The Peninsula Foundation

Category: Politics & Society

  • The Cultural Revolution from the Right: From the Democratic Concept of the People to its Ethnic-religious Understanding

    The Cultural Revolution from the Right: From the Democratic Concept of the People to its Ethnic-religious Understanding

    Despite all the real political problems we face, it is essential for the twenty-first century to defend the equality of all people, regardless of biological differences such as gender or ethnicity. It is not our biology that defines us as human beings, but our morality.
    According to Dominique Moisi, the Western states are consumed with fear of decline, the Islamic-Arab world is full of despair at unfulfilled promises, and East and Southeast Asia are full of hope for a better life. These global political sentiments are largely responsible for the escalation of conflicts, the disintegration of social cohesion and the spread of violence. 
    More than 50 years ago, a cultural revolution from the left shook the whole world. In the USA, there were demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and the hippie movement gathered hundreds of thousands in search of a new lifestyle and attitude to life. Flower, power, love was the motto of the legendary Woodstock. In Germany, young people turned against old traditions and the concealment of their parents’ and grandparents’ guilt under fascism. But here, too, the double face of the youth movement became apparent: when they celebrated the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh in their demonstrations, they were in no way aware of the political practice in North Vietnam. This process was even more dramatic during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when the youth were mobilised to ultimately legitimise the claim to power of the “Great Leader” Mao-TseTong. The lesson of that period was that a cultural revolution must precede political change. For some time now, a cultural revolution from the right has been following this pattern. It is characterised on the one hand by social developments in polarised societies, and on the other by a targeted and strategic discourse on the part of the new right. Without underestimating the importance of personalities such as former and newly elected President Trump, as well as Erdogan in Turkey and Putin in Russia (and many others) for this development, they have only been able to achieve such success because they have tapped into the “zeitgeist”. According to Dominique Moisi, the Western states are consumed with fear of decline, the Islamic-Arab world is full of despair at unfulfilled promises, and East and Southeast Asia are full of hope for a better life. These global political sentiments are largely responsible for the escalation of conflicts, the disintegration of social cohesion and the spread of violence.
    In the Western world, instead of recognising the equality of other civilisations, nations and states, the “others” were blamed for the loss of the “white man’s” superiority. The ideology of the white man’s burden to educate the uneducated and indigenous peoples of the world, developed at the beginning of the last century, was revived after the fall of the Soviet Union, but could no longer be sustained with the rise of the others and the newly industrialised nations. However, a dilemma arose – if the success of the others was attributed to them, they would be strengthened and the whites would be even less able to maintain their own sense of superiority. So people looked for internal others to blame for their own decline. This is at the heart of the cultural revolution from the right. It is explained by the fear of no longer being able to maintain the supposed superiority of the “white man” if, for example, a country like Indonesia (i.e. no longer just Japan and China) overtakes Germany’s gross domestic product around 2030. Meanwhile, the US, Germany and many other European countries are not only no longer relatively superior, but parts of the US, for example, are at levels that used to be ascribed only to developing countries. And scapegoats are easy to find and, above all, interchangeable – sometimes it can be emancipated women, migrants, the “elites”, the Chinese, Africans, African-Americans, or anyone who is different. Trump’s statement that migrants are taking “black jobs” from US Americans reveals the core of this ideology: the MAGA movement is the best illustration of this development. Despite Trump’s irrationality and narrow-mindedness, “Make America Great Again” can only take hold if many people fear decline or have already experienced it. Like the masterminds of the cultural revolution on the right, they are trying to conquer the more rural regions first.
    The reference to ethnic pluralism is also one of the defining characteristics of the New Right. The right of all cultures and ethnic groups to exist is unconditionally recognised, but only as long as people remain among themselves or on the territory intended for them. Trump’s idea of expelling millions of Latinos after winning the election corresponds perfectly with the German right’s idea of enforcing re-migration. In Germany, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger and Oswald Spengler, and even Nietzsche, are relativised in order to legitimise the cultural revolution of the right. Antonio Gramsci, actually a progressive Marxist, whose concept of achieving cultural hegemony in the “pre-political space” is pursued by the Right as “metapolitics”, gains central importance.
    At its core, however, the new right is about undermining human equality – in its view, we are only equal to our own nation or religion and gender. This exclusionary equality only with one’s own kind is at the heart of the right’s cultural revolution, whose ideal model is itself based on hierarchical notions, a graded dignity. Such attempts to undo the gains of the struggle for equality in a counter-revolution can be found all over the world – whether in nationalism, ethnocentrism, misogyny, cultural relativism (“they just have a different culture”) or thinly veiled racism.
    The only thing “new” about this right-wing movement is that it uses different terms. The New Right concentrates on the “battle for the heads”, leaving the battles for the streets and, in some cases, the parliaments to other groups of the extreme right. The storming of the Capitol and the German Bundestag were such actions of the extreme right. It must be admitted that the whole world is in turmoil. At its core, however, the new right is about undermining human equality – in its view, we are only equal to our own nation or religion and gender. This exclusionary equality only with one’s own kind is at the heart of the right’s cultural revolution, whose ideal model is itself based on hierarchical notions, a graded dignity. Such attempts to undo the gains of the struggle for equality in a counter-revolution can be found all over the world – whether in nationalism, ethnocentrism, misogyny, cultural relativism (“they just have a different culture”) or thinly veiled racism. It is also marked by the revival of toxic masculinity (Raewen Connel) through the MAGA movement and in particular Trump’s enthusiasm for the wrestling mentality and martial arts. Opinions can be divided on these as sports, but they have no place in politics and point to an absolutely exaggerated and violent masculinity that Trump embodies. These political discourses are used to win elections in the West. In one sentence, the New Right shifts the concept of the democratic people to the ethno-religious people.
    When the few people of Pegida (Patriotic Europeans to defend the Abendland) in Germany shout into the camera: “We are the people”, they are turning the slogan of the democratic revolution of 1989 into an ethno-nationalist revolution. From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, we have witnessed this transformation from the democratic to the ethnic concept of the people. Despite all the real political problems we face, it is essential for the twenty-first century to defend the equality of all people, regardless of biological differences such as gender or ethnicity. It is not our biology that defines us as human beings, but our morality.
    Feature Image Credit: Equality Trust
    from ‘The Link Between Inequality and the Far-Right’ – https://equalitytrust.org.uk
    The far-right has always been part of politics. The current global wave of far-right populist political movements began in the late 1970s, grew in the 1990s, and accelerated dramatically in the late 2000s. It has mirrored a sharp increase in inequality across developed economies, the globalisation of neoliberal economics, and the creation of an international super-rich. 
  • Untangling the “socialism” vs. “capitalism” Dichotomy

