The sociology of compromise (CReSPP)
John D Brewer
Professor of Post Conflict Studies
Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice, Queen’s University
Presentation to the Centre for Research on Social and Political Psychology, Queen’s
University, 25 June 2013
In preparing my comments for today I am aware of two things. First, it was only a few weeks
ago that I gave a talk to colleagues in Queen’s describing the Leverhulme Trust-funded
research programme on compromise after conflict from which today’s talk emerges;
secondly, in 2010, when at Aberdeen University, I gave a plenary lecture to CReSPP at its
inaugural conference on political psychology on the topic of compromise as a social practice.
These facts constrain me. So I will not here paint the broad backcloth to the study, and I will
try to reflect how my thoughts about compromise have developed since 2010.
Sociology’s main task, according to one of its most celebrated exponents, Zygmunt Bauman,
is to defamiliarise the familiar, or to put it another way, to make the routine strange. This is in
order to get a better grasp on what we so take for granted that it is normally hidden. And we
take compromise so for granted that sociology has not explicated it. Sociology ignores the
notion completely.
Theology, of course, lists compromise alongside other religious virtues that mark the process
of reconciliation, like turning the other cheek and loving one’s enemies, which associate it
with a sacred eschatology to be practised above all by people with personal faith. For
Christian theologians in particular, the figurehead of Jesus Christ renders compromise
unproblematic, for it is a necessary part of the Christian ethical value system and practised
as part of this tradition – but, of course, only for believers.
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Outside of bargaining theory in economics, social science neglects the term. The emergence
of political and peace psychology came very late – the American Psychological Association
developed a separate division of peace psychology only in 1991 – and this field is still
dominated by social identity theory, represented no better than here in CReSPP. This gives
political psychology a valuable focus on victims of conflict but it is inhibited from separating
out compromise as a process independent of the attitudinal correlates of peace, or the
mental health consequences of trauma, or broader processes of identity formation and
change.
And, in this respect, one of the objectives for my talk today is to establish the contrast
between psychological approaches to emotions like compromise and the sociology of
emotions.
If not in sociology and psychology, compromise is hugely popular however in philosophy.
Recently the philosopher Avishai Margalit has problematised the concept in order to identify
whether there are any moral grounds on which certain compromises ought to be rejected.
He refers to these as rotten compromises. And Queen’s University’s own David Archard has
written on what he calls ‘moral compromises’. These are compromises made for the sake of
achieving a consensus, in order to secure a morally desirable outcome when the
compromise is preferable to continued disagreement.
In order to understand the significance of these philosophical discourses on compromise for
the sociology of compromise, we first need to make a simple distinction.
It is clear that compromise enters into conflict resolution at two distinct phases. The first is
during the conflict transformation process itself, where compromise represents a willingness
amongst parties to negotiate a peace agreement that represents a second-best preference
in which they give up their first preference (victory) in order to cut a deal.
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Just as important is the second phase, when compromise is part of post-conflict
reconstruction, in which protagonists come to learn to live together despite their former
enmity and in face of the atrocities perpetrated during the conflict itself. In the first,
compromise describes reciprocal agreements between parties to the negotiations in order to
make political concessions sufficient to end conflict, in the second, compromise involves
victims and perpetrators developing ways of living together in which concessions are made
as part of shared social life. Margalit is solely concerned with the first, Archard, without
realising it, the second.
Let me expand a little on their views. Margalit’s sole concern is with political compromises,
as he describes them, not personal ones, ‘compromises between states rather than
compromises between individuals’ – for he seeks to demarcate those political compromises
states are not allowed to make for peace. Rotten compromises are those where negotiated
political agreements establish or maintain inhuman states, regimes and political orders,
based on cruelty and humiliation, where humans are not treated with dignity. Margalit lists as
examples of rotten compromises the 1938 Munich Agreement, the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact
and the 1945 Yalta Agreement.
Incidentally, this is a view of justice similar to the theologian-philosopher Nicholas
Wolterstorff, who links justice to the level of human worth and dignity people place in each
other rather than socio-economic redistribution or human rights.
As interesting as Margalit’s arguments are, they tell us nothing about compromise at the
interpersonal level between individuals and groups following communal conflict. Margalit set
his task to outline the peremptory norms that mark unacceptable political compromises
between states. The sociology of compromise, however, must set as its role the unpicking of
what compromise is like as a social practice at the social level, defamiliarising what
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compromise means when people have to come to terms with past enmity and the memories
of the conflict itself, and relate to each other in ways that consolidate the peace process.
