’s really simple for me. The only
question is what action has the best chance of reducing violence and promoting peace? That’s really simple. That’s all there is to this. And when looked at in that context, the answer is clear. Reaching out to people and talking to them has a better chance of reducing violence than ignoring them, pretending they don’t exist, or demonising them. . … The whole origin of the sister city business, it was set up during the Cold War, and as was pointed earlier, it wasn’t set up to say but don’t talk to anyone on the other side of the Cold War, it was set up to get around that and to get people to understand that the only way to solve these problems and to get past the due political state stuff is people-to-people.
Cr. Johnson went on to justify the moral stance he had taken on the local issue
at hand with reference to macro political theory. For this councillor, as for the
their governments offered the best, and perhaps the only, hope for a more
peaceful word order, and were a necessary foil to the belligerence of nation
states. To his mind, local authorities had a clear duty to demonstrate initiative
and community leadership, which outweighed any of the particular objections
that had been levelled at the Olympia-Rafah proposal.
TJJ: Joe Hyer said something really that stuck with me recently. He talked about the fact that nation states are increasingly irrelevant, because they can’t respond to the challenges of the world today, and Joe made a pretty
compelling case for the rise of city-states, or the resurgence of city states, since they were once the dominant factor. And so much of what keeps coming back to this council just seems to point to the truth of Joe’s observation there. We’re not solving any of these big problems at the federal level or through international agreements; the stuff that’s working and the progress that’s happening is happening because of people and it’s happening at the city level. Cities are taking on climate change; cities are talking on nuclear weapons; cities are taking on the war; cities are taking on impeachment, because nobody else is doing this stuff. And this is another opportunity for a city to show leadership and to get around the roadblocks that are created by the nation state and by our government and by the government of Israel and by the Arab governments that support the terrorists in the Middle East. None of that stuff is going to fix the problem. …The only hope of diminishing the violence, of making it less of a mess, is trying something new. Like talking to each other. Like reaching out to people that you might not agree with, that are culturally different, that have linguistic differences and trying to find your common humanity in the context of all of that.
The remaining four council members all voted against the proposal. In line
with the framing of opponents of the sister city proposal, they were
unanimously troubled by the effects it was having on their local community,
next to speak. In a brief and measured speech, he responded specifically to
three of the arguments that had been made by opponents of the proposal:
divisiveness within the city, the suggestion of a trilateral arrangement and the
absence of any necessity for council approval of an already successful
humanitarian project. Like Cr. Johnson, he attributed international agency to
local authorities, but in a form that seemed to him to be more evenly applied.
In his opinion, the sister city project would cease to be divisive and become a
tool for peace building in the Middle East only if a sister city relationship were
also established with an Israeli city, through which Olympians could work at a
local level to reconcile all afflicted parties.
DM: I believe that the proposal, although well-intended, has created conflict in our community. It is divisive, because, although it may be again
unintentional, it requires the council, and subsequently, the community, to choose a side, to make a political statement. And we’ll be choosing a side in an ongoing conflict, not only from afar, but also now the conflict that is in our own community. And I think it’s an ongoing conflict that is best served by a trilateral arrangement between Rafah, an Israeli city and the city of Olympia. And I would encourage the council to support a trilateral arrangement that would allow us to play a needed reconciliation role between Israel, Palestine and the United States. .. I also want to encourage the group to continue the people-to –people and humanitarian efforts without the support or recognition of the Olympia city government and without the divisiveness and conflict that such support may bring.
Councillor Karen Messmer’s response also illustrated her preoccupation with
the issue of divisiveness, but she referred in addition to two other significant
factors that had shaped her decision. The first was that the consequences for
council and for the people of Rafah of rejection of the proposal would be low,
decision made. The second was the distinction she drew between a
‘government’ program and a ‘people to people’ program. For this councillor,
the kinds of activities conducted by the ORSCP were clearly not the legitimate
concern of council. Not only did they require a policy statement on matters that
fell outside its area of jurisdiction, but they also threatened its integrity within
that jurisdiction. Cr. Messmer’s speech points to a paradox within the
‘structure’ component of the sister city model: formal municipal endorsement
constitutes both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Proponents of
contentious sister city proposals seek council approval because of the high
level of symbolic legitimacy it confers on their projects, but that same
symbolic legitimacy is anathema to those who oppose those proposals. It is the
symbolism of official naming, rather than the ideologies or activities of the
proposing groups themselves, which generate the public opposition that
ultimately dooms them to failure.