    Untangling the “socialism” vs. “capitalism” Dichotomy

    Few ideological dichotomies polarize opinions as readily and as completely as that between “socialism” and “capitalism.” Those who embrace socialism tend to blame capitalism for everything that’s wrong with our world today. Those who embrace capitalism harbor a seething contempt for socialists, but both camps base their views on ideology with only vague notions about the true nature of either system.

    The “socialists” think of capitalism as a rapacious system of exploitation that favors a few at the detriment of many. There is some truth in that. The “capitalists” think of socialism as a system that gives free stuff to the lazy and undeserving, choking society’s progress. There’s some truth in that too, but having lived in both systems and having experienced the ideological brainwash from both sides, I find neither side convincing.

    Spoiler alert: it’s not a left vs. right thing. It’s a top-down vs. bottom-up thing.

    So, you’re a communist!?

    Both system’s ideological foundations amount to marketing, the intellectual gloss on the cover of their respective sales brochures. But the gloss never captures the essence of either system – an omission that is so egregious that it is almost certainly deliberate. Clear understanding of the essence of this dichotomy is not encouraged and instead of exploring all the relevant issues, on both sides of the ideological divide people readily resort to derogatory labels which usually shut down the much needed open minded discussion.

    Last week I had the privilege of participating in a “Capitalist Exploits” conference in Dubai. The event was by invitation only and attended by about 70 participants, all successful entrepreneurs and investors from all over the world. Our various discussion panels covered a lot of ground including health, technology, investing, politics and geopolitics. For my humble contribution I had the honor of being called a communist. This was in jest and not with malice, but as they say, there’s some truth in every joke. I earned the distinction simply by questioning the ideological orthodoxy prevalent in the “capitalist” Western world.

    As someone who grew up in the Communist block and experienced the Marxist brainwash, being called a communist felt comical: I’d rejected the Marxist ideology already as a teenager, not because I had any deep understanding of the economic and socio-political issues we faced but because the system wasn’t delivering as advertised: it was clearly evolving in the opposite direction from the promised utopia.

    At the age of 17, I moved to the “capitalist” United States which appeared to be based on a much, much superior system to the one I knew. The U.S. economy was vibrant with entrepreneurship and innovation and the American people seemed significantly more prosperous than we were. But the more I learned about the “capitalist” system, the more I became convinced that the same seed of doom that made “socialism” unsustainable was also baked into the foundation of the “capitalist” system.

