the elementary forms of religious life, emile durkheim
translator's introduction (karen fields)
(xix): "for durkheim, religions exist because human beings exist only as social beings and in a humanly shaped world. religion is 'an eminently social thing.'"
(xxiiii): "...the Durkheimian pedigree of Michel Foucault."
(xxv): "religion is the steady, day-in-day-out reality of millions, their routine framework of everyday activity..."
(xxxiii): "to exist at all, all communities must be imagined. what his intellectual descendant benedict anderson has so well shown for large-scale twentieth-century anticolonial nationalism is also true of any face-to-face community and of the smallest Australian clan."
(xxxiv): in sum--"bear three points in mind. first, religion is not defined in terms of anything that would turn a man of science positive away from observable phenomena, or the real--not divinity, the otherworldly... second, the phrase 'unified system' postulates that religius beliefs and rites are not hodgeppodges but are internally ordered. third, the objects of those rites and beliefs acquire their religious status as sacred, or 'set apart and forbidden,' as a result of joint action by people who set them apart and who, by the same stroke, constitute themselves a 'moral community' or 'a Church.' once again, then, religion is social, social, social."
(xxxviii): "...he assumes the Australians to be rationally constituted humans, as are their Parisian contemporaries. there is no question of one's being civilized and the other not, or of the two groups' having different mental constitutions."
(xliii): "...sacredness is eminently a representation collective... as a quality of things--or, rather, as Durkheim insists, a quality superadded to things--sacredness can come to be its real self only within the domain of collective consciousness... sacredness is an aspect of the real that exists only in the mind but cannot possibly exist as the real in only one mind."
(xlvi): "sacredness is not merely a set of peculiar relationships between people and certain designated objects. the very act that constitues those peculiar relationships also relates a designated group of people to one another and sets them apart from others to whom they are not bound and who do not have the same relationship to designated physical objects."
(li): "if durkheim's analysis is right, it suggests that this century's monstrosities in collecitve life arise not from aberrations in human reason but from what is fundamental to it. that analysis also leads to a disturbing suggestion: that the ordinary human agents who serve as raw material for extraordinary abusers of human dignity are, in vast majority, the normal and the the socially responsible... it suggests, finally, that the human nature on which we depend, our social nature, is our uplift and our downfall. the only exit from this dilemma appears to be individualism. but the incompatibility of individualist assumptions with human nature as it can be observed in the real world was chief among Durkheim's discovereies in Formes and throughout his work. what we see, through his theoretical lens of conscience collective, is present in a social world of the real that coannot be arrived at with notions of individual conscience alone... thus, in the end, there is a deep and tragic tension in Durkheim's discoveries."
introduction (1-18)
(1): "i have made a very archaic religion the subject of my research because it seems better suited than any other to help us comprehend the religious nature of man, that is, to reveal a fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity."
(2): "fundamentally, then, there are no religions that are false. all are true after their own fashion: all fulfill given conditions of human existence, though in different ways. granted it is not impossible to rank them hierarchically..." [this last point seems different from what karen fields argued earlier--and generally incommensurate with the thrust of durkheim's move, here.]
(8): "if philosophy and the sciences were born in religion, it is because religion itself began by serving as science and philosophy. further, and less often noted, religion has not merely enriched a human intellect already formed but in fact has helped to form it. men owe to religion not only the content of their knowledge, in significant part, but also the form in which that knowledge is elaborated." [form/content -- here begins the rejoinder to kant and the empiricists]
(9): critical--"the principal categories... are born in and from religion. they are a product of religious thought. this is a point that i will make again and again in the course of this book... the general conclusion of the chapters to follow is that religion is an eminently social thing. religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities; rites are ways of acting that are born only in the midst of assembled groups and whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of those groups..."
(10): "it is not my time that is organized in this way. it is time that is conceived of objectively by all men of the same civilization. this by itself is enough to make us begin to see that any such organization would have to be collective. and indeed, observation establishes that these indispensable points, in reference to which all things are arranged temporally, are taken from social life. the division into days, weeks, months, ears, etc., corresponds to the recurrence of rites, festivals and public ceremonies at regular intervals."
(12-14): where he makes the rejoinder to kant and the empiricists: "faced with these opposite objections, the intellect remains uncertain. but if the social origin of the categories is accepted, a new stance becomes possible, one that should enable us, i believe, to avoid these opposite difficulties."
(16-17): key--"society cannot leave the categories up to the free choice of individuals without abandoning itself... we feel that we cannot abandon ourselves to them without our thought's ceasing to be really human... thus the necessit with which the categories press themselves is not merely the effect of habits whose yoke we could slip with little effort; nor is that necessity a habit or a physical or metaphysical need, since the categories change with place and time; it is a special sort of moral necessity that is to intellectual life what obligation is to the will."
book one
(24): religion cannot be sought in the supernatural, because the supernatural/natural antinomy is emphatically modern. "to be able to call certain facts supernatural, one must already have an awareness that there is a natural order of things, in other words, that the phenomena of the universe are internally linked according to necessary relationships called laws."
(27): neither can it be defined by the idea of divinity (see buddhism discussion on next page)
(33-34): important--definition of religion as a "system", which consists of beliefs and rites and a sacred/profane classification, of them [here it is appropriate to raise the concerns about how religions ossify and are cast off--how, in other words, there is development? since this, as a classically structuralist position, explains everything in a state of stasis...]
(38): "sacred things are things protected and isolated by prohibitions; profane things are those things to which the prohibitions are applied and that must keep at a distance from what is sacred."
(41): the Church--"...a society whose members are united because they imagine the sacred world and its relations with the profane world in the same way, and because they translate this common representation into identical practices, is what is called a Church..."
(42): important--"a Church is not simply a priestly brotherhood; it is a moral community made up of all the faithful, both laity and priests..."
(44): definition--"a religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite into on e single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."
(44): "the second element thus holds a place in my definition that is no less essential than the first: in showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from the idea of a Church, it conveys the notion that religion must be an eminently collective thing."
(45-67): not animism, as a theory for why religion emerges
(68-83): not naturism
(84-85): "since, in themselves, neither man nor nature is inherently sacred, both acquire sacredness elsewhere."
(91): "first, for the sociologist as for the historian, social facts exist in relationship with the social system to which they belong; hence they cannot be understood apart from it..."
(91-92): "the comaprative method would be impossible if social types did not exist, and it cannot be usefully applied except within the same type." [the place to ask, again, about the 'social type' vs. 'ideal type' method]
book two
(100): two essential traits of the clam: 1. a bond of a particular sort, because they bear the same name. 2. the name it bears is also that of a definites species of material things with which it thinks it has a special relationship...
(118): "thus, while the totem is a collective label, it also has a religious character. in fact, things are classified as sacred and profane by reference to the totem. it is the very archetype of sacred things."
(124): "this sacredness stems from one cause: it is a material representation of the clan..." [even if he means 'literally material' here, this still gives us an opportunity to ask about how his position here, and in general, resembles historical materialism.]
(145-146): e.g., how the idea of 'genus', or 'class' is born as a result of clan organization--"thus we have our first opportunity to test the proposition put forward at the beginning of this work and to assure ourselves that the fundamental notions of the intellect, the basic categories of thought, can be the product of social factors. the preceding shows that this is indeed the case for the notion of category itself."
(148): "in all probability, then, we would never have thought of gathering the beings of the universe into homogeneous groups, called genera, if we had not had the example of human societies before our eyes--if, indeed, we had not at first gone so far in making things members of the society of men..."
(156): "in sum, totemic organization as just described clearly must result from a sort of consensus among all the members of the tribe, without distinction. each clan cannot possibly have developed its beliefs in an absolutely independent manner; the cults of the various totems complement one another exactly, and so they must necessarily have been in some sense adjusted to one another." [here, must interrogate what work is being done by the notion of "consensus" -- this, again, is durkheim's strong (methodological-philosophical) bias in favor of non-contradiction, resolved tensions, etc.]
(191): the 'force'--"totemism is not the religion of certain animals, certain men, or certain images; it is the religion of a kind of anonymous and impersonal force that is identifiable in each of these beings but identical to none of them."
(192): "when i speak of these principles as forces, i do not use the word in a metaphorical sense; they behave like real forces."
(202): "that way of imagining religious things is by no means inherent in their nature. at the origin and basis of religious thought, we find not definite and distinct objects or beings that in themselves possess sacredness but indefinite powers and anonymous forces."
(208): key--"it follows from the same analysis that the totem expresses and symbolizes two different kinds of things. from one point of view, it is the outward and visible form of what i have called the totemic principle or god; and from another, it is also the symbol of a particular society that is called the clan. it is the flag of the clan, the sign by which each clan is distinguished from the others... thus, if the totem is the symbol of both the god and the society, is this not because the god and the society are one and the same?... thus the god of the clan, the totemic principle, can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan transfigured and imagined in the physical form of the plant or animal that serves as totem." [here we have the loose contours of an important contribution, definitely--but i want to know much more about the nature of the link. what kind of a totemic principle is produced by different kinds of society? and isn't it unavoidable that this principle is produced by specific sectors of society? where is the consensus, emile? the fact that people reproduce something does not mean that they produced it? of course he will no accept this as an intelligible question. partly, of course, this entire line of questioning is complicated by his methodology--he is using 'primitive communism' to explain highly stratified societies. surely, stratification will begin to matter as we interrogate the notion of 'consensus'?]
(208): "society in general, simply be its effect on men's minds, undoubtedly has all that is required to arouse the sensation of the divine. a society is to its members of what a god is to its faithful."
(209-211): notion of 'moral authority' -- which we attribute to the 'divine' but is, in actual fact, something that society exerts upon us.
(214): "because we feel the weight of them, we have no choice but to locate them outside ourselves..."
(215): "just as society consecrates men, so it also consecrates things, including ideas..." [what is the nature of this agency?]
(223): "because the religious force is none other than the collective and anonymous force of the clan..."
(224): "such moral powers do not express the manner in which natural things affect our senses but the manner in which the collective consciousness affects individual consciousness."
(226): important--again, an exceedingly strong, stable conception of hegemony (and, then, where to for resistance?) -- "each individual carries the whole in himself. it is part of him, so when he yields to its promptings, he does not think he is yielding to coercion but instead doing what his own nature tells him to do." [this is what craig was saying--durkheim will not be helpful if we want to understand rebellion. but if we want to understand restraint/passivity, he's our man. to an extent, of course]
(227): "religion is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it. such is its paramount role."
(229): important, and demonstrates his interesting insistence on seeing the modern and primitive together--"even though purely ideal, the powers thereby conferred on the object behave as if they were real. they determine man's conduct with the same necessity as phsycial forces. the Arunta who has properly rubbed himself with his churinga feels stronger; he is stronger... the soldier who falls defending his flag certainly does not believe he has sacrificed himself to a piece of cloth. such things happen because social thought, with its imperative authority, has a power that individual thought cannot possibly have. by acting on our minds, it can make us see things in the light that suits it..." [there is, perhaps, a positive project here, in deconstruction of this social (arbitrary?) authority? though, in durkheim, the tragic would re-assert itself, no doubt.]
(230): "the sacredness exhibited by the thing is not implicated in the intrinsic properties of the thing. it is added to them. the world of the religious is not a special aspect of empirical nature. it is superimposed upon nature."
(233): "we know, in fact, that social phenomena are born not in the individual but in the group. no matter what part we may play in their genesis, each of us receives them from without." [what would it mean to introduce the notion of class, here?]
(238): "we know furthermore that these religious ideas are the outcome of definite social causes... thus, it is social requirements that have fused together ideas that at first seem distinct..." [again, this is society in the abstract, not class society in the concrete. what would it mean to perform that transformation?]
(240): "...there is no gulf between the logic of religious thought and the logic of scientific thought..."
(242-275): inquiring after the soul -- see 265, where he writes, "the idea of the soul is a particular application of the bleifs relative to sacred things. in this way may be explained the religious character this idea has displayed ever since it appeared in history and that it still has today. the soul has always been considered a sacred thing; in this respect it is opposed to the body, which in itself is profane."
(276-279): inquiring after spirits and gods, beginning to track religion as it becomes steadily more complex
book three
(303): role of rites--"by definition, sacred beings are beings set apart. what distinguishes them is a discontinuity between them and profane beings. normally, the two sorts of beings are separate from one another. a whole complex of rites seeks to bring about that separation, which is essential..."
(304): introducing the notion of 'taboo'--"the institution in accordance with which certain things are withdrawn from ordinary use."
(312-313): generally-speaking, we see that sacred and profane life cannot exist at the same time, or same space
(316): asceticism
(400): taking it too far? -- "there is no relationship between the feelings felt and the actions done by those who take part in the rite." [here discussing funeral rites, which seems a classic overstatement]
conclusion
(418): seeing the study of primitive society as the opening phase of an inductive investigation
(420): "the cult is not merely a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly expressed; it is the sum total of means by which that faith is created and recreated periodically."
(420): footnote william james -- "like a recent apologist of faith, i accept that religious belief rests on a definite experience, whose demonstrative value is, in a sense, not inferior to that of scientific experiments..."
(421): "i have shown what moral forces it develops and how it awakens that feeling of support, safety, and protective guidance which binds the man of faith to its cult." [here we are deepening the arg re: consensus -- does it serve a personal need, also, and not just a social need?]
(421): "as i have shown, even collective ideas and feelings are possible only through the overt movements that symbolize them. thus it is action that dominates religious life, for the very reason that society is its source."
(421): "along the way, i have established that the fundamental categories of thought, and thus science itself, have religious origins... in short, then, we can say that nearly all the great social institutions were born in religion. for the principal features of collective life to have begun as none other than various features of religious life it is evident that religious life must necessarily have been the eminent form and, as it were, the epitome of collective life."
(422): interesting--echoes of discipline and punish, without any of the political implications--"in the end, the point is not to exert a kind of physical constraint upon blind, and, more than that, imaginary forces but to reach, fortify, and discipline consciousness."
(424): quite ambitious--the distinction between the real and the ideal can only be explained by my framework, he's arguing--"since what defines the sacred is that the sacred is added to the real. and since the ideal is defined in the same way, we cannot explain the one without explaining the other."
(424): "thus the formation of an ideal is by no means an irreducible datum that eludes science. it rests on conditions that can be uncovered through observation. it is a natural product of social life."
(425): "it is in the school of collective life that the individual has learned to form ideals. it is by assimilating the ideals worked out by society that the individual is able to conceive of the ideal."
(426): key, why my theory is not historical materialism--"in pointing out an essentially social thing in religion, i in no way mean to say that religion simply translates the material forms and immediate vital necessities of society into another language. i do indeed take it to be obvious that social life depends on and bears the mark of its material base, just as the mental life of the individual depends on the brain... but collective consiocusness is something other than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological base, just as individual consciousness is something other than a mere product of thenervous system. if collective consciousness is to appear, a sui generis synthesis of individual consciousness must occur... they mutually attract one another... none of these combinations is directly commanded and necessitated by the state of the underlying reality.." [unless i am misinterpreting, this seems at odds with the presentation, earlier. isn't he giving an unreasonable autonomy to the individual, here? and anyway this is theoretical very unsatisfactory--the collective consciousness emerging more-or-less randomly, as product? doesn't make any scientific sense. why is it that, confronted with marxism, these people are afraid to defend themselves properly? he has eschewed the possibility of generalization, neglecting that this is what his study has done, throughout.]
(427): "we can now judge the worth of the radical individualism that is intent on making religion out to be a purely individual thing: it misconceives the fundamental conditions of religious life... the only hearth at whcih we can warm ourselves morally is the hearth made by the company of our fellow men."
(429): "there can be no society that does not experience the need at regular intervals to maintain and stregnthen the collective feelings and ideas that provide its coherence and its distinct individuality." [this opens up grounds for a study of 'nationalism' as a durkheimian study of religion, certainly--he does this and more throughout his work]
(429): speaking of unjust inequalities. my my (remember, this is his last work)
(430): french revolution, and why "it instituted a whole cycle of celebrations in order to keep the principles that inspired it eternally young."