Although not designed for the purpose, Archard’s philosophical work is much more relevant
to this task. Let me expand a little on his argument as a precursor to developing a
sociological approach.
He makes a distinction between two types of compromise, moral and non-moral
compromises. A moral compromise is a compromise over moral matters; non-moral
compromises are those over non-moral matters, even when the compromise happens to be
morally commendable. It is not the outcome that distinguishes moral compromises but the
focus of the disagreement over moral matters. This is important. Disagreements over moral
matters tend to be irreconcilable. A moral compromise occurs therefore when parties agree
to two things: when they agree around a second-best consensus but agree to continue to
disagree over first preferences. Let me repeat. Moral compromise occurs when there is
continued disagreement over moral matters but where there is a preference for a secondbest consensus rather than continued disagreement over first preferences.
Moral compromises of this sort come in two kinds, however. There are compromises where
the continued disagreement is aired publicly, and those where the disagreement is
concealed in public. Archard refers to the latter as moral compromises with public
agreement.
I wish to make two comments on these arguments that are pointers toward sociology. First, I
do not think there are moral and non-moral compromises, for the sociological formulation I
will introduce in a moment suggests all compromises are moral in that they invoke moral
rights. Secondly, in my view moral compromises with public disagreement do not constitute
compromises at all. Continued insistence in public that the compromise deal was not what
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was originally wanted sours the consensus and shows it to be fragile and unworkable.
Consensus with public disagreement does not represent consensus.
What do these objections mean for the sociology of compromise? A sociological formulation
needs to address the processes that sustain the public agreement in face of the private
disagreement. There are two dimensions to this sociological problematic, which I pose at
this point merely as questions. Why might people agree to a public consensus that masks
private disagreement? What are the factors that sustain or undermine this choice? There
are sound sociological answers to these questions. My talk today will focus primarily on
answering the first question, although I will end by referencing a sociological answer to the
second.
Archard gives us an answer to the first question from within moral philosophy. The principal
reason, according to Archard is that public agreement secures good outcomes. Whatever
beliefs people have that create private disagreements they are combined with a
countervailing belief that there are good reasons not to publicly declare these
disagreements.
This is excellent as far as it goes. Archard rightly points to the crucial difference here
between thinking it best to recommend the compromise deal and thinking the compromise is
the best that can be recommended. First preferences may be better, but if first preferences
are also perceived as unrealisable and unattainable, the compromise deal may be the best
that can be recommended in the circumstances. And, of course, binding oneself to this
public agreement, despite continued disagreement in private, is akin to the idea of collective
responsibility in Cabinet government in the Westminster model, so it is not an unfamiliar
practice. And it’s what husbands and wives do all the time when maintaining a collective
front.
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Archard’s ideas were developed in an argument that explored the continued moral
disagreements about abortion. I think they form a useful starting point to consider the
sociology of compromise following peace settlements. This is what I would like to move on
to now.
I define compromise after conflict as the reciprocal practice of tolerance and civility toward
former protagonists in the public sphere, involving an act of will to avoid behaving and talking
in public space in the ways that people’s emotions in the private sphere would normally
dictate, thereby assisting people to keep to their reciprocal obligations.
Two features of this definition stand out. First, compromise after conflict works through
civility and tolerance but is different from them. There is a long-established philosophical
debate about civility and toleration in which toleration is rendered into discrete practices
within the public sphere that assists democratic dialogue, with civility portrayed as the
exercise of tolerance in the face of deep disagreement.
However, while compromise is outworked through civility and tolerance, it is not equivalent to
them. I see them as the consequence of compromise not its cause. I contend that civility and
tolerance are premised first on the ability to compromise, such that compromise makes
civility and tolerance possible. A sociological approach to compromise is thus less
concerned with clarifying the virtues of civility and tolerance than in specifying the conditions
under which compromise allows them to flourish.
The second feature to note is that this sociological approach renders compromise into a
social practice, rather than an attitude trait or social value. The term social practice is not
used loosely. In sociology, the term social practice describes forms of relations, activities
and discursive strategies that represent social norms – which sociology understands as
agreed ways of doing things.