    For starters, in both systems we had the familiar old fiat currency with fractional reserve lending. This one element guarantees the collapse of both systems: over time it reliably corrodes the democratic framework of society, suffocates free market economy, kills entrepreneurship and innovation, and guarantees that government sector of the economy will gradually displace more and more private enterprise. It does this due to an economic effect called the deflationary gap.

    Deflationary gap

    The following few paragraphs may seem convoluted but please bear with me, we’re getting to the essence of the issue at hand. To understand the deflationary gap, let’s consider a closed economic system that produces a certain quantity of goods and services. By “closed” I mean that we’ll assume the system has no foreign trade.

    The total of all the price tags attached to the goods and services produced is the aggregate cost of the system’s output: it represents the amounts of money expended by the businesses on things like raw materials, wages, rents and interest plus the entrepreneurs’ profits. These sums are income to those who receive them and also comprise the system’s total purchasing power. On the whole, the aggregate costs, aggregate incomes and aggregate prices are all the same, because they represent the opposite sides of the same transactions.

    The prices at which the system’s output can be sold in the marketplace are determined by the total amount of money which is available for spending in a given period of time. For the system to be in equilibrium, aggregate prices should exactly absorb the system’s total purchasing power. But a problem arises because in the current monetary system, there are two factors that significantly reduce the system’s purchasing power: (1) savings and (2) debt repayments.

    Namely, people don’t always spend all of their income. Instead, they prefer to set aside a part of it as savings which has the effect of reducing the total purchasing power available in the system.

    This is a problem

    So, if there are any savings, the available purchasing power will be less than the aggregate asking prices. For the system to remain in balance the savings would have to reappear in the market in the form of investments, but if total investment is less than total savings, the purchasing power will still fall short of the amount needed for all of the output to be sold at asking prices. This shortfall of purchasing power in the system, the excess of savings over investment is the deflationary gap.

    The other systemic drain on purchasing power (hat tip to author Liam Allonefor pointing this out to me) are debt repayments: since (nearly) all currency enters into circulation as debt, paying down debts extinguishes the currency and the purchasing power with it.

    Without government intervention we get a depression

    The system can be balanced either by lowering the supply and prices of goods, by enhancing its total purchasing power, or a combination of both. Lowering prices and production of goods will stabilize the economic system at a low level of economic activity. Increasing the purchasing power in the system will stabilize it on a higher level of activity. Left to itself and without intervention, a modern economic system would fall into what we call a self-reinforcing deflationary depression: the deflationary gap would lead to falling prices and output, decline of income and rising unemployment. Furthermore, in recessions and depressions, the level of investment typically declines even more rapidly than savings. To avert this, government intervention is necessary.

    Without government intervention, the economy would stabilize when the level of savings declined to the level of investments which would be at a depression level of activity. This is an anathema in all modern economies, and governments invariably pursue the imperative of economic growth. To generate growth, they must inject new purchasing power into the system. This cannot be done through taxation since taxation doesn’t create new purchasing power: taxes only transfer money from those who earn it to the government.

    This is why governments have no alternative but to continuously engage in deficit spending, adding debt in excess of their tax receipts. This is why virtually all governments in the world today run budget deficits and chronically grow public debt. In spite of all the incessant talk about balancing the budget, paying down debts or imposing debt ceilings, the debts only keep rising at rates that predictably accelerate over time. It doesn’t matter whether we call the system “socialist” or “capitalist,” they both necessitate an ever growing role of government in the economy.

    Today, in many of the “capitalist” nations, government spending accounts for almost half of the GDP and in some cases significantly more. In the UK, the mothership of capitalism, the government’s share of GDP is 44%. In France it’s over 58%.

    The great American debt ceiling Kabuki theater

    In the United States, for over a century now we’ve been treated to periodic reruns of the “debt ceiling” Kabuki theatre. When public debt reaches the “debt ceiling,” free-spending socialists call for more government spending and a raising of the debt ceiling. The conservatives enjoy grandstanding about fiscal conservatism and balancing budgets, but regardless of which side controls the Presidency or the Congress, for over a century now the debt ceiling has been raised every time. The only exceptions have been periods when the ceiling was simply ignored and the public debt continued its accelerating upward trajectory:

    You get socialism, whether you like it or not!

    Averting a depression and achieving economic growth necessitates government intervention and guarantees an accelerating rise in deficit spending with the corresponding rise in public debt regardless of whether we are talking about a “capitalist” or a “socialist” economies. This should be obvious, as the evolution of public debt in the U.S. illustrates:

     

    There’s no point railing against “socialism” and dreaming about a small government, private capital utopia which doesn’t, and cannot exist so long as our economies are based on fiat currencies with fractional reserve lending. Even if we start with zero public debt, the pursuit of economic growth will lead to the same outcomes.