(430): "religion is not only a system of practices but also a system of ideas whose object is to express the world..."
(431): science, and religion; the same goal, hence a (limited) incompatibility (see below, also) -- "in this regard, both pursue the same goal; scientific thought is only a more perfected form of religious thought. hence it seems natural that religion should lose ground as science becomes better at performing its task... although the offspring of religion, science tends to replace religion in everything that involves the cognitive and intellectual functions."
(432): science and religion, con't -- "science is said to deny religion in principle. but religion exist; it is a system of given facts; in short, it is a reality. how could science deny a reality? furthermore, insofar as religion is action and insofar as it is a means of making men live, science cannot possibly take its place. although science expresses life, it does not create life, and science can very well seek to explain faigh but by that very fact presupposes faith. hence there is conflict on only a limited point."
(434): "the basic material of logical thought is concepts. to try to discover how society could have played a role in the genesis of logical thought therefore amounts to asking how it can have taken part in the formation of concepts."
(435): change, in concepts (when there is some imperfection) -- can this take us away from what is otherwise a theory of stasis?
(435): the 'concept' is always an emphatically social thing -- "it is common to all because it is the work of the community."
(436): moreover, "concepts are not abstract things that have reality only in particular circumstances. they are [collective] representations just as concrete as any the individual can make of his own environment, for they correspond to the way in which the special being that is society thinks about the things of its own experience..." [again the question of society's agency]
(437): thus, "we can now begin to see society's share in the origin of logical thought. logical thought is possible only when man has managed to go beyond the fleeting representations he owes to sense experience and in the end to conceive a whole world of stable ideals, the common ground of intelligences..." (conditions for truth, he adds are two--impersonality and stability)
(438): here, oddly, a narrative of primitive-to-civilized is re-asserting itself (but it is sort of a meta- realm, so more forgivable, perhaps)
(440): "to say that concepts express the manner in which society conceives of things is also to say that conceptual thought is contemporaneous with humanity."
(441-442): key, answering why and how the categories are social, in origin, through the notion of totality--"above all, there is no individual experience, no matter how broad or prolonged, that could make us even suspect the existence of a whole genus embracing the universality of beings, and in which the other genera would be only species coordinated among, or subordinated to, one another. this notion of the whole, which lies at the basis of the classifications i have cited, cannot come to us from the individual himself, who is only a part of the whole and never comes in contact with more than an infinitesmal part of oreality... since the role of the categories is to encompass all the other concepts, the category par excellence would indeed seem to be the very concept of totality."
(443): "the concept of totality is but the concept of society in abstract form."
(443-444): "there is another reason... the relationships they express could not become conscious relationships except in and through society..."
(444): "society is possible only if the individuals and things that make it up are divided among different groups... and if those groups themeselves are classified in relation to one another..."
(445): "to summarize, society is by no means the illogical or alogical, inconsistent, and changeable being that people too often like to imagine. quite the contrary, the collective consciousness is the highest form of psychic life, for it is a consciousness of consciousness. being outside and above individual and local contingencies, collective consciousness sees things only in their permanent and fundamental aspect..."
(446): important--to the extent that there is dynamism in his picture, it is geometric--in other words, society will grow grow grow, until these concepts are stretched and need to be re-fit. it is not, though, that there is conflict.
(447): "the mystery dissolves once we have acknowledged that impersonal reason is but collective thought by another name. collective thought is possible only through the coming together of individuals..."
(448): "a new way of explaining man becomes possible as soon as we recognize that above the individual there is society, and that society is a system of active forces--not a nominal being, and not a creation of the mind..."
Showing posts with label nationalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nationalism. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Sunday, June 7, 2009
"the black man's burden," basil davidson
take-home: again, an interesting book that hints at the quirks of the man, one suspects. my initial reaction was less kind than my reaction, on reflection.
a first reading of the initial sections leads one to suspect that davidson's book will be far too kind to the precolonial. however, if you interrogate much of what he does say about the possibilities lost in africa's precolonial history, it is possible to argue, i think, that he is actually highlighting individual historical details (it doesn't help that he frames these in language that suggest the "blanket assertions" that they are perhaps not).
thus, the general merits--he makes a strong even if simple case that the failure of the "national question" to resolve the "social question" is at the root of the failures of the "nation-state." at the same time, he is clear that those who fought for the "social question" were an integral part of the "national struggle," as well. in other words, the struggle for nation-states always involved before it deceived the masses who made everything possible (1848 in Europe is obviously case-in-point).
he argues that the colonial encounter was disastrous, and decisively so, for the evolution of African institutions. here the contrast with Japanese history is introduced; Africa might very well have produced a merchant class (and, he implies, a bourgeois nationalism) had it not been so cruelly interrupted (his consistent anticolonialism on this point is great, of course.)
again, after an initial reading of the early parts, one cannot help but be struck by his emphasis on the possible virtues of this indigeneity--almost as if he is ignorant of the possibility that these polities were themselves racked by the definitional conflict over distribution of the surplus (the "class question," in other words). but as one reads further, one sees that he isn't blind to the class question, and that--indeed--it is at the core of his central thesis. so, in that sense, one is tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt--perhaps the "legitimacy" that he identifies in the precolonial was exceptional (in fairness, he establishes it in a confined way--the Asante and a couple of other examples, maybe). and if not that, perhaps it is enough to locate his reading in the anticolonial posture of his work--as a retort to the mission civilizatrice.
if one's not to give him this benefit of the doubt, then the weakness of his book is this--his failure to capture the spirit of marx on primitive accumulation, where a contempt for premodern elitisms co-exists with an indictment of bourgeois triumphalism. but, then again, it's also impossible to reject out-of-hand his unwillingness to resolve the tragedies he chronicles in orthodox marxist fashion-- with the promise of socialism. he is, after all, writing in the shadow of the USSR and the stalinist denial of national life. and in that sense he is right not to take refuge in the marxist promise.
there is, i will say, something infuriating about the way in which this theme of the "lost promise" does a disservice to the thinkers who imagined much more than the cooption of the "social question"--in other words, he seems to suggest that we can only see the loss of the "social question" with hindsight, a posture that allows his solution to suggest itself. but people understood the prominence of the "social question" and the importance of responsiveness to "spontaneity," but they still failed. that really is our burden.
nonetheless, even if the ending is somewhat trite and facile (that the answer to the perils of the nation-state lie in more and better democracy), the book is by no means just this--there is a lot in here worth remembering, particularly the emphasis on how the "social question" becomes the "national question," and these fragmentary reflections on the evolution of the concept of "tribalism."
a last note: he throughout stresses the "hardening" of colonial rule in late 1800s, which is an important sociological point.
--- important quotes/excerpts ---
(10): [GUIDING THESIS/QUESTION:] "Primarily, this is a crisis of institutions. Which institutions? To this the answer is easier. We ahve to be concerned here with the nationalism which produced the nation-states of newly indepdent Africa after the colonial period: with the nationalism that became nation-statism. This nation-statism looked like a liberation, and really began as one. But it did not continue as a liberation. In practice, it was not a restoration of Africa to African's own history, but the onset of a new peiod of indirect subjection to the history of Europe. The fifty or so states of the colonial partition, each formed and governed as though their peoples posessed no history of their own, became fifty or so nation-states formed and governed on European models, chiefly the models of Britain and France. Liberation thus produced its own denial. Liberation led to alienation."
(11): here he first draws the distinction that runs through the book--between "tribalism" of precolonial africa, which is more-or-less the nascent nationalism of the european experience, and the new "tribalism," which unfolds in genocides and "mindless" violence.
(12): [in a sense, this passage encapsulates the limitations of the book, i think] "Because, according to the British, there were no African models, these states would have to be built on European models. So these, being alien models, failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of African citizens, and soon proved unable to protect and promote the interests of those citizens..."
(21-22): "Privations had been bad in the "old days" of the Atlantic slave trade, before the trade began to be made illegal early in the nineteenth century: according to such statistics as may be found, about one in seven of all the captives shipped for the Americas were dead before the voyage was over. But now, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the mortality was higher still, for the old "close packing" of the legal slave trade, horrible enough as that had been, had given way to the dense packing of the smuggling trade."
(24): the legal end to British involvement in the slave trade didn't do much to put an end to smuggling: "The task was simply too big for the scale of the measures used [i.e., the naval blockade]. In the 1840s each slow-moving warship had to patrol some forty miles of coastline."
(26): [re: Sierra Leone and Liberia] "Africa had sent them into slavery. Europe, but especially Britain, had rescued and set them free... And for a while, before the racist constrictions of a new age of imperialism struck at them in the 1890s, these men and women felt the winds of a liberating history in their sails; and they prospered."
(35): Basil Davidson is using the aspirations of these descendants of freed slaves to stand-in for the modernizers' arguments in the "modernizers" vs. "traditionalist," though he rightly complicates the terms of the encounter: "It was not really a battle between tradition and modernizatoin. Enterprising chiefs and kings were as eager as anyone else to assimilate the fruits of modernization, so long as these could be made digestible to accustomed ritual and historical custom; while the best of the modernizers well understood that there must be some accomodation with tradition."
(40): [the possibility for a Japan-like Meji restoration, he's arguing, was lost as...] "But in Africa--and the case became general--modernization had to mean precisely that [alienation]. In the 1870s Britain, and the French still more, turned sharply to military enclosure. Armies marched and colonies were defined, filling up the "empty map." And with this there came by the end of the century a stifling tide of Eurocentrism, of the racism that held that Europeans are naturally and inherently superior to Africans, with lesser codicils assuring that Englishmen are superior to Frenchmen..."
(41): "So it came about that by 1912 Africans in Sierra Leone, for example, held only one in six of the senior official posts, whereas as recently as 1892 they had still held nearly half of those posts."
(42): [though we might have qualms with his reading of the post-colonial fall, there can be no question that his politics are fierce and well-meant] "In retrospect, the whole great European project in Africa, stretching over more than a hundred years, can only seem a vast obstacle thrust across every reasonable avenue of African progress out of preliterate and prescientific societies into the "modern world."
(47): [the tragedy of imitation] "It was, in this large and decisive sense, the European response to African acceptance of colonial alienation. Yes, to become civilized Africans they must cease to be Africans, but in order to ensure that this should duly and completely happen, they should never be allowed to become Europeans. They should wander in some no-man's land of their own until the trumpet of destiny, at some unthinkable time in the future, should swing wide the doors of civilization and let them in."
(48): [this is important--colonialism allies itself with "backwardness," of a very specific sort] "The racism of imperial government went hand in hand with a growing reliance on the 'savage backwoods' for the purpose of colonial rule. Nothing, it seemed, was to change except that the 'acknowledged chiefs' were now the agents of foreign domination instead of being, as in the past, the guardians of African tradition"
(52): "the two faces of nationalism: its capacity for enlarging freedom, and its potential for destroying freedom."
(52-62): the Asante project, and what might have emerged
(65): again, Basil Davidson is contrasting the African and Japanese experiences to highlight the explanatory importance of colonial disposession
(68): [why no merchant class?] Thrusting African merchants along the western seaboard, men such as King Ja Ja of Opobo, who now soared to commercial power on the export of palm oil, began to induce the rise of a capital-owning and -investing group that might have hope, given time, of becoming a middle class of nation builders in the European sense of the term. But they were not given time.
(70): instead of waking to find themselves outcompeted by these private merchants, in other words, the nascent African states were compelled to ally themselves with colonial crown and capital--one gets a sense that its not this simple, either in Davidson's book or in history, but this is a start (and it certainly parallels South Asia)
(72-73): these two pages encapsulate the flaws of Davidson's book. in brief there's an image of a "lost salvation" which is profoundly misleading, and hostile to any serious attempts at a materialist rendering of the colonial problem. he's giving space to subjectivity, but not in any dialectical, thoughtful way.
(75): [this, on the other hand, is critical--perhaps the take-away] "The history of precolonial tribalism (by no means necessarily the same thing as later forms of tribalism) was in every objective sense a history of nationalism: of sociopolitical categories, that is, corresponding to the origins and development of unifying community formation in one terminology or another."
(76): [THE THESIS, IN A SENSE] "However exotic Asante might appear in its African guise, it was manifestly a national state on its way toward becoming a nation-state with every attribute ascribed to a West European nation-state, even if some of these attributes had still to reach maturity. It possessed known boundaries, a central government with police and army, consequent law and order, an accepted national language; and beyond these it even possessed, by the 1880s, an emergent middle class capable of envisaging the role of capitalist entrepreneur. Thereupon its whole dynamic and potentials were suddenly dispossessed by colonial takeover, and all indigenous development stopped."
(76-81): informative pages--he's re-telling Africa's pre-history to emphasize the absurdity of the Hegelian reading.
(80): [travelers came to an Africa disrupted by the slave trade] "To most overseas travelers and chance observers, Africa seemed to live in a malevolent condition of chaos; and for this almost universal conclusion among Europeans and North Americans, we can now ascribe several reasons. One was that the impression was partly true. After about 1850 travelers and observers in East Africa began to enter lands ravaged by a relatively new slave trade; and they found, from the Swahili coast westward to the great lakes, or from the Southern Sudan southward through Mozambique, appalling evidence of death and devastation because of this slave trade."
(87-88): here he's arguing that pre-colonial African institutions were generally accepted as legitimate. the proof of that, of course, is that they endured, and were relatively stable. but while that goes some way towards refuting the colonial narrative, it's not infused with the urgency of a marxist analysis--for surely we're not going to fall into the rainbow lenses of the premoderns. history is always the history of class struggle, whether you're writing against the colonial narrative, or not.
(94): he understands this, of course, as he makes clear on this page--but doesn't do his understanding explicit justice throughout the book.
(95): "but what the core peoples of the regna did not favor was nationalism. They could not have the slightest interest in promoting or provoking ethnic self-assertion, including their own. they simply stretched their rule over many ethnic groups, extracted tax and tribute, and left it at that... When the African regna in due course fell apart and disappeared from history, pretty well by the beginning of the seventeenth century, their subject peoples--just as in Europe--by no means followed them into the void." [some key points here: he's making a distinction between the Asante and the pre-nationalism regna (the European and African forms being indistinguishable)--but this opens up his analysis of nationalism to a class critique; how can you justify subjecting only the feudal and thus "pre-national" to a class critique, in other words? there is plenty to despise about the bourgeois nationalism that Europe constructed, and Africa failed in constructing. what's lacking, really, is a spirit infused by the Marxist contempt for BOTH feudal elitism AND bourgeois triumphalism.]
(99): "The new nationalists of the 1950s would then embrace nation-statism as the only available escape from colonial domination. Striving to transform colonial territories, they would find Africa's wealth of ethnic cultures both distracting and hard to absorb into their schemes. They would fall back into the colonial mentality of regarding it as "tribalism," and, as such, retrogressive. This diversity, it seemed, had to be just another hangover from an unregenerate past."
(100): "tribes" both pre-existed the colonial encounter, and were constituted by its divide-and-rule aspirations
(102-103): an important point about the modernizers here--they recognized pre-colonial Africa in rhetoric, as a response to colonial racism. but they didn't integrate it into their activism or aspirations.
(104): and the British tried to combat the new appeal of the modernizers by handing authority to the chiefs
(106-108): there is--and this is perhaps another merit of Davidson's book--an honest critique here about the shallowness with which many of these new "nationalists" came to know their country. and in that sense one can understand Davidson's lamenting a "lost possibility" in the failure of precolonial authority and these elites to ally. but, at the same time, i find it hard to believe that the "masses" wouldn't have been written out of that picture, as well (and indeed, that's where his account is most deficient, is it not? in the contention that these pre-colonial elites had "legitimacy" in the eyes of the masses...)