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This approach to compromise draws on two sets of mainstream sociological ideas: the
sociology of emotions, and the familiar distinction between public and private space. It is
necessary to specify the relevance of both in order to support the sociological view of
compromise developed here.
The sociology of emotions is a vast and well-established sub-discipline and it is not
necessary to summarise the field as a whole, but to focus more narrowly on applying its
ideas to the management of emotions in post-conflict societies. Emotions induce senses of
urgency and impatience that short-circuit people’s usual prudence but these are momentary.
However, while emotions have a short shelf life, people subject to them lack any anticipation
that these feelings will decay: we expect to continue to feel what our emotions tell us at the
moment of their experience. In this respect, people’s emotions transcend their
momentariness and can be separated from raw feelings.
Feelings and behaviour are distinct. Emotionally induced urgency, impatience and intensity
can inflame feelings within us that result in action that is thought of as unavoidable, yet these
feelings need not be enacted; the behaviour is entirely avoidable. We may choose (or not be
able) to act out the emotions we feel at the moment of their experience, for while all
emotions have behaviours related to them, these action tendencies are not encoded,
culturally or genetically, and can be overruled. This analytical discussion can be taken a
stage further.
Emotions transform when they affect behaviour. The action tendencies associated with
particular emotional feelings are performative behaviours, by which I mean actions that are
performed, behaviourally and linguistically, according to the socially learned scripts by which
emotion work is conventionally done and talked about. Emotions are artful in one of two
senses therefore, in that the feelings are constructed in their performance and this
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performance can be uncoupled from what is being felt. The latter may occur because we
may either lack any of the feelings associated with the ritualised behaviour we are enacting
and talking (we are pretending an emotion) or we are performing behaviours and talking
entirely contrary to how we feel (we are disguising an emotion).
The social practices and normative structures we experience as constraints and which
prevent us from acting out our feelings of the moment, can be used to persuade us to act
and talk in ways opposite to our momentary emotional response, whether for individual
reasons, like conscience or personal gain, or social and cultural pressure and legal sanction.
All these constraints decouple behaviour and feelings.
There is a further lesson from the sociology of emotions. Emotions are modulated by social
relations. They can be kept vivid or moderated by our social networks. Our social
relationships can assist in the reinforcement of feelings and sustain the patterns of action
and forms of talk they enact, or undermine them. In particular, dense social networks, with
high degrees of connectedness between people, such as in ethno-religious groups, closeknit neighbourhoods and the like, help establish norms of reasonableness about what is
appropriate to feel, act and say. People’s social relations thus modulate their emotions,
expurgating them, intensifying them or moderating them: in short, we become in our
emotional repertoire like the people we associate closely with. To put it colloquially, if we
sleep with dogs, we get fleas.
The sociology of emotions suggests, therefore, that compromise does not require people to
stop feeling or to suppress emotions; consensus needs to emerge around agreement to
perform the ritualised behaviours and forms of talk that people may not personally feel but
which are recognised as socially productive for the maintenance of the reciprocal
concessions in the future. This becomes feasible given people’s participation in mutually
reinforcing social networks where compromise is socially practised.
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The key to this, however, is the distinction between public and private practice, to which I
now turn. Sociology has long theorised the character of public and private space, suggesting
that the private sphere is domestic space, the sphere of home, whereas public space is the
sphere of social roles outside the home; the sphere of work, politics and civil society, where
we conform to public expectations, act according to socially agreed roles and talk with a civil
tongue and with the absence of ‘hate speech’.
Critically, however, this is not a simple binary distinction for sociology no longer theorises it
as a binary divide, for late modernity has collapsed the distinction. The public and private
penetrate each other – behaviour formerly restricted to the private sphere is now made into a
public performance (politicians crying, open displays of grief, declarations of religious faith by
public figures, and expressions of public anger and the like). The personal has become
political and public space has been domesticated.
The definition of compromise proposed here does not require the reinstatement of this as a
binary divide. Compromise is the public performance of behaviours and language scripts that
disguise private feelings and forms of talk, representing a ‘surface’ rather than ‘deep’ social
practice, to use Hoschild’s terms, one reproduced ‘front stage’ with what Illouz calls ‘cold
intimacies’ not with the full heartfelt passions of private space.