    With fullness of time, government sector will progressively crowd out private enterprise: it’s a mathematical certainty. As a result, we get socialism whether we like it or not. Even if a political leader declares himself to be an anarcho-capitalist and thinks he can create the capitalist utopia (like Argentina’s Javier Millei), the endgame will be the same.

    The passionate disciples of capitalist ideology will protest and invoke the theoretical works by economists like Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothbardor Friedrich Hayek but I would simply ask them to please name one real-world example of a successful free market capitalist economy where the government never ran budget deficits and piled up public debt. I can wait.

    For those who would defend the free market ideology and excuse its failing as a consequence of human corruption and weakness of the structures of society, I’d warn them that this was exactly how Marxists explained away the failures of communist utopia.

    Top-down or bottom-up?

    With that, we can address the false dichotomy between “socialist” and “capitalist” economies as they’re commonly discussed. Namely, in what we call “capitalist” economies, a larger proportion of government-injected purchasing power flows top-down. In what we call “socialist” economies, it flows bottom-up.

    Capitalist governments splurge their largesse on large private corporations in the form of subsidies and generous government contracts. Socialist governments splurge on social welfare programs like low-cost or free health care, education, generous unemployment benefits and pension plans, and programs that maintain full employment even where jobs couldn’t be justified by private enterprise.

    It’s what the “capitalists” hate. As a rule, individuals who strongly favor free market capitalism tend to be the successful, entrepreneurial types who value risk taking, hard work and creating wealth through private initiative. The idea that the state would splurge on the lazy and undeserving free-loaders is understandably revolting.

    However, the alternative in splurging on large corporations is far more dangerous. If purchasing power is distributed bottom up, the decisions about how to spend that purchasing power are up to the ordinary people. As such, they’ll tend to benefit ordinary businesses that produce consumer goods and services: bakers, apparel makers, restaurants, coffee shops, musicians, tour guides, bicycle repairmen, etc.

    By contrast, if the state spends top-down, it runs the moral hazard of determining the winners and losers in the supposedly free market competition. The winners will tend to be those corporations and groups that can “invest” the most in political lobbying efforts. As a result, we get the TBTF banking behemoths, big Ag, big Pharma, big Media, big Tech and a massively bloated military-industrial complex. Ultimately, this favors the emergence of corporatism, as Benito Mussolini characterized fascism. Today we prefer the sanitized term, “private-public partnership.” The adverse effect of all this is a society’s addiction to permanent wars and a penchant for empire-building.

     

    This article is published in Alex Krainer’s Substack.

     

  • The Impact of Domestic Politics on Foreign Policy: The Colombian Case Study

    The Impact of Domestic Politics on Foreign Policy: The Colombian Case Study

    Introduction

    Colombia is amongst the world’s highly polarised states and has endured conflict for decades. The country witnessed around 50 years of armed struggle between militant groups, the government, and the drug cartels and has seen various forms of human rights violations in these years. The country saw more than 220,000 people killed in the conflict, roughly 25000 kidnapped or disappeared and more than 5 million displaced citizens (García-Perdomo, Harlow & Brown, 2022). However, after much pressure from the people and the government, the guerrilla factions and the ruling party convened to sign a peace agreement that essentially brought the active warring factions to a pause. On November 24, 2016, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army, or FARC, signed a landmark peace agreement, which also saw the militants present a public apology to the people of Colombia for their violent actions (Georgi, 2022).

    Since the end of the Second World War, Colombia has seen various governments adopt different stances and approaches to their foreign policies. Multiple domestic actors – state and non-state- have strongly influenced the country’s diplomacy. For example, between 1998 – 2002, Colombia moved from the narrative of remaining a failed state and developed ties with the US (Monroy & Sanchez, 2017). The Republic of Colombia has had 17 presidents since 1946, most of whom belong to Right-Wing conservative parties. The current President, Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego, is the first President from a liberal and leftist political party (Tickner, 2022, 8:10) in decades. The country has never had a progressive-left leader in its political history, and his government has been making waves on all fronts concerning ties with neighbouring countries, attempting to resolve the internal conflict, and dealing with economic disparities within the population.

    A state’s foreign policy primarily focuses on interactions with other states and international actors and is essential to its political agenda. Given the interdependence of these two domains, domestic politics play a vital role in determining a state’s foreign policy. Foreign policy refers to a state’s approach and actions internationally. In contrast, domestic politics refers to the political processes, institutions, and actors within a state that affect the country’s policies. This essay uses Colombia as a case study to investigate how the country’s domestic politics and conflicts have affected its foreign policy. The timeline under revision is from the end of the Second World War to the present.