(112): [here he starts to give his thesis some substance, i think]: "The competing interests of the "elites," as they began to be called by sociologists and others, took primacy over the combined interests of the "masses." The "social conflict," one may say, was subordinated to the "national conflict."
(113-114): [two principles that led to the "fall," even if Davdison overstates his case, here] "The first principle, universally accepted like the second, was that advancement toward the nation-state was the only feasible route of escape from the colonial condition... Any such large and constructive reorganization of frontiers could never suit the imperial powers, eager still to retain "neocolonialist" levers of interest and influence... The second principle, servant of the first, was that the 'national conflict,' embodied in the rivalries for executive power between contending groups or individuals among the 'elites,' must continue to take priority over a 'social conflict' concerned with the interests of most of the inhabitants of these new nation-states."
(127): [the Janus-face of nationalism. in essence a class critique, but articulated through this dichotomy between national/social]--"After the unification of Italy in 1861, the new Italian nation-state would turn quite shamelessly to colonial enterprises in Africa. The very steamship company whose boats had carried the Thousand to Sicily would be foremost in Italian colonialism; and Garibaldi himself would speak in favor of loading on Africans the chains of servitude that Italy had struck from itself. But in 1860, for a little while, the two aspects of nationalism--the 'national' and the 'social'--were in happy unison"
(134) [CRITICAL PASSAGE--it prefigures a critique of Davidson's overgenerous portrayal of the pre-national, even as it indicates his awareness of the importance of that same critique] "the rise of nationalism in its nineteenth-century context was the outcome of a combination of effort between rising 'middle classes,' few in numbers and weak in the power to impose themselves, and the multitudinous masses of the 'lower orders.' After gaining power, of course, the 'middle orders' would abandon the 'lower orders'--just as, in the Italian case, most of the survivors of Garibaldi's Thousand were demobilized into poverty or unemployment... But that would be later: meanwhile, nationalism could advance boldly under the banners of populist democracy. Indispensable to nation-statis success in all the many upheavals of the nineteenth century, as E.J. Hobsbawm has insisted, were the agitations and uprising of peasants and urban workers. These were 'lower orders' which had until now played no role on the widening stage of statist claims and conflicts. But now it was the 'laboring poor' who died on the democratic barricades of Europe's 'great year of revolutions,' in 1848, against aristocratic and tyrannical power."
(135): [can't fight the feudals without fire, after all] "... all the political revolutions which reduced Europe to nation-states were in fact or immediate anticipation, social revolutions of the labouring poor."
(136): "But all the democratic revolutions of 1848 were crushed. The nation-states that came eventually to birth were to be the political work of 'middle strata' who prudently survived aristocratic reprisals, while the 'labouring poor' paid the price of defeat... Nation-state Europe began in the bloodshed would stay with nation-state Europe"
(138): [class consciousness dressed up as national consciousness--CRITICAL] "But the "middle strata," some of whom also did their fair share of fighting and dying, needed to seat their legitimacy as rulers on something more solid and respectable than class ambition... They presented their nation-state as the product of a national consciousness rather than a class consciousness. In this way the emergent state seemed to be the product of nationalism, whereas in truth it was nearly always the other way around. As it was going to be in AFrica in the twentieth century, it was the European state in the nineteenth century that demanded the nation."
(146): [in Romania, made independent through this kind of work, the national question didn't resolve the social question, and the peasants rose]: "This peasant revolt of 1907 was a vast and desperate affair; but it failed. True to the style and form of the nineteenth century, the "romantic nationalists" in power came smartly to earth and called out the truths... When good national order was restored, the toll of the peasant dead was found to be about 10,000 persons."
(166): [this is a timeless and critical story--struggle invariably prefigures more than the world it consolidates] "Like the European movements of the 1840s, it was always the 'labouring poor' whose involvement and effort in the 1950s gave the tribunes of the 'national struggle,' who were the educated elite in one manifestation or antother, their ground to stand on. Without...mass pressure, the educated elite would have remained upon the sidelines of everyday life..."
(173): notes on the depoliticization of the civil service
(178-179): the civil service was not anticipating independence--still obsessed with the African's inability to govern
(183): "Like it or not, the leading nationalists found themselves obliged by imperialist policies, fashioned in London and Paris, 'to seek independence within the existing power unit' of their colony, rather than in any more rational or historically logical territorial unit."
(190): suggestion, here, that the planet of the slums was born in the mass flight of peasantry to the cities in the wake of the great depression. "as many as one in six AFricans were already living in 1946 outside the rural areas that had produced them; by 1953 the proportion was one in four..." [the numbers are modest, relative to what we see today]
(192): "Yet Africa even in the 1980s, with some 450 million inhabitants, or at least triple the population of a century earlier, would still be relatively underpopulated when compared with other continents. What looked like a crisis of "overpopulation' was really a crisis of underproduction of food and maldistribution of goods."
(206): it is almost like he is saying that the only type of "class society" is bourgeois society--that is not what he is arguing, but almost
(208): "The systems that were 'taken over' might vary in detail and culture, but all of them--from the British and French through to the Belgian and Portuguese and Spanish--supposed that the actual work of government, and all the crucial decisions depending on it and from it, would be exercised by a bureaucracy trained and tested in authoritarian habits and practices."
(210-211): the well-known story of the modern country celebrating its city at the expense of its countryside; "Part of that price has had to be paid in a reliance on imports of foreign food into a continent which had always been self-sufficient in food."
(220): the continuing tragedy of the terms-of-trade
(225): important reflections on "tribalism," the new kind, and its evolution--argument that it represented a survival strategy in the absence of a viable state to protect individuals from slaving and colonial excess.
(232): [this will be Davidson's response to the critique of his presentation of bourgeois nationalism--and it is very apt]: "If the solutions of capitalism meant turning one's back on a nationalism centered on the social struggle for improvement, and were in any case hamstrung by the absence of a 'true economic bourgeoisie,' what about the solutions of socialism? The trouble with them, of course, was that a 'true economic working-class' had likewise failed to appear. Rural multitudes had become proletarians in the sense of posessing nothing. But this was not at all the same thing as saying that in doing this they acquired a proletarian consciousness of class and category, and would or could unite around that consciousness..."
(251): [nice re-statement of the argument, in short] "The colonizing process was invariably presented... as a 'modernizing process.' In fact, as we have seen, it induced in practice one after another form of moral and political disintegration. The decolonization process has repeated this downward slide. Once the force of the 'social struggle' of the colonized was spent, the drive against social inequalities and perceived injustices was supplanted by a 'national struggle' within the institutional 'containers' of an imported nation-statism. At this stage there ensued, and evidently could not but ensue, a dogfight scramble for state power by would-be ruling groups acting outside and against the rules and restraints of historical cultures and their compromises. To reach for the AK-47 was then a step both short and easy."
(261): important reflections on bourgeoisie-formation--if foreign aid fails, maybe banditry will succeed? (indeed, he adds, it has always been banditry)
(267): in Central and Eastern europe, he argues, the formations that emerged at independence matched better onto the precolonial past than in Africa.
(268-269): what's more, they possessed two characteristics further in parallel to the African experience: (1) the incapacity of the 'middle strata' to assert itself; (2) the structural, economic weakness that reduced all of the new states to "more or less complete submission to external controls."
(272): ecological catastrophe that was Stalinist model
(273): [BRILLIANT!]1953, in East Germany: "After the Berlin rising of that year, official leaflets of the government informed 'the people' that they had 'forfeited the confidence of the government'--in which case, asked Brecht, would it not be simpler 'for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?'
(287): towards an alternative nation-statism: "for was it after all so sure that newly clamorous nationalities in, for example, Soviet Asia were shouting for nation-statism; or were they not in revolt, rather, against being governed from afar, governed by a rigidly centralized system they could seldom influence, and therefore governed badly?"
(295): in Davidson's defence, when he speaks about the "stable" societies in pre-colonial Africa, he is employing his expertise and being selective. he identifies only select societies, which fulfill the criteria of being responsive to their people. insofar as we can only suspect him of over-reaching, it behooves us to be kinder to his analysis--because the rest of his book does demonstrate that he's alive to the "social question"
(300-305ish): interesting analysis of Angola and Mozambique where, he argues, admirable intentions went astray in their overemphasis on central authority vis-a-vis peasant spontaneity. failed to strike the balance between a strong state, on the one hand, and a responsive state, on the other.
(315): nonetheless it's clear where the solution lies, for davidson--"...the modern state can become stable and progressive only in the measure that it wins back for itself the popular legitimacy it has lost or never sufficiently posessed, and that it can do this only by processes of participatory democracy, no matter where the actual mechanisms may be found to be."
take-home: again, an interesting book that hints at the quirks of the man, one suspects. my initial reaction was less kind than my reaction, on reflection.
a first reading of the initial sections leads one to suspect that davidson's book will be far too kind to the precolonial. however, if you interrogate much of what he does say about the possibilities lost in africa's precolonial history, it is possible to argue, i think, that he is actually highlighting individual historical details (it doesn't help that he frames these in language that suggest the "blanket assertions" that they are perhaps not).
thus, the general merits--he makes a strong even if simple case that the failure of the "national question" to resolve the "social question" is at the root of the failures of the "nation-state." at the same time, he is clear that those who fought for the "social question" were an integral part of the "national struggle," as well. in other words, the struggle for nation-states always involved before it deceived the masses who made everything possible (1848 in Europe is obviously case-in-point).
he argues that the colonial encounter was disastrous, and decisively so, for the evolution of African institutions. here the contrast with Japanese history is introduced; Africa might very well have produced a merchant class (and, he implies, a bourgeois nationalism) had it not been so cruelly interrupted (his consistent anticolonialism on this point is great, of course.)
again, after an initial reading of the early parts, one cannot help but be struck by his emphasis on the possible virtues of this indigeneity--almost as if he is ignorant of the possibility that these polities were themselves racked by the definitional conflict over distribution of the surplus (the "class question," in other words). but as one reads further, one sees that he isn't blind to the class question, and that--indeed--it is at the core of his central thesis. so, in that sense, one is tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt--perhaps the "legitimacy" that he identifies in the precolonial was exceptional (in fairness, he establishes it in a confined way--the Asante and a couple of other examples, maybe). and if not that, perhaps it is enough to locate his reading in the anticolonial posture of his work--as a retort to the mission civilizatrice.
if one's not to give him this benefit of the doubt, then the weakness of his book is this--his failure to capture the spirit of marx on primitive accumulation, where a contempt for premodern elitisms co-exists with an indictment of bourgeois triumphalism. but, then again, it's also impossible to reject out-of-hand his unwillingness to resolve the tragedies he chronicles in orthodox marxist fashion-- with the promise of socialism. he is, after all, writing in the shadow of the USSR and the stalinist denial of national life. and in that sense he is right not to take refuge in the marxist promise.
there is, i will say, something infuriating about the way in which this theme of the "lost promise" does a disservice to the thinkers who imagined much more than the cooption of the "social question"--in other words, he seems to suggest that we can only see the loss of the "social question" with hindsight, a posture that allows his solution to suggest itself. but people understood the prominence of the "social question" and the importance of responsiveness to "spontaneity," but they still failed. that really is our burden.
nonetheless, even if the ending is somewhat trite and facile (that the answer to the perils of the nation-state lie in more and better democracy), the book is by no means just this--there is a lot in here worth remembering, particularly the emphasis on how the "social question" becomes the "national question," and these fragmentary reflections on the evolution of the concept of "tribalism."
a last note: he throughout stresses the "hardening" of colonial rule in late 1800s, which is an important sociological point.
--- important quotes/excerpts ---
(10): [GUIDING THESIS/QUESTION:] "Primarily, this is a crisis of institutions. Which institutions? To this the answer is easier. We ahve to be concerned here with the nationalism which produced the nation-states of newly indepdent Africa after the colonial period: with the nationalism that became nation-statism. This nation-statism looked like a liberation, and really began as one. But it did not continue as a liberation. In practice, it was not a restoration of Africa to African's own history, but the onset of a new peiod of indirect subjection to the history of Europe. The fifty or so states of the colonial partition, each formed and governed as though their peoples posessed no history of their own, became fifty or so nation-states formed and governed on European models, chiefly the models of Britain and France. Liberation thus produced its own denial. Liberation led to alienation."
(11): here he first draws the distinction that runs through the book--between "tribalism" of precolonial africa, which is more-or-less the nascent nationalism of the european experience, and the new "tribalism," which unfolds in genocides and "mindless" violence.
(12): [in a sense, this passage encapsulates the limitations of the book, i think] "Because, according to the British, there were no African models, these states would have to be built on European models. So these, being alien models, failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of African citizens, and soon proved unable to protect and promote the interests of those citizens..."
(21-22): "Privations had been bad in the "old days" of the Atlantic slave trade, before the trade began to be made illegal early in the nineteenth century: according to such statistics as may be found, about one in seven of all the captives shipped for the Americas were dead before the voyage was over. But now, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the mortality was higher still, for the old "close packing" of the legal slave trade, horrible enough as that had been, had given way to the dense packing of the smuggling trade."
(24): the legal end to British involvement in the slave trade didn't do much to put an end to smuggling: "The task was simply too big for the scale of the measures used [i.e., the naval blockade]. In the 1840s each slow-moving warship had to patrol some forty miles of coastline."
(26): [re: Sierra Leone and Liberia] "Africa had sent them into slavery. Europe, but especially Britain, had rescued and set them free... And for a while, before the racist constrictions of a new age of imperialism struck at them in the 1890s, these men and women felt the winds of a liberating history in their sails; and they prospered."
(35): Basil Davidson is using the aspirations of these descendants of freed slaves to stand-in for the modernizers' arguments in the "modernizers" vs. "traditionalist," though he rightly complicates the terms of the encounter: "It was not really a battle between tradition and modernizatoin. Enterprising chiefs and kings were as eager as anyone else to assimilate the fruits of modernization, so long as these could be made digestible to accustomed ritual and historical custom; while the best of the modernizers well understood that there must be some accomodation with tradition."
(40): [the possibility for a Japan-like Meji restoration, he's arguing, was lost as...] "But in Africa--and the case became general--modernization had to mean precisely that [alienation]. In the 1870s Britain, and the French still more, turned sharply to military enclosure. Armies marched and colonies were defined, filling up the "empty map." And with this there came by the end of the century a stifling tide of Eurocentrism, of the racism that held that Europeans are naturally and inherently superior to Africans, with lesser codicils assuring that Englishmen are superior to Frenchmen..."
(41): "So it came about that by 1912 Africans in Sierra Leone, for example, held only one in six of the senior official posts, whereas as recently as 1892 they had still held nearly half of those posts."
(42): [though we might have qualms with his reading of the post-colonial fall, there can be no question that his politics are fierce and well-meant] "In retrospect, the whole great European project in Africa, stretching over more than a hundred years, can only seem a vast obstacle thrust across every reasonable avenue of African progress out of preliterate and prescientific societies into the "modern world."
(47): [the tragedy of imitation] "It was, in this large and decisive sense, the European response to African acceptance of colonial alienation. Yes, to become civilized Africans they must cease to be Africans, but in order to ensure that this should duly and completely happen, they should never be allowed to become Europeans. They should wander in some no-man's land of their own until the trumpet of destiny, at some unthinkable time in the future, should swing wide the doors of civilization and let them in."
(48): [this is important--colonialism allies itself with "backwardness," of a very specific sort] "The racism of imperial government went hand in hand with a growing reliance on the 'savage backwoods' for the purpose of colonial rule. Nothing, it seemed, was to change except that the 'acknowledged chiefs' were now the agents of foreign domination instead of being, as in the past, the guardians of African tradition"
(52): "the two faces of nationalism: its capacity for enlarging freedom, and its potential for destroying freedom."
(52-62): the Asante project, and what might have emerged
(65): again, Basil Davidson is contrasting the African and Japanese experiences to highlight the explanatory importance of colonial disposession
(68): [why no merchant class?] Thrusting African merchants along the western seaboard, men such as King Ja Ja of Opobo, who now soared to commercial power on the export of palm oil, began to induce the rise of a capital-owning and -investing group that might have hope, given time, of becoming a middle class of nation builders in the European sense of the term. But they were not given time.