KM: I think people-to-people relationships are very important and … I am very impressed that this organisation has done some amazing work. You’ve done all this work without necessarily having a government endorsement of that work and I’m not clear that designating a sister city from this government, the city government here now, would be the appropriate thing to do. I don’t think that not giving the designation diminishes at all what is going on. I want to encourage it to continue to go on. But this is a people-to-people program, not a government relationship, and by endorsing this, whether we want it to or not, it does make a policy declaration. It makes a policy statement. And unfortunately, that official government involvement could worsen the kind of disagreements that we’ve heard here tonight, about whether we should have this kind of relationship in an official way. I didn’t hear anybody say that the people who are doing the sister city activities shouldn’t do them. I heard them saying that a government endorsement of that is going to create a situation that they’re uncomfortable with. The proposal that’s before us to make an
official sister city should be something that we can endorse that is extending a hand where we’re saying we represent the community at large to do this. And with all the emails and the testimony that we’ve heard on this issue, I don’t hear a uniformity, or even a large majority one sided or the other, about this situation. There is a large support, but there’s also a lot of people who are very uncomfortable with this, with the governmental endorsement. So I want to encourage the Rafah group to continue to do what they’re doing and people to people relationships are important, but I can’t support the official sanction of this at this point.
For Councillor Jeff Kingsbury (JK), not only was the proposal divisive, but the
controversy he had seen enacted in his municipality had been generated
unnecessarily by the act of bringing it before council for official approval. In
his opinion, humanitarian or friendship projects did not require council
involvement. Furthermore he could not understand why the ORSCP and its
supporters would not accept a compromise in the form of a tripartite
relationship, which would also include an Israeli community.
JK: I wish that I could support this proposal, but I cannot. I am very
concerned about entering into a sister city relationship with a city on the other side of the world, when our own community is clearly divided over this issue. If we cannot come to some unity here in our own community about it, then I’m not comfortable entering into a sister city relationship with this
community. I am comfortable with having people-to-people relationships as well, and the truth of the matter is, it doesn’t require a government entity to enter into pen-pal relationships with people and to develop strong person-to- person relationships with people all over the world, and I endorse such activities. And I’m actually dismayed that there has been some talk for some time about getting a tri-community relationship and I don‘t understand the reticence. And if it is not possible to do that, which I think sends a true
message of trying to mitigate the kinds of things that are going on in that part of the world, which are horrendous, then I’m uncomfortable endorsing this and I’m afraid I’m going to have to vote against it.
Scanning the political horizon for signs of threat, local politicians as risk
managers of the city must attend to three key questions (Kaplan and Garrick
1981, cited in Little, 2007:99), namely:
1. What can go wrong?
2. What is the likelihood that it would go wrong?
3. What are the consequences of failure?
For the councillors who voted against the proposal, the answer to the first
question lay in the conflicting interests and demands expressed by citizen
speakers during the hearing. What couldgo wrong was an ongoing and
possibly more acrimonious version of the local divisions they had already seen
enacted before their eyes in City Hall, and they perceived the likelihood of this
happening to be high. The consequences of failure were most clearly
articulated in the response of Mayor Mark Foutch (MF) who, as Chair of the
meeting, was the last panel member to speak.
His response demonstrates that there was no doubt in his mind his mind that
the venture was simply too risky to be allowed to proceed.
MF: It comes down now to whether I think the great majority of the people of Olympia are comfortable with us sanctioning this relationship in their name, in their name. We’re not just seven people. We represent the entire
community, or we should, or we try to. Many people of this community feel that this prior council, I would say, has not been very careful with the community’s reputation. Other people would disagree with that. But the council’s taken some pretty controversial stances in the past, and there are still some scars left from that and I hear about that every once in a while. There are still some mistaken impressions of some things we’ve done in the past, and that’s out there in the world and there’s very little we can do about that now.
watching this right now and where, and what they think, but we’re now in a position, as someone said, that we will be seen to be taking a side in this Arab- Israeli conflict tonight no matter what we do. We’re stuck with it. So I will fall back on a factor that council member Messmer cited and that is I don’t think our community as a whole is ready to have their city council sanction this relationship. I think we should continue to encourage the activities of the sister city project and assist them as much as possible, but as for speaking for the entire community right now, I don’t think that would be advisable. So I will not support the motion.
In the mayor’s estimation, a highly salient ethical requirement of his office was
to shield council from future blame, and the people it served from future
distress, by means of present reflexivity and caution. Once formalised, the
consequences of council decisions would be beyond the control of council. In
contrast to the expectations of courageous leadership (or support for
courageous citizen leadership) voiced by supporters of the project, dissenting
councillors agreed with citizen opponents that the appropriate role for council