    This paper will look at the following factors as critical points of discussion. Determining the success of a policy is done by evaluating its efficiency and the evident improvement of situations. The paper will examine 1. How has the evolution of state leadership impacted Colombia’s foreign policy? 2. What role did the insurgents and drug lords play in this scenario? The state leadership (Hey, 1997), the insurgents, and the drug lords are critical players in Colombia’s political landscape and the evolution of its foreign policy. King, Keohane and Verba (1994, p.76) define causality as “a theoretical concept independent of the data used to learn about it”. It is difficult to draw causal inferences in a limited paper. Still, by examining the players mentioned earlier, this paper hopes to attract inferences between domestic politics and the direction of the country’s foreign policy.

    State Leadership and Foreign Policy

    There is a crisp scent of dependency theory when exploring literature about the foreign policies of Latin American countries (Hey, 1997). Similarly, Colombia – a state that witnessed long years of violent conflicts, deaths, kidnappings and illegal drug production continued on the same path as the rest of the countries in the continent. Significant economic disparities and multiple right-wing presidencies saw the inequality between people grow larger and larger (Hey, 1997). These were all critical factors in shaping how the country’s foreign policy presented itself to the world. After the end of the Second World War, Colombia maintained a low profile with respect to its foreign policy (Drekonja-Kornat, 1983). However, Colombia did have a traditional foreign policy – as in a Ministry to oversee relations and maintain ties with neighbouring countries, especially since border disagreements were high. Colombia had closer ties with the US than its immediate neighbouring states. At the same time, there appeared to be a consensus on the state leadership directing policies to suit principles of capitalistic democracy, free trade and markets; Colombia’s external affairs seemed to feed off of international support, especially from the United States of America. The US, in its quest to spread its capitalist democracy, assisted the various presidencies with aid and other means to combat guerrilla movements and insurgent activities. In turn, Colombia helped the US in the Korean War and stood by the US during the Cold War years, too. Drekonja-Kornat (1983) says Colombia was the only Latin American Country involved in the Korean conflict. During Turbay’s presidency, the US-Colombia ties grew closer, and US assistance helped establish his regime further (Hey, 1997). He held office from 1978 – 1982.

    The state’s leadership, in return, adopted and often tailored policies to suit strategic and international partners, particularly the US. Examples of presidencies adopting such policies include supporting the US stance on drugs (Hey, 1997), committing to recognise threats and terrorist activities as adjudged by the US and the EU, etc. (United States Department of State, 2021). Colombia’s constant internal security dilemma accentuates the existence of a dependency theory of Foreign Policy.

    Impact of the Internal Conflict on Colombia’s Foreign Policy

    The insurgents, guerrilla groups, and drug cartels played a role in shaping the foreign policy of Colombia. The entry of drugs into neighbouring countries, particularly the US, brought an international player into Colombia’s domestic issues (Gomez-Suarez & Newman, 2013). The United States desperately tried to solve the drug menace, which led to fighting the drug cartels and networks. America aided and supported the governments in curbing the cartel’s activities and eliminating insurgents who pushed for a more communist ideology, primarily in the Cold War period. Colombia’s alignment with the US on account of the Cold War influenced its domestic politics, which had a more significant say in shaping the country’s foreign policy. The United States of America is Colombia’s largest aid donor; listed below are some of the aid packages received by Colombia:

    1. The US has provided more than $1 billion in direct and indirect support for implementing peace in Colombia since 2016. (United States Department of State, 2021).
    2. The US provided roughly $700 million to assist Colombia with the Venezuelan migrant crisis and host approximately 1.8 million refugees in Colombia. (United States Department of State, 2021).

    Viewing the case from a realist perspective, much of Colombia’s foreign affairs has been dictated by the ebbs and flow of the insurgency. With Colombia’s development and domestic affairs requiring external support, it lacked the necessary flexibility to implement social development schemes as dependency on external aid was high (Monroy & Sanchez, 2017). Colombia became an instrument of the American War on Drugs, almost a pawn to the American foreign policy in Latin America (Tickner, 2011).

    While examining the history of how the state’s leadership handled its foreign policy directives and its domestic issues, there is space for some leniency. Many attempts to broker a peace agreement between the insurgents and the state were met with strong reluctance from the general public and a lack of participation from insurgent groups. Furthermore, corruption in various levels of government offices withheld any progress that could have been made. One could interpret the constant repetition of right-wing presidencies as people’s reluctance to move away from conservative rules, much to the dismay of insurgents, ultimately rendered the public most affected in the struggle for domestic power in the country.