(70): instead of waking to find themselves outcompeted by these private merchants, in other words, the nascent African states were compelled to ally themselves with colonial crown and capital--one gets a sense that its not this simple, either in Davidson's book or in history, but this is a start (and it certainly parallels South Asia)
(72-73): these two pages encapsulate the flaws of Davidson's book. in brief there's an image of a "lost salvation" which is profoundly misleading, and hostile to any serious attempts at a materialist rendering of the colonial problem. he's giving space to subjectivity, but not in any dialectical, thoughtful way.
(75): [this, on the other hand, is critical--perhaps the take-away] "The history of precolonial tribalism (by no means necessarily the same thing as later forms of tribalism) was in every objective sense a history of nationalism: of sociopolitical categories, that is, corresponding to the origins and development of unifying community formation in one terminology or another."
(76): [THE THESIS, IN A SENSE] "However exotic Asante might appear in its African guise, it was manifestly a national state on its way toward becoming a nation-state with every attribute ascribed to a West European nation-state, even if some of these attributes had still to reach maturity. It possessed known boundaries, a central government with police and army, consequent law and order, an accepted national language; and beyond these it even possessed, by the 1880s, an emergent middle class capable of envisaging the role of capitalist entrepreneur. Thereupon its whole dynamic and potentials were suddenly dispossessed by colonial takeover, and all indigenous development stopped."
(76-81): informative pages--he's re-telling Africa's pre-history to emphasize the absurdity of the Hegelian reading.
(80): [travelers came to an Africa disrupted by the slave trade] "To most overseas travelers and chance observers, Africa seemed to live in a malevolent condition of chaos; and for this almost universal conclusion among Europeans and North Americans, we can now ascribe several reasons. One was that the impression was partly true. After about 1850 travelers and observers in East Africa began to enter lands ravaged by a relatively new slave trade; and they found, from the Swahili coast westward to the great lakes, or from the Southern Sudan southward through Mozambique, appalling evidence of death and devastation because of this slave trade."
(87-88): here he's arguing that pre-colonial African institutions were generally accepted as legitimate. the proof of that, of course, is that they endured, and were relatively stable. but while that goes some way towards refuting the colonial narrative, it's not infused with the urgency of a marxist analysis--for surely we're not going to fall into the rainbow lenses of the premoderns. history is always the history of class struggle, whether you're writing against the colonial narrative, or not.
(94): he understands this, of course, as he makes clear on this page--but doesn't do his understanding explicit justice throughout the book.
(95): "but what the core peoples of the regna did not favor was nationalism. They could not have the slightest interest in promoting or provoking ethnic self-assertion, including their own. they simply stretched their rule over many ethnic groups, extracted tax and tribute, and left it at that... When the African regna in due course fell apart and disappeared from history, pretty well by the beginning of the seventeenth century, their subject peoples--just as in Europe--by no means followed them into the void." [some key points here: he's making a distinction between the Asante and the pre-nationalism regna (the European and African forms being indistinguishable)--but this opens up his analysis of nationalism to a class critique; how can you justify subjecting only the feudal and thus "pre-national" to a class critique, in other words? there is plenty to despise about the bourgeois nationalism that Europe constructed, and Africa failed in constructing. what's lacking, really, is a spirit infused by the Marxist contempt for BOTH feudal elitism AND bourgeois triumphalism.]
(99): "The new nationalists of the 1950s would then embrace nation-statism as the only available escape from colonial domination. Striving to transform colonial territories, they would find Africa's wealth of ethnic cultures both distracting and hard to absorb into their schemes. They would fall back into the colonial mentality of regarding it as "tribalism," and, as such, retrogressive. This diversity, it seemed, had to be just another hangover from an unregenerate past."
(100): "tribes" both pre-existed the colonial encounter, and were constituted by its divide-and-rule aspirations
(102-103): an important point about the modernizers here--they recognized pre-colonial Africa in rhetoric, as a response to colonial racism. but they didn't integrate it into their activism or aspirations.
(104): and the British tried to combat the new appeal of the modernizers by handing authority to the chiefs
(106-108): there is--and this is perhaps another merit of Davidson's book--an honest critique here about the shallowness with which many of these new "nationalists" came to know their country. and in that sense one can understand Davidson's lamenting a "lost possibility" in the failure of precolonial authority and these elites to ally. but, at the same time, i find it hard to believe that the "masses" wouldn't have been written out of that picture, as well (and indeed, that's where his account is most deficient, is it not? in the contention that these pre-colonial elites had "legitimacy" in the eyes of the masses...)
(112): [here he starts to give his thesis some substance, i think]: "The competing interests of the "elites," as they began to be called by sociologists and others, took primacy over the combined interests of the "masses." The "social conflict," one may say, was subordinated to the "national conflict."
(113-114): [two principles that led to the "fall," even if Davdison overstates his case, here] "The first principle, universally accepted like the second, was that advancement toward the nation-state was the only feasible route of escape from the colonial condition... Any such large and constructive reorganization of frontiers could never suit the imperial powers, eager still to retain "neocolonialist" levers of interest and influence... The second principle, servant of the first, was that the 'national conflict,' embodied in the rivalries for executive power between contending groups or individuals among the 'elites,' must continue to take priority over a 'social conflict' concerned with the interests of most of the inhabitants of these new nation-states."
(127): [the Janus-face of nationalism. in essence a class critique, but articulated through this dichotomy between national/social]--"After the unification of Italy in 1861, the new Italian nation-state would turn quite shamelessly to colonial enterprises in Africa. The very steamship company whose boats had carried the Thousand to Sicily would be foremost in Italian colonialism; and Garibaldi himself would speak in favor of loading on Africans the chains of servitude that Italy had struck from itself. But in 1860, for a little while, the two aspects of nationalism--the 'national' and the 'social'--were in happy unison"
(134) [CRITICAL PASSAGE--it prefigures a critique of Davidson's overgenerous portrayal of the pre-national, even as it indicates his awareness of the importance of that same critique] "the rise of nationalism in its nineteenth-century context was the outcome of a combination of effort between rising 'middle classes,' few in numbers and weak in the power to impose themselves, and the multitudinous masses of the 'lower orders.' After gaining power, of course, the 'middle orders' would abandon the 'lower orders'--just as, in the Italian case, most of the survivors of Garibaldi's Thousand were demobilized into poverty or unemployment... But that would be later: meanwhile, nationalism could advance boldly under the banners of populist democracy. Indispensable to nation-statis success in all the many upheavals of the nineteenth century, as E.J. Hobsbawm has insisted, were the agitations and uprising of peasants and urban workers. These were 'lower orders' which had until now played no role on the widening stage of statist claims and conflicts. But now it was the 'laboring poor' who died on the democratic barricades of Europe's 'great year of revolutions,' in 1848, against aristocratic and tyrannical power."
(135): [can't fight the feudals without fire, after all] "... all the political revolutions which reduced Europe to nation-states were in fact or immediate anticipation, social revolutions of the labouring poor."
(136): "But all the democratic revolutions of 1848 were crushed. The nation-states that came eventually to birth were to be the political work of 'middle strata' who prudently survived aristocratic reprisals, while the 'labouring poor' paid the price of defeat... Nation-state Europe began in the bloodshed would stay with nation-state Europe"
(138): [class consciousness dressed up as national consciousness--CRITICAL] "But the "middle strata," some of whom also did their fair share of fighting and dying, needed to seat their legitimacy as rulers on something more solid and respectable than class ambition... They presented their nation-state as the product of a national consciousness rather than a class consciousness. In this way the emergent state seemed to be the product of nationalism, whereas in truth it was nearly always the other way around. As it was going to be in AFrica in the twentieth century, it was the European state in the nineteenth century that demanded the nation."
(146): [in Romania, made independent through this kind of work, the national question didn't resolve the social question, and the peasants rose]: "This peasant revolt of 1907 was a vast and desperate affair; but it failed. True to the style and form of the nineteenth century, the "romantic nationalists" in power came smartly to earth and called out the truths... When good national order was restored, the toll of the peasant dead was found to be about 10,000 persons."
(166): [this is a timeless and critical story--struggle invariably prefigures more than the world it consolidates] "Like the European movements of the 1840s, it was always the 'labouring poor' whose involvement and effort in the 1950s gave the tribunes of the 'national struggle,' who were the educated elite in one manifestation or antother, their ground to stand on. Without...mass pressure, the educated elite would have remained upon the sidelines of everyday life..."
(173): notes on the depoliticization of the civil service
(178-179): the civil service was not anticipating independence--still obsessed with the African's inability to govern
(183): "Like it or not, the leading nationalists found themselves obliged by imperialist policies, fashioned in London and Paris, 'to seek independence within the existing power unit' of their colony, rather than in any more rational or historically logical territorial unit."
(190): suggestion, here, that the planet of the slums was born in the mass flight of peasantry to the cities in the wake of the great depression. "as many as one in six AFricans were already living in 1946 outside the rural areas that had produced them; by 1953 the proportion was one in four..." [the numbers are modest, relative to what we see today]
(192): "Yet Africa even in the 1980s, with some 450 million inhabitants, or at least triple the population of a century earlier, would still be relatively underpopulated when compared with other continents. What looked like a crisis of "overpopulation' was really a crisis of underproduction of food and maldistribution of goods."
(206): it is almost like he is saying that the only type of "class society" is bourgeois society--that is not what he is arguing, but almost
(208): "The systems that were 'taken over' might vary in detail and culture, but all of them--from the British and French through to the Belgian and Portuguese and Spanish--supposed that the actual work of government, and all the crucial decisions depending on it and from it, would be exercised by a bureaucracy trained and tested in authoritarian habits and practices."
(210-211): the well-known story of the modern country celebrating its city at the expense of its countryside; "Part of that price has had to be paid in a reliance on imports of foreign food into a continent which had always been self-sufficient in food."
(220): the continuing tragedy of the terms-of-trade
(225): important reflections on "tribalism," the new kind, and its evolution--argument that it represented a survival strategy in the absence of a viable state to protect individuals from slaving and colonial excess.
(232): [this will be Davidson's response to the critique of his presentation of bourgeois nationalism--and it is very apt]: "If the solutions of capitalism meant turning one's back on a nationalism centered on the social struggle for improvement, and were in any case hamstrung by the absence of a 'true economic bourgeoisie,' what about the solutions of socialism? The trouble with them, of course, was that a 'true economic working-class' had likewise failed to appear. Rural multitudes had become proletarians in the sense of posessing nothing. But this was not at all the same thing as saying that in doing this they acquired a proletarian consciousness of class and category, and would or could unite around that consciousness..."
(251): [nice re-statement of the argument, in short] "The colonizing process was invariably presented... as a 'modernizing process.' In fact, as we have seen, it induced in practice one after another form of moral and political disintegration. The decolonization process has repeated this downward slide. Once the force of the 'social struggle' of the colonized was spent, the drive against social inequalities and perceived injustices was supplanted by a 'national struggle' within the institutional 'containers' of an imported nation-statism. At this stage there ensued, and evidently could not but ensue, a dogfight scramble for state power by would-be ruling groups acting outside and against the rules and restraints of historical cultures and their compromises. To reach for the AK-47 was then a step both short and easy."
(261): important reflections on bourgeoisie-formation--if foreign aid fails, maybe banditry will succeed? (indeed, he adds, it has always been banditry)
(267): in Central and Eastern europe, he argues, the formations that emerged at independence matched better onto the precolonial past than in Africa.
(268-269): what's more, they possessed two characteristics further in parallel to the African experience: (1) the incapacity of the 'middle strata' to assert itself; (2) the structural, economic weakness that reduced all of the new states to "more or less complete submission to external controls."
(272): ecological catastrophe that was Stalinist model
(273): [BRILLIANT!]1953, in East Germany: "After the Berlin rising of that year, official leaflets of the government informed 'the people' that they had 'forfeited the confidence of the government'--in which case, asked Brecht, would it not be simpler 'for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?'
(287): towards an alternative nation-statism: "for was it after all so sure that newly clamorous nationalities in, for example, Soviet Asia were shouting for nation-statism; or were they not in revolt, rather, against being governed from afar, governed by a rigidly centralized system they could seldom influence, and therefore governed badly?"
(295): in Davidson's defence, when he speaks about the "stable" societies in pre-colonial Africa, he is employing his expertise and being selective. he identifies only select societies, which fulfill the criteria of being responsive to their people. insofar as we can only suspect him of over-reaching, it behooves us to be kinder to his analysis--because the rest of his book does demonstrate that he's alive to the "social question"
(300-305ish): interesting analysis of Angola and Mozambique where, he argues, admirable intentions went astray in their overemphasis on central authority vis-a-vis peasant spontaneity. failed to strike the balance between a strong state, on the one hand, and a responsive state, on the other.
(315): nonetheless it's clear where the solution lies, for davidson--"...the modern state can become stable and progressive only in the measure that it wins back for itself the popular legitimacy it has lost or never sufficiently posessed, and that it can do this only by processes of participatory democracy, no matter where the actual mechanisms may be found to be."
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
lecture 13, "the origins of WWI"
john merriman
------------
showing a map of "the new imperialism"--from the mid 1880s to 1914. (in particular, the "scramble for Africa")
------------
so, just to put this in context--the diplomatic origins of WWI
the traditional image is not a bad one: entangling alliances that create a house of cards, ready to collapse.
how does it happen? (for France, this is also the story of a shift from England seen as France's greatest rival, to Germany)
much of the diplomatic history of this period revolves around the rivalry of France and Germany--one can debate the extent to which revenge played a role (most people in the 1890s would have likely said France were more likely to go to war with Britain).
the other major issue upon which WWI hinged on was the hatred between Russia and Austria-Hungary--Russia sees itself as the protector of the Slavic peoples, and that Austria-Hungary is a polyglot Empire (about 15 national communities--a perpetual destabilizing factor in their national politics). particularly when Russia is fanning the flames of pan-Slavism and Slavic nationalisms within the A-H Empire (which had become the dual empire in 1867).
by 1900, Russia is fanning the flames of pan-Slavic fervor in the mountainous territories of Bosnia-Herzogivina, which includes Serbs, Muslims, and Catholic Croats.
now, the alliance system of the late 19th century hinges on German and French antagonism, and the competing interests of A-H and Russia in the Balkans, and Germany's fear of being attacked from both East and West by Russia and France. you have two potential free agents, Italy (which goes to highest bidder in 1915), and Great Britain (it wasn't a given that it would ally with France and Russia, remember--Britain and Russia and Britain and France had been fighting each other for ages).
so, how does it happen that it in 1914 that France finds it with these bizarre bedfellows? (remember, if you're a republican/socialist, how do you explain an alliance with the Tsar, represser of the peoples and encourager of vicious pogroms against the Jews).
later on, i will make the case that, most of the people who looked at such things expected a war in their lifetimes. they're had not been a major conflagration since Waterloo, basically. you have wars, but basically this period is referred to as the Pax Britannica. but most people thought there would be a war in their lifetime--and many people wanted one.
but nobody wanted one that would carry away four empires, a million lives, and last for four years, and unleash the demons of the 20th century.
in 1879, Bismarck forges the cornerstone alliance, between Germany and Austria-Hungary, against Russia's activity in the Balkans. and this is one of the continuities of the entire period.
and this explains why, in July 1914, the Germans give the famous blank cheque to Austria-Hungary--you can do whatever you want to Serbia, and we will back you all the way (even if it involves going to war with "these guys"). (they all know that it will take Russians two weeks to mobilize--furthermore they had lost badly to Japan in 1905, remember).
this is the first chip, the first block.
a year later, 1n 1880, Italy allies itself with these two, but there are all sorts of conditions, and it's more of a free agent.