The sociology of compromise does not require that public and private spaces be portrayed
as hermetically sealed. After all, the performance of compromise in the public sphere is
heavily influenced by private considerations and will oscillate according to the array of
factors that prevent emotions momentarily being kept under management and control in
public. Private factors – an anniversary, birthday, momentary reminder of the victim
experience, flash memories provoked by music, television – penetrate the public
performance of compromise.
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I want to end by addressing two problems with this characterisation of compromise. This
disjuncture between public and private performances can in some cultures be perceived as
‘bluffing’ and ‘spoofing’, and thus counter to the modern emphasis on ‘authenticity’, of being
‘real’ and ‘true’ to oneself. The second is that it can be construed as lying and thus counter
to the modern emphasis placed on honesty.
To deal with these problems I want to distinguish between personal morality and public
morality and to return to what sociologists can learn from Archard’s depiction of moral
compromises.
Non-authenticity and dishonesty are not everywhere morally and culturally wrong, for there
can be public gains and benefits that outweigh the wrongness. Let me specify three
conditions where this is feasible.
The first condition is where the public good is served by the inauthentic performance of
civility and tolerance in the public sphere. This condition holds true, of course, only when the
compromise does not involve accommodation to human indignity and injustice, as
Wolterstorff would define it, and is reciprocal and fair.
The second condition is when the compromise defends, protects and ensures people’s
moral rights. Moral rights are those entitlements people should expect by virtue of their moral
character, where, to use the terminology of Peter Jones, people are both owed certain sorts
of conduct and where they are wronged if treated otherwise. I contend that in post-conflict
societies, people are owed the moral right to be treated with civility and tolerance, and are
wronged when this is denied them. That is to say, compromise defends and protects
people’s moral rights after conflict. Contrary to Archard then, within my sociological approach
to compromise, it is not that there moral and non-moral types of compromise – all
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compromise is moral in that it protects people’s moral rights to be treated in the public
sphere with civility and tolerance.
I use the term moral rights rather than human rights because they are not legal entitlements,
as are most human rights, but based moral claims. But they have the same universality as
human rights, inasmuch as it is contrary to public morality to be civil and tolerant to one and
not to another.
The third condition is when there are moral grounds for the public affirmation of the
compromise to the point where people are persuaded to be moral beacons despite private
reservations. These moral grounds can involve the recognition that the collectivity benefits
from the consensus against one’s private interests, and that the compromise is reasonable
in its outcomes for the collectivity as a whole, if not oneself. I have referred elsewhere to
victims’ capacity to be moral beacons.
What I have been doing up to this point is giving a sociological depiction of compromise that
helps establish sociologically why people might concur in public compromises that they may
disagree with in private. I said earlier, however, that there were two dimensions to this
sociological problematic, the second being to understand the conditions which sustain or
undermine this choice.
This brings me in closing to the problem of victims, which is, after all, the case study for our
entire Leverhulme research programme. There is nothing in my conceptualisation that
suggests that the public practice of compromise is an easy thing for victims. Compromise
does not exist in a vacuum; it operates within a repertoire of biographical responses to stress
and within a social context that can make the practice of compromise by victims very difficult,
inhibiting its outworking in public civility and tolerance.
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The social structural and biographical conditions under which compromise can be garnered
and sustained, which facilitate or constrain public civility and tolerance, therefore need
sociological explanation. Compromise is envisaged as being easier for people to perform
publicly according to several mediating factors. Not unnaturally, I call these compromise
mediators.
These are often personal and manifold, but amongst them are included, for example,
feelings of hope, the capacity for forgiveness, the ability to transcend divided memories of
the former conflict, senses of the fairness of the concessions, views about whether in
practice the concessions remain reciprocal, the social networks in which people are located,
and trust.
The way they mediate compromise – their ability to promote or undermine it – reflects what
C Wright Mills calls the ‘sociological imagination’, that is to say, the intersection of individual
biographical experience, history, power and the social structure. To elaborate on these,
however, is another talk, for which you’ll have to invite me back.
But let me test your patience by two final comments. First, I have shown, I think, that our
focus on victims is an intellectual strength of the research programme, supporting its
contention that victims throw into unusually high relief the factors that garner and maintain
the social practice of compromise. Secondly, I have also shown, I think, what a specifically
sociological approach to compromise adds to current reflections from within moral
philosophy. Thank you.
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