    The Way Forward

    Gustavo Petro became the first leftist President of Colombia on June 19, 2022, in decades (Freeman, 2023). His Presidential victory also marked the first-ever Afro-Colombian, Francia Marquez, to take office as Vice President. Unlike his liberal predecessors, the change in power was smooth from his rightist counterparts. As a leftist, there were questions about his merit and reputation as the country’s leftists were primarily likened to insurgents and militants. While the 2016 Peace Accords dismantled and disarmed most militants from the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or FARC, the associations took longer to change.

    President Petro, however, is having quite the start to office. He is leading a policy of ‘Total Peace’, an effort to include all factions and players in the internal conflict and arrive at an end to the insurgency; his presidency plans to shift Colombia’s economic dependency on trade from the US, fossil fuels and the illicit drug trade to a more sustainable approach (Freeman, 2023), that would be similar to the Green Theory. One can interpret his actions as playing on both sides of the solid and historical US-Colombia ties (Santa Eulalia, 2022). Owing to the associations with his left-leaning tendencies, his moves are somewhat open to more scrutiny by the public. After all, no incumbent President has been re-elected to office in the last 15 elections (Freeman, 2023).

    A significant part behind his election to office has been the general public’s displeasure at rising economic inequalities between people, the inability of the previous government to provide and implement social welfare schemes and the financial toll caused by inactivity during the Covid-19 pandemic. While Drekonja-Konrat (1986) argues that most Latin-American countries can shape their foreign policies to the extent that it doesn’t hurt US interests, Petro is challenging the very notion of keeping his voters happy (Santa Eulalia, 2022). The truth in the details is that they are pretty co-dependent; Colombia needs the support of the US in tackling drug issues and the matter of the guerrilla militant groups, while the US views Colombia as a key strategic partner in the region. Accordingly, Petro has to carefully cater to his vote-bank’s anti-Americanism and yet maintain cordial ties with the US. It is a fragile line to tread, but the room to navigate and keep the US and the public happy is also quite small. Political revisionism is prevalent, given Petro is trying to appease both sides of support, constantly showing evident links as to how a country’s domestic politics can affect its foreign policy.

    References

    Drekonja-Kornat., G. (1983). Colombia: Learning the Foreign Policy Process, Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs, 25(2). Pp- 229-250.

    Drekonja-Kornat., G. (1986). The rise of Latin America’s foreign policy: Between hegemony and autonomy. Latin American Research Review, 21(1), 239-259.

    Freeman, W. (February 2023). Colombia tries a transformative Left Turn, Council on Foreign Relations. Retrieved from: https://www.cfr.org/article/colombia-tries-transformative-left-turn

    García-Perdomo, V.,  Harlow, S. & Brown, D. K., (2022). Framing the Colombian Peace Process: Between Peace and War Journalism, Journalism Practice.

    Georgie, R. (2022). Peace that antagonises: Reading Colombia’s peace process as a hegemonic crisis, Security Dialogue, pp – 1-19.

    Gomez-Suarez, A. & Newman, J., (2013). Safeguarding Political Guarantees in the Colombian Peace Process: have Santos and FARC learnt the lessons from the past?, Third World Quarterly, 34(5), pp – 819-837.

    Hey, J. A. K. (1997). Three Building Blocks of a Theory of Latin American Foreign Policy, Third World Quarterly, 18(4), pp -631-658.

    King, G., Keohane, R.O, & Verba, S. (1994). Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research.Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.

    Monroy, M. C. & Sánchez, F. (2017) Foreign Policy Analysis and the Making of Plan Colombia, Global Society, 31(2), pp – 245-271.

    Santaeulilah, I. (October 2022). Petro Playing Both Sides in Colombia-US Relations, El Pais. Retrieved from: https://english.elpais.com/international/2022-10-26/petro-playing-both-sides-in-colombia-us-relations.html

    Feature Image Credit: Foreign Policy

     

  • Trump followed four years later by Trump: Would America’s trustiness and system of alliances survive?

    Trump followed four years later by Trump: Would America’s trustiness and system of alliances survive?

    Ambassador Alfredo Toro Hardy examines, in this excellently analysed paper, the self-created problems that have contributed to America’s declining influence in the world. As he rightly points out, America helped construct the post-1945 world order by facilitating global recovery through alliances, and mutual support and interweaving the exercise of its power with international institutions and legal instruments. The rise of neoconservatism following the end of the Cold War, particularly during the Bush years from 2000 to 2008, led to American exceptionalism, unipolar ambitions, and the failure of American foreign policy.  Obama’s Presidency was, as Zbigniew Brezinski said, a second chance for restoring American leadership but those gains were nullified in Donald Trump’s 2016-20 presidency leading to the loss of trust in American Leadership. In a final analysis that may be questionable for some, Ambassador Alfredo sees Biden’s administration returning to the path of liberal internationalism and recovering much of the lost trust of the world.  His fear is that it may all be lost if Trump returns in 2024.                               – Team TPF

     

    TPF Occasional Paper   9/2023    

    Trump followed four years later by Trump: Would America’s trustiness and system of alliances survive?