the last thing that Bismarck wants (remember he's out of it by 1894) was to see Germany attacked from both sides. they don't want France, in other words, to ally with Russia.
so how does that happen?
well, it has to do with a fear of Germany (aside from some scattered cultural tries; some Russian elite spoke French). other facts: tied together by economic investment (French investors are frequently investing outside of France, remember, and they have invested heavily in Russia--particularly in railroads). these economic ties help solidify the arrangements of Great Powers. think of the irony of the Russian Tsar being received France in 1892, when they sign a military treaty! there is a formal alliance in 1894--and everybody knows the rough outlines of this. this ends what Bismarck had intended, which was the diplomatic isolation of France.
how does Britain get into this?
because Germany becomes a much bigger economic rival than anyone else--the German economy grows rapidly (nipping at British heels in terms of steel production, they're producing huge battleships, and that sort of thing). they go way ahead, in chemistry. so, with this economic rivalry (expressed in Africa, as well), goes the naval rivalry, that heats up after the turn of the century. industrialists, of course, love to build big ships. Britain's control of the seas has persisted for centuries, don't forget.
so the last thing the British think they can do, is lose control of the seas.
for a long time, Britain has not seen the need for an alliance, but now looking towards the French in the face of this economic and naval tension. again, in the 1890s, people in Bourdeaux/London, etc. had expected to go to war with Britain/France (people were writing future war novels at this time, don't forget--and one of the more ridiculous ones was a novel in England that predicted a war with France, after the French arrive in Dover, digging a tunnel under the English channel!).
events in 1905--the first Moroccan crisis, followed by, in 1911, the second Moroccan crisis--demonstrate German saber-rattling in Morocco. and this convinces the British that maybe allying with the French isn't such a dumb idea after all. they begin to have informal military talks, that develop into a military understanding viz-a-viz Germany (French on Mediterranean, England on North Sea).
so this explains how these two unlikely allies came together. moreover, the birth-rate--the French realize, that if it's more than just a short encounter, their birth-rate is so miniscule that they'd better have allies. and military planners know this stuff. that means that it's all that more important, if they're contemplating that war, to rely on allies.
remember: when the Tzar orders Russia to mobilize, it is well-known that it will take two weeks. So: the Germans know, then, that they have two weeks to defeat France. they're sure that they can do it, but then they'd better get ready for the Russians on their Eastern frontier. and the only way that they can do that is by violating Belgian and Dutch neutrality (Alsace-Lorraine is not a viable place to launch invasion from). That guarantees, above all else, that the British will go to war--it's bad enought hat they have the French across the Channel. now they have the Germans, as well. you can't have that, so you're going to go to war.
why was that a risk that the Germans were willing to take? because the English do not have a conscript army, but only an expeditionary force. it would take them a month to raise an army that could make any difference, in effect.
these are the competing alliances/considerations that precede 1914, essentially. and this is why the assasination of the Archduke triggers the Great War (prof recounting putting his feet where the 16-yr old gunner had killed Franz Ferdinand). this leads to the blank cheque, and it brings this dreadful war.
-----------
now, like revolutions, wars don't entirely break out according to the hydraulic model--that things get worse and worse and worse and then BOOM, war. but there are moments that raise tensions, and make it possible for the popular press to target potential enemies.
and that's why the incident of Zabern is interesting to discuss, says prof.
the German empire doesn't really trust its Alsatians--residents of the area are not allowed to vote on certain key policy matters (war, treaties, constitutional amendments), for example. Alsace-Lorraine, though, at the same time--is basically German-speaking. 77% of the communes in Alsace-Lorraine are German-speaking, YET, many people consider themselves French. (multiple identities, etc.).
Alsace, is, of course, terribly important, strategically/military.
and what this incident in 1913 does is it confirms the image of German aggressiveness (there are other reasons, too, that Germany does not trust Alsatians--Bismarck is terribly anti-Catholic, don't forget, and this region is overwhelmingly Catholic).
this incident, then: a German officer, speaking to some Alsatian soldiers that were there, refers to them in very scatalogical terms. then, someone else says, "I don't care if you kill these bastards..." And word spreads. tensions build--some German officer slept with a 14 year old Alsatian girl, he's beaten up. the French and German press picks this up and inflames the tensions on both side. they don't go to war, but it confirms the stereotypes that take off during the first years of the war.
so this minor incident, essentially a shouting match, a rape, and a fight, has huge implications. it confirms these military plans. it confirms, for the French, that when the war starts, you'd better get into Alsace-Lorraine and take it back (they're not really going to go into Belgium, are they?).
1914-1944 becomes a new, terrible Thirty Years War. and there were anti-war sentiments, but it was unclear what could be done to stop it.
-------------
in conclusion: it's not just these diplomatic factors and military planning, of course, but really there are deeper, underlying factors. the imperial rivalry helps create this culture of popular imperialism, and popular aggressive nationalism. and the Other, becomes an object of perpetual disdain. jingoism explodes--feeds this expectation that war with come. everyday people dreaming of the next war. social darwinist rivalries, almost. have to pay attention to the popular imaginaire, prof is arguing--public jingoism. only this can help us explain the initial, public, urban enthusiasm for the war (and of course people did not know what it would portend).
john merriman
------------
showing a map of "the new imperialism"--from the mid 1880s to 1914. (in particular, the "scramble for Africa")
------------
so, just to put this in context--the diplomatic origins of WWI
the traditional image is not a bad one: entangling alliances that create a house of cards, ready to collapse.
how does it happen? (for France, this is also the story of a shift from England seen as France's greatest rival, to Germany)
much of the diplomatic history of this period revolves around the rivalry of France and Germany--one can debate the extent to which revenge played a role (most people in the 1890s would have likely said France were more likely to go to war with Britain).
the other major issue upon which WWI hinged on was the hatred between Russia and Austria-Hungary--Russia sees itself as the protector of the Slavic peoples, and that Austria-Hungary is a polyglot Empire (about 15 national communities--a perpetual destabilizing factor in their national politics). particularly when Russia is fanning the flames of pan-Slavism and Slavic nationalisms within the A-H Empire (which had become the dual empire in 1867).
by 1900, Russia is fanning the flames of pan-Slavic fervor in the mountainous territories of Bosnia-Herzogivina, which includes Serbs, Muslims, and Catholic Croats.
now, the alliance system of the late 19th century hinges on German and French antagonism, and the competing interests of A-H and Russia in the Balkans, and Germany's fear of being attacked from both East and West by Russia and France. you have two potential free agents, Italy (which goes to highest bidder in 1915), and Great Britain (it wasn't a given that it would ally with France and Russia, remember--Britain and Russia and Britain and France had been fighting each other for ages).
so, how does it happen that it in 1914 that France finds it with these bizarre bedfellows? (remember, if you're a republican/socialist, how do you explain an alliance with the Tsar, represser of the peoples and encourager of vicious pogroms against the Jews).
later on, i will make the case that, most of the people who looked at such things expected a war in their lifetimes. they're had not been a major conflagration since Waterloo, basically. you have wars, but basically this period is referred to as the Pax Britannica. but most people thought there would be a war in their lifetime--and many people wanted one.
but nobody wanted one that would carry away four empires, a million lives, and last for four years, and unleash the demons of the 20th century.
in 1879, Bismarck forges the cornerstone alliance, between Germany and Austria-Hungary, against Russia's activity in the Balkans. and this is one of the continuities of the entire period.
and this explains why, in July 1914, the Germans give the famous blank cheque to Austria-Hungary--you can do whatever you want to Serbia, and we will back you all the way (even if it involves going to war with "these guys"). (they all know that it will take Russians two weeks to mobilize--furthermore they had lost badly to Japan in 1905, remember).
this is the first chip, the first block.
a year later, 1n 1880, Italy allies itself with these two, but there are all sorts of conditions, and it's more of a free agent.
the last thing that Bismarck wants (remember he's out of it by 1894) was to see Germany attacked from both sides. they don't want France, in other words, to ally with Russia.
so how does that happen?
well, it has to do with a fear of Germany (aside from some scattered cultural tries; some Russian elite spoke French). other facts: tied together by economic investment (French investors are frequently investing outside of France, remember, and they have invested heavily in Russia--particularly in railroads). these economic ties help solidify the arrangements of Great Powers. think of the irony of the Russian Tsar being received France in 1892, when they sign a military treaty! there is a formal alliance in 1894--and everybody knows the rough outlines of this. this ends what Bismarck had intended, which was the diplomatic isolation of France.
how does Britain get into this?
because Germany becomes a much bigger economic rival than anyone else--the German economy grows rapidly (nipping at British heels in terms of steel production, they're producing huge battleships, and that sort of thing). they go way ahead, in chemistry. so, with this economic rivalry (expressed in Africa, as well), goes the naval rivalry, that heats up after the turn of the century. industrialists, of course, love to build big ships. Britain's control of the seas has persisted for centuries, don't forget.
so the last thing the British think they can do, is lose control of the seas.
for a long time, Britain has not seen the need for an alliance, but now looking towards the French in the face of this economic and naval tension. again, in the 1890s, people in Bourdeaux/London, etc. had expected to go to war with Britain/France (people were writing future war novels at this time, don't forget--and one of the more ridiculous ones was a novel in England that predicted a war with France, after the French arrive in Dover, digging a tunnel under the English channel!).
events in 1905--the first Moroccan crisis, followed by, in 1911, the second Moroccan crisis--demonstrate German saber-rattling in Morocco. and this convinces the British that maybe allying with the French isn't such a dumb idea after all. they begin to have informal military talks, that develop into a military understanding viz-a-viz Germany (French on Mediterranean, England on North Sea).
so this explains how these two unlikely allies came together. moreover, the birth-rate--the French realize, that if it's more than just a short encounter, their birth-rate is so miniscule that they'd better have allies. and military planners know this stuff. that means that it's all that more important, if they're contemplating that war, to rely on allies.
remember: when the Tzar orders Russia to mobilize, it is well-known that it will take two weeks. So: the Germans know, then, that they have two weeks to defeat France. they're sure that they can do it, but then they'd better get ready for the Russians on their Eastern frontier. and the only way that they can do that is by violating Belgian and Dutch neutrality (Alsace-Lorraine is not a viable place to launch invasion from). That guarantees, above all else, that the British will go to war--it's bad enought hat they have the French across the Channel. now they have the Germans, as well. you can't have that, so you're going to go to war.
why was that a risk that the Germans were willing to take? because the English do not have a conscript army, but only an expeditionary force. it would take them a month to raise an army that could make any difference, in effect.
these are the competing alliances/considerations that precede 1914, essentially. and this is why the assasination of the Archduke triggers the Great War (prof recounting putting his feet where the 16-yr old gunner had killed Franz Ferdinand). this leads to the blank cheque, and it brings this dreadful war.
-----------
now, like revolutions, wars don't entirely break out according to the hydraulic model--that things get worse and worse and worse and then BOOM, war. but there are moments that raise tensions, and make it possible for the popular press to target potential enemies.
and that's why the incident of Zabern is interesting to discuss, says prof.
the German empire doesn't really trust its Alsatians--residents of the area are not allowed to vote on certain key policy matters (war, treaties, constitutional amendments), for example. Alsace-Lorraine, though, at the same time--is basically German-speaking. 77% of the communes in Alsace-Lorraine are German-speaking, YET, many people consider themselves French. (multiple identities, etc.).
Alsace, is, of course, terribly important, strategically/military.
and what this incident in 1913 does is it confirms the image of German aggressiveness (there are other reasons, too, that Germany does not trust Alsatians--Bismarck is terribly anti-Catholic, don't forget, and this region is overwhelmingly Catholic).
this incident, then: a German officer, speaking to some Alsatian soldiers that were there, refers to them in very scatalogical terms. then, someone else says, "I don't care if you kill these bastards..." And word spreads. tensions build--some German officer slept with a 14 year old Alsatian girl, he's beaten up. the French and German press picks this up and inflames the tensions on both side. they don't go to war, but it confirms the stereotypes that take off during the first years of the war.
so this minor incident, essentially a shouting match, a rape, and a fight, has huge implications. it confirms these military plans. it confirms, for the French, that when the war starts, you'd better get into Alsace-Lorraine and take it back (they're not really going to go into Belgium, are they?).
1914-1944 becomes a new, terrible Thirty Years War. and there were anti-war sentiments, but it was unclear what could be done to stop it.
-------------
in conclusion: it's not just these diplomatic factors and military planning, of course, but really there are deeper, underlying factors. the imperial rivalry helps create this culture of popular imperialism, and popular aggressive nationalism. and the Other, becomes an object of perpetual disdain. jingoism explodes--feeds this expectation that war with come. everyday people dreaming of the next war. social darwinist rivalries, almost. have to pay attention to the popular imaginaire, prof is arguing--public jingoism. only this can help us explain the initial, public, urban enthusiasm for the war (and of course people did not know what it would portend).
Sunday, March 1, 2009
from "the darker nations: a people's history of the third world" by vijay prashad (part IV)
(224): A hundred years after Columbus arrived on the island of Jamaica in 1494, the Arawak population of a hundred thousand dwindled to a handful. In time, the entire population was cleansed, and the island was peopled by English colonial officials and plantation owners as well as enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. Captive labor grew the sugarcane that provided the main economic resource of the island. Rebellions came over time, and these generated a strong consciousness of distaste for the brutality, and paternalism of colonial rule. It took centuries for independence to come, and when it did come in 1962, it was overdue.
(224-225): The new regime of Nelson Manley's People's National Party crafted a social development agenda to counter the chainless bondage of postcolonial life.... Economic policy generally drew from the import-substitution theory, and the government relied on targeted direct foreign investment, notably in the bauxite sector. The latter provided Jamaica with most of its foreign exchange earnings. Discovered in the 1940s, the bauxite reserves fell prey to Canadian and US firms starting in 1952. These firms have since dominated the extraction of the mineral, with Jamaica becoming the largest exporter to North America in the 1960s. But as with sugar and tourism, the Jamaican people did not benefit from their natural resources. The only return to Jamaica came in the way of modest taxes to the government, meager wages to the working class, and a small tribute to the Jamaican managers at the mines and plantations--for this reason, what Jamaica exported despite its fabulous resources was cheap labor, and what it gained for that was a pittance toward its grandiose development aims.
(225-226): Despite the decent rate of growth, Jamaica could not raise the funds to cover its import bill; over 60 percent of the goods used in the country came from abroad (including energy and consumer goods, but also about half its food). Unable to cover its import bill as a result of a failure to diversify its economy, the Jamaican government relied on foreign investment and tourism to balance its books. The erratic, but almost always low prices of its minerals (bauxite) as well as its plantation crops (bananas and sugar) meant that the balance of payments suffered from a chronic deficit.
(226): By the early 1970s, the government reactivated its efforts to break Jamaica out of its impoverished chrysalis at the nether end of global capitalism. Manley's son Michael ran a ferocious and successful political campaign against the global economic system that stacked the deck against countries like Jamaica. Once in power, Michael Manley promoted the construction of democratic socialism for Jamaica, but his regime did not try to disassociate itself from the world capitalist system... Keeping Jamaica hooked up to the infusion of foreign aid or investment meant that the government had to respond to the demands of the foreign money managers rather than the long-term developmental needs of the people of Jamaica.
(227): [DECLINING TERMS OF TRADE] Bauxite was not the only unprocessed commodity to experience a sharp decline in its price into the early 1980s. If the 1970s saw a marginal rise in the price of certain nonpetroleum commodities, by the 1980s there was an across-the-board drop in these prices. Single commodity export-dependent countries lost earnings of as much as $290 billion between 1980-1991 as a result of the decline in their terms of trade. For sub-Saharan Africa, the impact was gruesome. For much of the region, nonfuel primary commodity goods amount for about one-third of the state's export earnings. The decline in the terms of trade meant that these countries lost on average about 5 percent of their gross domestic product...
(229): [DEBT CRISIS] World inflation, high oil prices, and a drop in commodity prices affected the reserves, as it did those of most of the darker nations. In 1960, the total debt of the 133 states that the World Bank counted as part of the "developing countries" held a total public and private debt just short of US $18 billion. In ten years, the debt had escalated to $75 billion., and when Jamaica went into fiscal crisis, it was $113 billion. By 1982, the debt had reached the astronomical figure of $612 billion. While many scholars and commentators blame the oil crisis of 1973-1974 for the ballooning debt, this is a superficial argument. The rise in oil prices due to the action of the OPEC cartel only exacerbated tendencies that had already stymied the social development of the formerly colonized states. The distorted development agenda followed by most of the third World... and the imperialist pressure faced by these states produced a structurally impoverished international political economy. When the oil crisis hit, it provided the conjuncture for the Third World's structural rot.
(229): In 1974-1975, the nonpetroleum exporting states of the Third World had to come up with $80 billion to finance their external deficits. Of this, about $36 billion came from private sources. Commercial banks in the G-7 that found that the rate of return within the advanced industrial states declined as productivity rates grew flat, turned eagerly to fund the Third World states... But the banks would not dole out their capital without cover from the IMF. If the IMF sanctified the state with a short-term standby agreement, it provided a "seal of approval" for more funds. The IMF loans often fell far short of the amount needed, so the IMF acted as insurance for the private commercial banks... The money swept into the Third World, but not without a prospect of return. In 1975, Rothschild reports, "each of the five largest US banks made more than 40 percent of its profits from foreign operations. Chase was an extreme case. It earned 64 percent of its profits abroad, as compared to only 22 percent in 1970.
(230): How could the impoverished pay back these enormous loans?... The defaults did not come because the IMF, backed by the US government and the newly confident elites of the darker nations, strong-armed governments into the cannibalization of their resources to maintain the payment schedules. After the Mexican collapse of 1982, the US government proposed the Brady Plan (1989), which had two elements. First, the banks lent money to cover the debt if the country provided assurances to pay back the loan and the debt, and second, the IMF and the US Department of the Treasury sanctified the loan if the country entered a process of significant economic reform.
(231): [DEBT CRISIS AS TRIBUTE] By 1983, capital flows reversed, as more money came from the indebted states to the G-7 than went out as loans and aid. In other words, the indebted countries subsidized and funded the wealthy nations. In the late 1980s, the indebted states sent an average of $40 billion more to the G-7 than the G-7 sent out as loans and aid; this became the annual tribute from the darker nations. By 1997, the total debt owed by the formerly colonized world amounted to about $2.17 trillion, with a daily debt-service payment of $717 million. The nations of sub-Saharan Africa spent four times more on debt service, on interest payments, than on health care. For most of the indebted states, between one-third and one-fifth of their gross national product was squandered in this debt-service tribute. The debt crisis had winners: the financial interests in the G-7.
(231): During the first six months of 1974, when the fiscal effects of the oil crisis became clear,
the G-7 enjoyed a $6 billion surplus with the nonpetroleum exporting Third World states, but it suffered a $41 billion deficit with the oil exporting states. A year later, the nonpetroleum states owed $21 billion, whereas the G-7 owed the oil group $21 billion. The scale had been balanced.
(231): Furthermore, the oil states... held their profits largely in US dollars, which meant that as the US dollar abandoned the gold standard in 1971, its own standing in the global economy remained high because petrodollars kept it in demand. The rise in petrodollars allowed the United States to abandon the very macroeconomic restrictions it demanded of the Third World, and therefore run a deficit to strengthen its domestic economy and expand its already-considerable military.
(233): The IMF plan was rigorous. First, it called on the government to devalue its currency to discourage imports and increase its ability to export its products. The policy intended to shift the import-substitution thrust to an export-oriented economy. Second, the government had to discourage an increase in wages to keep down the need to import goods. Third, the IMF called for the reduction of the role of the state in the economy... Fourth, the state needed to sell off its public-sector assets and enhance the private enterprises. Finally, the state had to hamper the money supply and raise interest rates to induce "fiscal discipline."
(233): In Jamaica, the immediate effects of IMF policy fell on the rural and urban working class. Inflation soared as the Jamaican dollar faced significant devaluation and price of basic goods began to skyrocket (chicken up 74 percent, salt-fish 285 percent, milk 83 percent, flour 214 percent, and cooking oil 72 percent). The IMF austerity regime dropped real wages by as much as 35 percent in 1978 alone. By 1980, the unemployment rate in Jamaica soared to 30 percent or perhaps more. About 60 percent of Jamaican households began to rely primarily, if not exclusively, on the income of women, many of whom worked in unrewarding sweatshops in Kingston's free trade zone. In that zone, 80 percent of the employees were single mothers whose desperation to keep their families alive meant that three-quarters of them worked overtime.
(234): In 1990, a senior IMF economist studied the IMF-enforced stabilization measures from 1973 to 1988, the period when the structural adjustment bombed the Third World. His measured study found that "the growth rate is significantly reduced in program countries relative to the change in non-program countries." The IMF produced a patient with contracted economic activity, the destruction of the capacity for long-term economic growth, the cannibalization of resources (what is known as "asset stripping"), and a consequent return to being an exporter of raw materials. Much of this resulted in rising inequality in terms of class and gender, in addition to widespread environmental devastation.
(236): By the end of 1980, the per capita income in Jamaica fell by 40 percent.
(237): Marcos, Suharto, and Seaga [Edward Seaga, who succeeded Manley in 1980] mastered the art of political illusion: by a sleight of hand, they posed as efficient nationalists as they opened their countries to unregulated corporations. The national bourgeoisie, represented in Jamaica by Seaga, camouflaged their enthusiasm for "reform" by making the claim that there is no alternative and the IMF made us do it as well as by touting the amount of US and IMF money that flowed into the country as a result of the reforms.
(238): In 1981, the island's gross domestic product was $3 billion, but three years later it fell to $2 billion... IMF-driven globalization exacerbated the collapse of the Jamaican economy... The institutional impact of IMF-driven globalization was heavy. The new reforms pushed by Seaga's government resulted in a weakened responsive state. Between the mid-1980s and 1989, Jamaica's government fired about a third of its public employees, "both through privatization of public companies and through central government layoffs"... The national liberation state was disemboweled in this process.
(238): The neoliberal state now stakes itself more on repression than on responsiveness... From 1979 to 1986, the Jamaican police killed more than two hundred people per year... In the conditions of total social and economic collapse, gang violence or community protection against gang violence became the order of the day. Social anomie intensified alongside IMF-driven reforms, and the neoliberal state responded with the bullet.
(243): The G-7 dominated the IMF procedures and policies, and regarded its rules as being for the darker nations and not for the advanced industrial states. For this reason, the G-7 did not adhere to the IMF structural adjustment demands against budget deficits and subsidies. The G-7 broke the rules when it wanted to... The IMF served the G-7, and not the G-77... The statement showed that whereas almost a hundred Third World states accounted for less than 37 percent of the IMF's voting power, the five leading industrial powers controlled more than 40 percent, while the United States alone held 20 percent of the votes in the IMF.
(245): In the thirty years after 1960, the Tigers' total share of total world exports increased from 1.5 to 6.7 percent. Their share of total exports from the Third World rose from 6 to 34 percent, as their share of Third World manufacturing exports rose from 13.2 to an unbelievable 61.5 percent. Unlike most great leaps forward of this kind, the Tigers did not grow at the cost of extreme domestic inequality. By 1990, all the Tigers showed a substantial improvement in income distribution...
(246): Singapore... had the privilege of being the second most competitive economy in the world (after the US). The GDP of this small island grew from 1965 to 1990 by an average of 6.5% per year... The engine for this explosion was Singapore's exports of manufactures. In1960, only 7.2 percent of Singapore's gross domestic product came from manufactured exports, whereas by 1990 manufactured exports accounted for a little more than three-quarters of the gross domestic product.
(249): The sensation of Singapore and other other Tigers came in large part from a set of advantages exceptional to them. For one, the colonial experience of the Tigers was objectively beneficial. Seized by the British as commercial bases for their China trade, Singapore (1819) and Hong Kong (1841) inherited few of history's problems. There was little agriculture, and what there was soon vanished before the hunger for buildings... Both Singapore and Hong Kong thrived as duty-free ports for opium and other commodities. These were paradises of capital, where the problem of production (and hence workers) was shipped elsewhere. [SEEMS CONTRADICTORY, IN LIGHT OF LATER ADMISSION THAT COMMUNIST TRADE UNIONS PLAYED PROMINENT ROLE IN SINGAPORE] These were almost purely entrepots. Occupied by the Japanese, Taiwan and Korea experienced an assault on their landlord class and forced land reform. Feudalism disappeared at the butt of an Arisaka rifle. In addition, the Japanese colonial machine exported its zaibatsu-state complex for capitalist development.
(249): A brutal war between the British and the Communist Party ran from 1948 until Malaysia's independence in 1957.
(250-251): Politics interfered with the necessary work of development; the ideological framework developed by Lee for PAP secluded the work of development... The Tigers emulated each other on this score: two consecutive dictatorships (led by Park Chung-Hee and Chun Doo-Hwan) controlled South Korea from 1960-1988; in Taiwan, the Kuomintang ruled a one-party state from 1949-1996; and Hong Kong remained a British colony until 1997.
(251): Even as the Third World's bourgeoisie lavished praise on the East Asian miracle in the 1980s, during the 1950s and 1960s, the Tigers traveled a familiar route, albeit with better basic conditions (land reforms and institutions such as the chaebols for industrial organizations). Singapore's PAP, led by the charismatic Lee, followed Goh Keng Swee's advice on state intervention. The Development Plan (1960-64) adopted the import-substitution industrialization strategy. Whatever funds could be harnessed went into state-owned enterprises...
(252-253): [KEY BREAK WITH ISI--THIS WHOLE ACCOUNT IS SLIGHTLY WEAK, I THINK] When Singapore broke from Malaysia in 1965, it had to reassess the import-substitution strategy because now the small island alone did not have a sufficient domestic market to carry through the program. This specific event, the caesura from Malaysia, caused the cabinet to move the island state toward an export-oriented manufacturing plant... To transform Singapore into a major transshipment entrepot and manufacturing site required an enormous infusion of capital... The secret to the Tigers' sensation lies in this original infusion of capital, because only with it could their various institutional advantages shine. A large amount of the investement capital came from PAP's ability to capture domestic savings... Additional money came from US government aid, although this played less of a role in Singapore than in Taiwan ($13 billion) and Korea ($5.6 billion)... More than domestic savings and foreign aid, the Tigers in the 1960s relied on investment from transnational corporations. Lee Kuan Yew recognized early that his goal was "to make Singapore into an oasis in Southeast Asia, for if we had First World standards then business peple and tourists would make us a base for their business and tours of the region." To draw in tourists and finance capital required lenient rules and clean streets. Lee provided the latter through his authoritarian state; his government created the conditions for the former in haste. It worked: between 1960 and 1990, Singapore enjoyed the world's highest investment ratio... By 1973, Singapore abolished quotas and tariffs to create a free-trade port. It created EPZ's, which blossomed because the staet removed all income taxes and allowed them to function without regulation... [YET] The high rates of investment did not change the nature of the Singaporean economy; it produced low-end goods for the world market. Singapore needed to go after the high-end, high-value goods to hasten its development and break out of its dependency on foreign capital. Starting in 1979, PAP inaugurated a new targeted investment strategy. It gave immense incentives for foreign capital to invest in industrail manufacturing, tourism, trade, transport, and communication as well as "brain services" (medical and financial). This "Second Industrial Revolution" required and infusion of skill and a new kind of investment. The import of skill was not new to the Tigers. Because of Communist insurrection and insurgency, the well-educated and upwardly mobile professionals fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong (from China), South Korea (from the North), and Singapore (from China and Malaysia). These professionals brought with them mercantile and technical skills that came gratis to their host societies. In the early years, all the Tigers invested heavily in their human capital: state-funded and managed educational systems that stressed technical skills, and an enhanced social wage that drew and maintained populations... Singapore developed its high-technology firms, but structurally its economy remained dependent on foreign investment (mainly from transnational corporations and private portfolio investment). As Japanese investment dried up in the late 1980s, Chinese investment kicked in. China, boosted by the human capital growth of its socialist era and the EPZ performance on its coastal rim, generated investment for the East Asian manufactures...
(255): IN 1997, the Thai bhat failed, setting off a chain reaction across the rim until the Tigers had to go to the IMF with their hats in hand for a bailout. What had struck the rest of the Third World from the late 1970s onward, hit East Asia two decades later. While the Tigers' collapse appeared structural, as the dust settled it became clear that they had been the victims of financial speculators... China's sheer economic size allowed it to weather the storm, and its stability provided a lifeline for parts of the East Asian world. The commodity price drop explains not only the downturn but also the structural closeness of the Tigers to the rest of the darker nations.
(261): ...[M]ost of the Saudi royal family had enjoyed a pragmatic relationship with Wahhabism: they accorded it respect in public, but lived wilder lives in private (including during long sojourns to Europe). [Crown Prince] Faysal was different. He was a true believer.
(262): The reinvention of tribalism and other atavistic ideas is equally central. Joseph Desire Mobutu, raised in the Belgian Congo by European friars, led the coup against the left-wing prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1960. Lumumba's Congolese National Movement Party took the newly freed Congo leftward and disadvantaged European capital... Mobutu, backed by the Belgians and the United States, overthrew and killed Lumumba... Within a few years, to consolidate his position, Mobutu conducted the Zaireanization of the Congo: he changed his name (Mobutu Sese Seko) and that of his country (Zaire), and insisted on a series of cultural returns to an idea of the pure cultural heritage of Zaire.... Mobutu stole an estimated $5.5 billion from his country at the same time as he tried to portray himself as a Zairean like any other.
(263-265): Oil came into the picture for Saudi society in the early years of ibn Saud's rule (1933). Hastily, ibn Saud signed concessions to US-British oil firms. The corporations flourished. The Saudis acted as sentries of a reservoir that holds a quarter or more of the world's oil, while the US and British governments offered security for the longevity of the antidemocratic regime... Saudi largess went toward the prolfligate consumption of the royal family and religious charity. By 1958, the oil-rich land was in debt by $480 million. Crown Prince Faysal, who exerted his own authority against his brother King Saud, went to the IMF in 1957, and earned some credits in lieu of a tighter fiscal policy and a devalued rial. The oil merchants thrived, but the Saudi people suffred... The stalled state expenditure exacerbated the population's already-diminished set of expectations. They were tinder for Nasserism, Third World nationalism, and Communism... In 1953, the workers at Aramco conducted an unsuccessful two-week strike to form a union. Then, in July 1956, when King Saud came to Dhahran mass demonstrations greeted him. The workers wanted basic rights, while the population wanted the removal of the growing military base... The year before, at the Taif Air Base in the western mountains of the kingdom, Saudi troops mutinied in Nasser's name. They were executed. In this context, Nasser arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1956... These Nasserite currents came to the fore in the early months of 1958... By March, Saudi frustration with Nasser had reached a high pitch. The crown tried to assasinated him as his airport approached Damascus International Airport The Nasserite threat was always greater than that of the Communists, who in Saudi Arabia numbered few. The Organization of Saudi Communists operated under the aegis of the National Renewal (later, Liberation) Front from 1954 onward. Only in the 1960s did peninsular Marxism make its mark--in Yemen and Oman. The 1962 nationalist revolution in Yemen provided a haven for the export of Third world nationalist and revolutionary ideas across the region... When the Marxists seized power in South Yemen in 1967, the Popular Front was renamed the Popular Front for the liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf. The Saudis, now much more militarily confident than they were in the 1950s, financed the resistance against South Yemen and that of the Omani government against the Popular Front. They were scrupulous in the extrication of the Left from the peninsula.
(265): Nasserism, like a virus entered the palace walls... Their leader was Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz, the "Red Prince"... Talal broached the idea of a National Council in 1958, and now the Free Princes moved to gain public support. They had no mass base., and since they did not have the support of their clans, they failed to penetrate Saudi society... Talal used the bulk of 1961 to create secular social institutions in Saudi society and ameliorate unemployment through public works. The Free Princes appeared to be on the road to accomplish a left-wing palace coup, to do what the Free Officers did without the use of the military. Then Faysal moved against Talal... Talal and his group withdrew to Beirut. The Free Princes were squashed...
(266): Not long after Faysal's coup de grace against the Nasserites and the Communists, he hosted the WML. Faysal had a senior partner in Aramco, and behind them was the US government. The US government gave "wholehearted support" to the WML as an instrument to roll back Third World nationalism and dent the USSR by appeal to its large Muslim population (perhaps 45 million)... US president Eisenhower held a summit in 1957 with the Saudis and enunciated his doctrine. The Eisenhower Doctrine was framed to contain Communism in general, but in the specific instance of the Middle East to promote the Saudis and monarchical forces (such as the Shah of Iran and the kings of Jordan and Iraq) as an alternative to Nasserism.
(269): [EVEN THIS ONLY WENT SO FAR--INJUSTICE CAN ONLY BE MADE SO PALATABLE, IN OTHER WORDS] IN 1979, a group of devout Muslim activists organized into the Movement of the Muslim Revolutionaries of the Arabian Peninsula laid siege to the Masjid al-Haram. They defended their actions as the only way to take back the holy shrines from the "drunkards" who "led a dissolute life in luxurious palaces." ... Simultaneously, but independently, the Shia of eastern Saudi Arabia came out in mass demonstrations (many of them were oil workers in Aramco's fileds). The National Guard crushed both the siege and the rebellion. The egalitarian noises from the Iranian Revolution (but no so much the Islamic republic that followed it) petrified the Saudi royals and indeed the entrenched elites across the Third World... The ulema in Saudi Arabia were quick to line up with the monarchy.
(269): The oil price rise after 1973 provided Saudi Arabia with the singular ability among the darker nations to buy off its citizenry. A few years of liquidity in the 1970s allowed the state to increase the social wage, although the monarchy did not fundamentally change the dependent basis of the Saudi economy. Saudi industry produced less than 2 percent of the gross national product, and dates remained the second-largest export item after crude and refined oil... In the fundamentals, Saudi society reflected the same problems as much of the Third World: a one-commodity economy, with a poorly developed industrial sector, a large state apparatus, a growing military (costing about 14 percent of the gross national product), and a languished population. At the whim of fickle oil prices, the Saudi economy went into a nosedive beginning in the late 1970s. The World Bank recommended that the Saudi state shore up its fundamentals, and the royal family conducted a self-directed structural adjustment during the 1980s... For a society with a young population and growing structural unemployment, the social and cultural consequences of austerity were great. As dissent and protest grew, the Saudis met this both through outright repression and an ideological campaign. In 1976, the Saudi royals welcomed the head of the religious police into the cabinet... Chauvinisms of various kinds were encouraged. The royals called for the "Saudiization" of the workforce as a means to turn the blame for unemployment on the five million foreign contract workers (almost a third of the total population).
(271): The IMF instituions prodded the post-colonial states in the 1970s to give up on the delivery of public goods such as education, health care, and relief services, and allow private or charitable entities to do the work. In Pakistan and Egypt, for instance, as the state slowly eroded its public educational system, the exponential growth of cheap Islamic schools provided opportunities for lower-middle-class and working-class youth.
(273): As Part of the Pakistan National Alliance, the Jamaat reaped the benefit of Zia's cutback in educational funding--money now came in from the WML, the International Islamic relief Organization, the Saudi and Kuwaiti Red Crescent, the Saudi General Intelligence Department, the Saudi royals, and other such private avenues. This money created a web of religious schools (madrassas): from nine hundred madrassas in 1971, the number swelled to eight thousand by 1988.
(274): As it undermiend the idea of nationalism, conservative social forces and various powerful social classes gathered together to offer an alternative vision of what it meant to be patriotic, indeed what it meant to be nationalistic. The secular-socialist nationalism of the Third World agenda withered before the rise of a cultural nationalism now deeply invested in racial, religious, and such atavistic differences... National liberation regimes had not been able or did not try to dethrone the old social classes and the older forms of social solidarity but they did create mechanisms to create national solidarity. Public schools, military service, voluntary labor, and other such institutions attempted to make equality a real social value and part of the experience of the citizenry. If the social classes do not mingle, there can be no real national solidarity. That said, once the state ceased to make this token effort, the significance o fht eolder, generally unmolested class bonds now attained a greater deal of purpose.
(275): Globalization and cultural nationalism are not opposites or irreconcilable doubles; they exist together, they feed of each other. Indeed, cultural natioanlism is the Trojan horse of IMF-driven globalization. The mecca of IMF-driven globalization is therefore in the ability to open one's economy to stateless, soullesss corporations while blaming the failure of well-being on religious, ethnic, sexual, and other minorities. That is the mecca of the post-Third World era.
(276): Debt hangs heavy for the bulk of the planet. In 1970, when the Third World project was intact, the sixty states classified as "low-income" by the World Bank owed commercial lenders and international agencies $25 billion. Three decades later, the debt of these states ballooned to $523 billion. An impoverished conversation on debt yields no agenda to combat this fundametnal ailment for the former Third world. These are not "poor" countires. Over the course of these three decades, the sixty states paid $550 billion in principle and interest on loans worth $540 billion. Yet they still owe $523 billion. The alchemy of international usury binds the darker nations.
(276-277): For there was a gradual realization that such progress as was made in the first three decades after 1945 did not imply any fundamental change in the status or real development prospects of Third World countries. Dependency was increasing rather than decreasing, poverty was persisting and the income gap between the Rich North and the Poor south was gettting wider. According to the World Bank, "In 1960 per capita GDP in the richest 20 countries was 18 times more than in the poorest 20 countries. By 1995 this gap had widened to 37 times." The divergence between the North and the South grew as the Third World fragmented. But even this spatial metaphor of the North and South is insufficient; it ignores the mature class hierarchies that had grown within each of the countries in the South and the North.
(281): The limitations of IMF-driven globalization and revanchist traditionalism provoke mass movements across the planet. The battles for land rights and water rights, for cultural dignity and economic parity, for women's rights and indigenous rights, for the construction of democratic institutions and responsive states--these are legion in every country, on every continent. It is from these many creative initiatives that a genuine agenda for the future will arise. When it does, the Third World will have found its successor.
(224): A hundred years after Columbus arrived on the island of Jamaica in 1494, the Arawak population of a hundred thousand dwindled to a handful. In time, the entire population was cleansed, and the island was peopled by English colonial officials and plantation owners as well as enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. Captive labor grew the sugarcane that provided the main economic resource of the island. Rebellions came over time, and these generated a strong consciousness of distaste for the brutality, and paternalism of colonial rule. It took centuries for independence to come, and when it did come in 1962, it was overdue.
(224-225): The new regime of Nelson Manley's People's National Party crafted a social development agenda to counter the chainless bondage of postcolonial life.... Economic policy generally drew from the import-substitution theory, and the government relied on targeted direct foreign investment, notably in the bauxite sector. The latter provided Jamaica with most of its foreign exchange earnings. Discovered in the 1940s, the bauxite reserves fell prey to Canadian and US firms starting in 1952. These firms have since dominated the extraction of the mineral, with Jamaica becoming the largest exporter to North America in the 1960s. But as with sugar and tourism, the Jamaican people did not benefit from their natural resources. The only return to Jamaica came in the way of modest taxes to the government, meager wages to the working class, and a small tribute to the Jamaican managers at the mines and plantations--for this reason, what Jamaica exported despite its fabulous resources was cheap labor, and what it gained for that was a pittance toward its grandiose development aims.
(225-226): Despite the decent rate of growth, Jamaica could not raise the funds to cover its import bill; over 60 percent of the goods used in the country came from abroad (including energy and consumer goods, but also about half its food). Unable to cover its import bill as a result of a failure to diversify its economy, the Jamaican government relied on foreign investment and tourism to balance its books. The erratic, but almost always low prices of its minerals (bauxite) as well as its plantation crops (bananas and sugar) meant that the balance of payments suffered from a chronic deficit.
(226): By the early 1970s, the government reactivated its efforts to break Jamaica out of its impoverished chrysalis at the nether end of global capitalism. Manley's son Michael ran a ferocious and successful political campaign against the global economic system that stacked the deck against countries like Jamaica. Once in power, Michael Manley promoted the construction of democratic socialism for Jamaica, but his regime did not try to disassociate itself from the world capitalist system... Keeping Jamaica hooked up to the infusion of foreign aid or investment meant that the government had to respond to the demands of the foreign money managers rather than the long-term developmental needs of the people of Jamaica.
(227): [DECLINING TERMS OF TRADE] Bauxite was not the only unprocessed commodity to experience a sharp decline in its price into the early 1980s. If the 1970s saw a marginal rise in the price of certain nonpetroleum commodities, by the 1980s there was an across-the-board drop in these prices. Single commodity export-dependent countries lost earnings of as much as $290 billion between 1980-1991 as a result of the decline in their terms of trade. For sub-Saharan Africa, the impact was gruesome. For much of the region, nonfuel primary commodity goods amount for about one-third of the state's export earnings. The decline in the terms of trade meant that these countries lost on average about 5 percent of their gross domestic product...
(229): [DEBT CRISIS] World inflation, high oil prices, and a drop in commodity prices affected the reserves, as it did those of most of the darker nations. In 1960, the total debt of the 133 states that the World Bank counted as part of the "developing countries" held a total public and private debt just short of US $18 billion. In ten years, the debt had escalated to $75 billion., and when Jamaica went into fiscal crisis, it was $113 billion. By 1982, the debt had reached the astronomical figure of $612 billion. While many scholars and commentators blame the oil crisis of 1973-1974 for the ballooning debt, this is a superficial argument. The rise in oil prices due to the action of the OPEC cartel only exacerbated tendencies that had already stymied the social development of the formerly colonized states. The distorted development agenda followed by most of the third World... and the imperialist pressure faced by these states produced a structurally impoverished international political economy. When the oil crisis hit, it provided the conjuncture for the Third World's structural rot.
(229): In 1974-1975, the nonpetroleum exporting states of the Third World had to come up with $80 billion to finance their external deficits. Of this, about $36 billion came from private sources. Commercial banks in the G-7 that found that the rate of return within the advanced industrial states declined as productivity rates grew flat, turned eagerly to fund the Third World states... But the banks would not dole out their capital without cover from the IMF. If the IMF sanctified the state with a short-term standby agreement, it provided a "seal of approval" for more funds. The IMF loans often fell far short of the amount needed, so the IMF acted as insurance for the private commercial banks... The money swept into the Third World, but not without a prospect of return. In 1975, Rothschild reports, "each of the five largest US banks made more than 40 percent of its profits from foreign operations. Chase was an extreme case. It earned 64 percent of its profits abroad, as compared to only 22 percent in 1970.
(230): How could the impoverished pay back these enormous loans?... The defaults did not come because the IMF, backed by the US government and the newly confident elites of the darker nations, strong-armed governments into the cannibalization of their resources to maintain the payment schedules. After the Mexican collapse of 1982, the US government proposed the Brady Plan (1989), which had two elements. First, the banks lent money to cover the debt if the country provided assurances to pay back the loan and the debt, and second, the IMF and the US Department of the Treasury sanctified the loan if the country entered a process of significant economic reform.
(231): [DEBT CRISIS AS TRIBUTE] By 1983, capital flows reversed, as more money came from the indebted states to the G-7 than went out as loans and aid. In other words, the indebted countries subsidized and funded the wealthy nations. In the late 1980s, the indebted states sent an average of $40 billion more to the G-7 than the G-7 sent out as loans and aid; this became the annual tribute from the darker nations. By 1997, the total debt owed by the formerly colonized world amounted to about $2.17 trillion, with a daily debt-service payment of $717 million. The nations of sub-Saharan Africa spent four times more on debt service, on interest payments, than on health care. For most of the indebted states, between one-third and one-fifth of their gross national product was squandered in this debt-service tribute. The debt crisis had winners: the financial interests in the G-7.
(231): During the first six months of 1974, when the fiscal effects of the oil crisis became clear,
the G-7 enjoyed a $6 billion surplus with the nonpetroleum exporting Third World states, but it suffered a $41 billion deficit with the oil exporting states. A year later, the nonpetroleum states owed $21 billion, whereas the G-7 owed the oil group $21 billion. The scale had been balanced.
(231): Furthermore, the oil states... held their profits largely in US dollars, which meant that as the US dollar abandoned the gold standard in 1971, its own standing in the global economy remained high because petrodollars kept it in demand. The rise in petrodollars allowed the United States to abandon the very macroeconomic restrictions it demanded of the Third World, and therefore run a deficit to strengthen its domestic economy and expand its already-considerable military.
(233): The IMF plan was rigorous. First, it called on the government to devalue its currency to discourage imports and increase its ability to export its products. The policy intended to shift the import-substitution thrust to an export-oriented economy. Second, the government had to discourage an increase in wages to keep down the need to import goods. Third, the IMF called for the reduction of the role of the state in the economy... Fourth, the state needed to sell off its public-sector assets and enhance the private enterprises. Finally, the state had to hamper the money supply and raise interest rates to induce "fiscal discipline."
(233): In Jamaica, the immediate effects of IMF policy fell on the rural and urban working class. Inflation soared as the Jamaican dollar faced significant devaluation and price of basic goods began to skyrocket (chicken up 74 percent, salt-fish 285 percent, milk 83 percent, flour 214 percent, and cooking oil 72 percent). The IMF austerity regime dropped real wages by as much as 35 percent in 1978 alone. By 1980, the unemployment rate in Jamaica soared to 30 percent or perhaps more. About 60 percent of Jamaican households began to rely primarily, if not exclusively, on the income of women, many of whom worked in unrewarding sweatshops in Kingston's free trade zone. In that zone, 80 percent of the employees were single mothers whose desperation to keep their families alive meant that three-quarters of them worked overtime.
(234): In 1990, a senior IMF economist studied the IMF-enforced stabilization measures from 1973 to 1988, the period when the structural adjustment bombed the Third World. His measured study found that "the growth rate is significantly reduced in program countries relative to the change in non-program countries." The IMF produced a patient with contracted economic activity, the destruction of the capacity for long-term economic growth, the cannibalization of resources (what is known as "asset stripping"), and a consequent return to being an exporter of raw materials. Much of this resulted in rising inequality in terms of class and gender, in addition to widespread environmental devastation.
(236): By the end of 1980, the per capita income in Jamaica fell by 40 percent.
(237): Marcos, Suharto, and Seaga [Edward Seaga, who succeeded Manley in 1980] mastered the art of political illusion: by a sleight of hand, they posed as efficient nationalists as they opened their countries to unregulated corporations. The national bourgeoisie, represented in Jamaica by Seaga, camouflaged their enthusiasm for "reform" by making the claim that there is no alternative and the IMF made us do it as well as by touting the amount of US and IMF money that flowed into the country as a result of the reforms.
(238): In 1981, the island's gross domestic product was $3 billion, but three years later it fell to $2 billion... IMF-driven globalization exacerbated the collapse of the Jamaican economy... The institutional impact of IMF-driven globalization was heavy. The new reforms pushed by Seaga's government resulted in a weakened responsive state. Between the mid-1980s and 1989, Jamaica's government fired about a third of its public employees, "both through privatization of public companies and through central government layoffs"... The national liberation state was disemboweled in this process.
(238): The neoliberal state now stakes itself more on repression than on responsiveness... From 1979 to 1986, the Jamaican police killed more than two hundred people per year... In the conditions of total social and economic collapse, gang violence or community protection against gang violence became the order of the day. Social anomie intensified alongside IMF-driven reforms, and the neoliberal state responded with the bullet.
(243): The G-7 dominated the IMF procedures and policies, and regarded its rules as being for the darker nations and not for the advanced industrial states. For this reason, the G-7 did not adhere to the IMF structural adjustment demands against budget deficits and subsidies. The G-7 broke the rules when it wanted to... The IMF served the G-7, and not the G-77... The statement showed that whereas almost a hundred Third World states accounted for less than 37 percent of the IMF's voting power, the five leading industrial powers controlled more than 40 percent, while the United States alone held 20 percent of the votes in the IMF.
(245): In the thirty years after 1960, the Tigers' total share of total world exports increased from 1.5 to 6.7 percent. Their share of total exports from the Third World rose from 6 to 34 percent, as their share of Third World manufacturing exports rose from 13.2 to an unbelievable 61.5 percent. Unlike most great leaps forward of this kind, the Tigers did not grow at the cost of extreme domestic inequality. By 1990, all the Tigers showed a substantial improvement in income distribution...
(246): Singapore... had the privilege of being the second most competitive economy in the world (after the US). The GDP of this small island grew from 1965 to 1990 by an average of 6.5% per year... The engine for this explosion was Singapore's exports of manufactures. In1960, only 7.2 percent of Singapore's gross domestic product came from manufactured exports, whereas by 1990 manufactured exports accounted for a little more than three-quarters of the gross domestic product.
(249): The sensation of Singapore and other other Tigers came in large part from a set of advantages exceptional to them. For one, the colonial experience of the Tigers was objectively beneficial. Seized by the British as commercial bases for their China trade, Singapore (1819) and Hong Kong (1841) inherited few of history's problems. There was little agriculture, and what there was soon vanished before the hunger for buildings... Both Singapore and Hong Kong thrived as duty-free ports for opium and other commodities. These were paradises of capital, where the problem of production (and hence workers) was shipped elsewhere. [SEEMS CONTRADICTORY, IN LIGHT OF LATER ADMISSION THAT COMMUNIST TRADE UNIONS PLAYED PROMINENT ROLE IN SINGAPORE] These were almost purely entrepots. Occupied by the Japanese, Taiwan and Korea experienced an assault on their landlord class and forced land reform. Feudalism disappeared at the butt of an Arisaka rifle. In addition, the Japanese colonial machine exported its zaibatsu-state complex for capitalist development.
(249): A brutal war between the British and the Communist Party ran from 1948 until Malaysia's independence in 1957.
(250-251): Politics interfered with the necessary work of development; the ideological framework developed by Lee for PAP secluded the work of development... The Tigers emulated each other on this score: two consecutive dictatorships (led by Park Chung-Hee and Chun Doo-Hwan) controlled South Korea from 1960-1988; in Taiwan, the Kuomintang ruled a one-party state from 1949-1996; and Hong Kong remained a British colony until 1997.
(251): Even as the Third World's bourgeoisie lavished praise on the East Asian miracle in the 1980s, during the 1950s and 1960s, the Tigers traveled a familiar route, albeit with better basic conditions (land reforms and institutions such as the chaebols for industrial organizations). Singapore's PAP, led by the charismatic Lee, followed Goh Keng Swee's advice on state intervention. The Development Plan (1960-64) adopted the import-substitution industrialization strategy. Whatever funds could be harnessed went into state-owned enterprises...
(252-253): [KEY BREAK WITH ISI--THIS WHOLE ACCOUNT IS SLIGHTLY WEAK, I THINK] When Singapore broke from Malaysia in 1965, it had to reassess the import-substitution strategy because now the small island alone did not have a sufficient domestic market to carry through the program. This specific event, the caesura from Malaysia, caused the cabinet to move the island state toward an export-oriented manufacturing plant... To transform Singapore into a major transshipment entrepot and manufacturing site required an enormous infusion of capital... The secret to the Tigers' sensation lies in this original infusion of capital, because only with it could their various institutional advantages shine. A large amount of the investement capital came from PAP's ability to capture domestic savings... Additional money came from US government aid, although this played less of a role in Singapore than in Taiwan ($13 billion) and Korea ($5.6 billion)... More than domestic savings and foreign aid, the Tigers in the 1960s relied on investment from transnational corporations. Lee Kuan Yew recognized early that his goal was "to make Singapore into an oasis in Southeast Asia, for if we had First World standards then business peple and tourists would make us a base for their business and tours of the region." To draw in tourists and finance capital required lenient rules and clean streets. Lee provided the latter through his authoritarian state; his government created the conditions for the former in haste. It worked: between 1960 and 1990, Singapore enjoyed the world's highest investment ratio... By 1973, Singapore abolished quotas and tariffs to create a free-trade port. It created EPZ's, which blossomed because the staet removed all income taxes and allowed them to function without regulation... [YET] The high rates of investment did not change the nature of the Singaporean economy; it produced low-end goods for the world market. Singapore needed to go after the high-end, high-value goods to hasten its development and break out of its dependency on foreign capital. Starting in 1979, PAP inaugurated a new targeted investment strategy. It gave immense incentives for foreign capital to invest in industrail manufacturing, tourism, trade, transport, and communication as well as "brain services" (medical and financial). This "Second Industrial Revolution" required and infusion of skill and a new kind of investment. The import of skill was not new to the Tigers. Because of Communist insurrection and insurgency, the well-educated and upwardly mobile professionals fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong (from China), South Korea (from the North), and Singapore (from China and Malaysia). These professionals brought with them mercantile and technical skills that came gratis to their host societies. In the early years, all the Tigers invested heavily in their human capital: state-funded and managed educational systems that stressed technical skills, and an enhanced social wage that drew and maintained populations... Singapore developed its high-technology firms, but structurally its economy remained dependent on foreign investment (mainly from transnational corporations and private portfolio investment). As Japanese investment dried up in the late 1980s, Chinese investment kicked in. China, boosted by the human capital growth of its socialist era and the EPZ performance on its coastal rim, generated investment for the East Asian manufactures...
(255): IN 1997, the Thai bhat failed, setting off a chain reaction across the rim until the Tigers had to go to the IMF with their hats in hand for a bailout. What had struck the rest of the Third World from the late 1970s onward, hit East Asia two decades later. While the Tigers' collapse appeared structural, as the dust settled it became clear that they had been the victims of financial speculators... China's sheer economic size allowed it to weather the storm, and its stability provided a lifeline for parts of the East Asian world. The commodity price drop explains not only the downturn but also the structural closeness of the Tigers to the rest of the darker nations.
(261): ...[M]ost of the Saudi royal family had enjoyed a pragmatic relationship with Wahhabism: they accorded it respect in public, but lived wilder lives in private (including during long sojourns to Europe). [Crown Prince] Faysal was different. He was a true believer.
(262): The reinvention of tribalism and other atavistic ideas is equally central. Joseph Desire Mobutu, raised in the Belgian Congo by European friars, led the coup against the left-wing prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1960. Lumumba's Congolese National Movement Party took the newly freed Congo leftward and disadvantaged European capital... Mobutu, backed by the Belgians and the United States, overthrew and killed Lumumba... Within a few years, to consolidate his position, Mobutu conducted the Zaireanization of the Congo: he changed his name (Mobutu Sese Seko) and that of his country (Zaire), and insisted on a series of cultural returns to an idea of the pure cultural heritage of Zaire.... Mobutu stole an estimated $5.5 billion from his country at the same time as he tried to portray himself as a Zairean like any other.
(263-265): Oil came into the picture for Saudi society in the early years of ibn Saud's rule (1933). Hastily, ibn Saud signed concessions to US-British oil firms. The corporations flourished. The Saudis acted as sentries of a reservoir that holds a quarter or more of the world's oil, while the US and British governments offered security for the longevity of the antidemocratic regime... Saudi largess went toward the prolfligate consumption of the royal family and religious charity. By 1958, the oil-rich land was in debt by $480 million. Crown Prince Faysal, who exerted his own authority against his brother King Saud, went to the IMF in 1957, and earned some credits in lieu of a tighter fiscal policy and a devalued rial. The oil merchants thrived, but the Saudi people suffred... The stalled state expenditure exacerbated the population's already-diminished set of expectations. They were tinder for Nasserism, Third World nationalism, and Communism... In 1953, the workers at Aramco conducted an unsuccessful two-week strike to form a union. Then, in July 1956, when King Saud came to Dhahran mass demonstrations greeted him. The workers wanted basic rights, while the population wanted the removal of the growing military base... The year before, at the Taif Air Base in the western mountains of the kingdom, Saudi troops mutinied in Nasser's name. They were executed. In this context, Nasser arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1956... These Nasserite currents came to the fore in the early months of 1958... By March, Saudi frustration with Nasser had reached a high pitch. The crown tried to assasinated him as his airport approached Damascus International Airport The Nasserite threat was always greater than that of the Communists, who in Saudi Arabia numbered few. The Organization of Saudi Communists operated under the aegis of the National Renewal (later, Liberation) Front from 1954 onward. Only in the 1960s did peninsular Marxism make its mark--in Yemen and Oman. The 1962 nationalist revolution in Yemen provided a haven for the export of Third world nationalist and revolutionary ideas across the region... When the Marxists seized power in South Yemen in 1967, the Popular Front was renamed the Popular Front for the liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf. The Saudis, now much more militarily confident than they were in the 1950s, financed the resistance against South Yemen and that of the Omani government against the Popular Front. They were scrupulous in the extrication of the Left from the peninsula.
(265): Nasserism, like a virus entered the palace walls... Their leader was Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz, the "Red Prince"... Talal broached the idea of a National Council in 1958, and now the Free Princes moved to gain public support. They had no mass base., and since they did not have the support of their clans, they failed to penetrate Saudi society... Talal used the bulk of 1961 to create secular social institutions in Saudi society and ameliorate unemployment through public works. The Free Princes appeared to be on the road to accomplish a left-wing palace coup, to do what the Free Officers did without the use of the military. Then Faysal moved against Talal... Talal and his group withdrew to Beirut. The Free Princes were squashed...
(266): Not long after Faysal's coup de grace against the Nasserites and the Communists, he hosted the WML. Faysal had a senior partner in Aramco, and behind them was the US government. The US government gave "wholehearted support" to the WML as an instrument to roll back Third World nationalism and dent the USSR by appeal to its large Muslim population (perhaps 45 million)... US president Eisenhower held a summit in 1957 with the Saudis and enunciated his doctrine. The Eisenhower Doctrine was framed to contain Communism in general, but in the specific instance of the Middle East to promote the Saudis and monarchical forces (such as the Shah of Iran and the kings of Jordan and Iraq) as an alternative to Nasserism.
(269): [EVEN THIS ONLY WENT SO FAR--INJUSTICE CAN ONLY BE MADE SO PALATABLE, IN OTHER WORDS] IN 1979, a group of devout Muslim activists organized into the Movement of the Muslim Revolutionaries of the Arabian Peninsula laid siege to the Masjid al-Haram. They defended their actions as the only way to take back the holy shrines from the "drunkards" who "led a dissolute life in luxurious palaces." ... Simultaneously, but independently, the Shia of eastern Saudi Arabia came out in mass demonstrations (many of them were oil workers in Aramco's fileds). The National Guard crushed both the siege and the rebellion. The egalitarian noises from the Iranian Revolution (but no so much the Islamic republic that followed it) petrified the Saudi royals and indeed the entrenched elites across the Third World... The ulema in Saudi Arabia were quick to line up with the monarchy.
(269): The oil price rise after 1973 provided Saudi Arabia with the singular ability among the darker nations to buy off its citizenry. A few years of liquidity in the 1970s allowed the state to increase the social wage, although the monarchy did not fundamentally change the dependent basis of the Saudi economy. Saudi industry produced less than 2 percent of the gross national product, and dates remained the second-largest export item after crude and refined oil... In the fundamentals, Saudi society reflected the same problems as much of the Third World: a one-commodity economy, with a poorly developed industrial sector, a large state apparatus, a growing military (costing about 14 percent of the gross national product), and a languished population. At the whim of fickle oil prices, the Saudi economy went into a nosedive beginning in the late 1970s. The World Bank recommended that the Saudi state shore up its fundamentals, and the royal family conducted a self-directed structural adjustment during the 1980s... For a society with a young population and growing structural unemployment, the social and cultural consequences of austerity were great. As dissent and protest grew, the Saudis met this both through outright repression and an ideological campaign. In 1976, the Saudi royals welcomed the head of the religious police into the cabinet... Chauvinisms of various kinds were encouraged. The royals called for the "Saudiization" of the workforce as a means to turn the blame for unemployment on the five million foreign contract workers (almost a third of the total population).
(271): The IMF instituions prodded the post-colonial states in the 1970s to give up on the delivery of public goods such as education, health care, and relief services, and allow private or charitable entities to do the work. In Pakistan and Egypt, for instance, as the state slowly eroded its public educational system, the exponential growth of cheap Islamic schools provided opportunities for lower-middle-class and working-class youth.
(273): As Part of the Pakistan National Alliance, the Jamaat reaped the benefit of Zia's cutback in educational funding--money now came in from the WML, the International Islamic relief Organization, the Saudi and Kuwaiti Red Crescent, the Saudi General Intelligence Department, the Saudi royals, and other such private avenues. This money created a web of religious schools (madrassas): from nine hundred madrassas in 1971, the number swelled to eight thousand by 1988.
(274): As it undermiend the idea of nationalism, conservative social forces and various powerful social classes gathered together to offer an alternative vision of what it meant to be patriotic, indeed what it meant to be nationalistic. The secular-socialist nationalism of the Third World agenda withered before the rise of a cultural nationalism now deeply invested in racial, religious, and such atavistic differences... National liberation regimes had not been able or did not try to dethrone the old social classes and the older forms of social solidarity but they did create mechanisms to create national solidarity. Public schools, military service, voluntary labor, and other such institutions attempted to make equality a real social value and part of the experience of the citizenry. If the social classes do not mingle, there can be no real national solidarity. That said, once the state ceased to make this token effort, the significance o fht eolder, generally unmolested class bonds now attained a greater deal of purpose.
(275): Globalization and cultural nationalism are not opposites or irreconcilable doubles; they exist together, they feed of each other. Indeed, cultural natioanlism is the Trojan horse of IMF-driven globalization. The mecca of IMF-driven globalization is therefore in the ability to open one's economy to stateless, soullesss corporations while blaming the failure of well-being on religious, ethnic, sexual, and other minorities. That is the mecca of the post-Third World era.
(276): Debt hangs heavy for the bulk of the planet. In 1970, when the Third World project was intact, the sixty states classified as "low-income" by the World Bank owed commercial lenders and international agencies $25 billion. Three decades later, the debt of these states ballooned to $523 billion. An impoverished conversation on debt yields no agenda to combat this fundametnal ailment for the former Third world. These are not "poor" countires. Over the course of these three decades, the sixty states paid $550 billion in principle and interest on loans worth $540 billion. Yet they still owe $523 billion. The alchemy of international usury binds the darker nations.
(276-277): For there was a gradual realization that such progress as was made in the first three decades after 1945 did not imply any fundamental change in the status or real development prospects of Third World countries. Dependency was increasing rather than decreasing, poverty was persisting and the income gap between the Rich North and the Poor south was gettting wider. According to the World Bank, "In 1960 per capita GDP in the richest 20 countries was 18 times more than in the poorest 20 countries. By 1995 this gap had widened to 37 times." The divergence between the North and the South grew as the Third World fragmented. But even this spatial metaphor of the North and South is insufficient; it ignores the mature class hierarchies that had grown within each of the countries in the South and the North.
(281): The limitations of IMF-driven globalization and revanchist traditionalism provoke mass movements across the planet. The battles for land rights and water rights, for cultural dignity and economic parity, for women's rights and indigenous rights, for the construction of democratic institutions and responsive states--these are legion in every country, on every continent. It is from these many creative initiatives that a genuine agenda for the future will arise. When it does, the Third World will have found its successor.
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