     

     

    According to Daniel W. Drezner: “Despite four criminal indictments, Donald Trump is the runaway frontrunner to win the GOP nomination for president. Assuming he does, current polling shows a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Biden in the general election. It would be reckless for other leaders to dismiss the possibility of a second Trump term beginning on January 20, 2025. Indeed, the person who knows this best is Biden himself. In his first joint address to Congress, Biden said that in a conversation with world leaders, he has ‘made it known that America is back’, and their responses have tended to be a variation of “but for how long?”. [1]

    A bit of historical context

    In order to duly understand the implications of a Trump return to the White House, a historical perspective is needed. Without context, it is difficult to comprehend the meaning of the “but for how long?” that worries so many around the world. Let’s, thus, go back in time.

    Under its liberal internationalist grand vision, Washington positioned itself at the top of a potent hegemonic system. One, allowing that its leadership could be sustained by the consensual acquiescence of others. Indeed, through a network of institutions, treaties, mechanisms and initiatives, whose creation it promoted after World War II, the United States was able to interweave the exercise of its power with international institutions and legal instruments. Its alliances were a fundamental part of that system. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, though, the Soviet Union established its own system of alliances and common institutions.

                In the 1970s, however, America’s leadership came into question. Two reasons were responsible for it. Firstly, the Vietnam War. The excesses committed therein and America’s impotence to prevail militarily generated great discomfort among several of its allies. Secondly, the crisis of the Bretton Woods system. As a global reserve currency issuer, the stability of the U.S. currency was fundamental. In a persistent way, though, Washington had to run current account deficits to fulfil the supply of dollars at a fixed parity with gold. This impacted the desirability of the dollar, which in turn threatened its position as a reserve currency issuer. When a run for America’s gold reserves showed a lack of trust in the dollar, President Nixon decided in 1971 to unhook the value of the dollar from gold altogether.

                Notwithstanding these two events, America’s leadership upon its alliance system would remain intact, as there was no one else to face the Soviet threat. However, when around two decades later the Soviet Union imploded, America’s standing at the top would become global for the same reason: There was no one else there. Significantly, the United States’ supremacy was to be accepted as legitimate by the whole international community because, again, it was able to interweave the exercise of its power with international institutions and legal instruments.

    Inexplicable under the light of common sense

                In 2001, however, George W. Bush’s team came into government bringing with them an awkward notion about the United States’ might. Instead of understanding that the hegemonic system in place served their country’s interests perfectly well, the Bush team believed that such a system had to be rearranged in tandem with America’s new position as the sole superpower. As a consequence, they began to turn upside down a complex structure that had taken decades to build.

    The Bush administration’s world frame became, indeed, a curious one. It believed in unconditional followers and not in allies’ worthy of respect; it believed in ad hoc coalitions and “with us or against us” propositions where multilateral institutions and norms had little value; it believed in the punishment of dissidence and not in the encouragement of cooperation; it believed in preventive action prevailing over international law.

    In proclaiming the futility of cooperative multilateralism, which in their perspective just constrained the freedom of action of America’s might, they asserted the prerogatives of a sole superpower. The Bush administration’s world frame became, indeed, a curious one. It believed in unconditional followers and not in allies’ worthy of respect; it believed in ad hoc coalitions and “with us or against us” propositions where multilateral institutions and norms had little value; it believed in the punishment of dissidence and not in the encouragement of cooperation; it believed in preventive action prevailing over international law. Well-known “neoconservatives” such as Charles Krauthammer, Robert Kagan, and John Bolton, proclaimed America’s supremacy and derided countries not willing to follow its unilateralism.

                But who were these neoconservatives? They were the intellectual architects of Bush’s foreign policy, who saw themselves as the natural inheritors of the foreign policy establishment of Truman’s time. The one that had forged the fundamental guidelines of America’s foreign policy during the Cold War, in what was labelled as the “creation”. In their view, with the United States having won the Cold War, a new creation was needed. Their beliefs could be summed up as diplomacy if possible, force if necessary; U.N. if possible, ad hoc coalitions, unilateral action, and preemptive strikes if necessary. America, indeed, should not be constrained by accepted rules, multilateral institutions, or international law. At the same time, the U.S.’ postulates of freedom and democracy, expressions of its exceptionalism, entailed the right to propitiate regime change whenever necessary, in order to preserve America’s security and the world order.

    Bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, while deriding and humiliating so many around the world, America’s neoconservatives undressed the emperor. By taking off his clothes, they made his frailties visible for everyone to watch.

    Inexplicable, under the light of common sense, the Bush team disassociated power from the international structures and norms that facilitated and legitimized its exercise. As a consequence, America moved from being the most successful hegemonic power ever to becoming a second-rate imperial power that proved incapable of prevailing in two peripheral wars. Bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, while deriding and humiliating so many around the world, America’s neoconservatives undressed the emperor. By taking off his clothes, they made his frailties visible for everyone to watch.

                At the beginning of 2005, while reporting a Pew Research Center poll, The Economist stated that the prevailing anti-American sentiment around the world was greater and deeper than at any other moment in history. The BBC World Service and Global Poll Research Partners, meanwhile, conducted another global poll in which they asked, “How do you perceive the influence of the U.S. in the world?”. The populations of some of America’s traditional allies gave an adverse answer in the following percentages: Canada 60%; Mexico 57%; Germany 54%; Australia 52%; Brazil 51%; United Kingdom 50%. With such a negative perception among Washington’s closest allies, America’s credibility was in tatters.[2]

             Is the liberal international order ending? what is next? dailysabah.com

     While Bush’s presidency was reaching its end, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a pivotal book that asserted that the United States had lost much of its international standing. This felt, according to the book, particularly disturbing. Indeed, as a result of the combined impact of modern technology and global political awakening, that speeded up political history, what in the past took centuries to materialize now just took decades, whereas what before had taken decades, now could materialize in a single year. The primacy of any world power was thus faced with immense pressures of change, adaptation and fall. Brzezinski believed, however, that although America had deeply eroded its international standing, a second chance was still possible. This is because no other power could rival Washington’s role. However, recuperating the lost trust and legitimacy would be an arduous job, requiring years of sustained effort and true ability. The opportunity of this second chance should not be missed, he insisted, as there wouldn’t be a third one. [3]

    A second chance

                Barak Obama did certainly his best to recover the space that had been lost during the preceding eight years. That is, the U.S.’s leading role within a liberal internationalist structure. However, times had changed since his predecessor’s inauguration. In the first place, a massive financial crisis that had begun in America welcomed Obama, when he arrived at the White House. This had increased the international doubts about the trustiness of the country. In the second place, China’s economy and international position had taken a huge leap ahead during the previous eight years. Brzezinski’s notion that no other power could rival the United States was rapidly evolving. As a result, Obama was left facing a truly daunting challenge.

                To rebuild Washington’s standing in the international scene, Obama’s administration embarked on a dual course of action. He followed, on the one hand, cooperative multilateralism and collective action. On the other hand, he prioritized the U.S.’ presence where it was most in need, avoiding unnecessary distractions as much as possible. Within the first of these aims, Obama seemed to have adhered to Richard Hass’ notion that power alone was simple potentiality, with the role of a successful foreign policy being that of transforming potentiality into real influence. Good evidence of this approach was provided through Washington’s role in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in relation to Iran, in the NATO summits, in the newly created G20, and in the summits of the Americas, among many other instances. By not becoming too overbearing, and by respecting other countries’ points of view, the Obama Administration played a leading influence within the context of collective action. Although theoretically being one among many, the United States always played the leading role.[4]

    Within this context, Obama’s administration followed a coalition-building strategy. The Trans-Pacific Partnership represented the economic approach to the pivot and aimed at building an association covering forty per cent of the global economy. There, the United States would be the first among equals. As for the security approach to the pivot, the U.S. Navy repositioned its forces within the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans.

                To prioritize America’s presence where it was most needed, Obama turned the attention to China and the Asia-Pacific. While America was focusing on the Middle East, China enjoyed a period of strategic opportunity. His administration’s “pivot to Asia” emerged as a result. This policy had the dual objective of building economic prosperity and security, within that region. Its intention was countering, through facts, the notion that America was losing its staying power in the Pacific. Within this context, Obama’s administration followed a coalition-building strategy. The Trans-Pacific Partnership represented the economic approach to the pivot and aimed at building an association covering forty per cent of the global economy. There, the United States would be the first among equals. As for the security approach to the pivot, the U.S. Navy repositioned its forces within the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans. From a roughly fifty-fifty correlation between the two oceans, sixty per cent of its fleet was moved to the Pacific. Meanwhile, the U.S. increased joint exercises and training with several countries of the region, while stationing 2,500 marines in Darwin, Australia. As a result of the pivot, many of China’s neighbours began to feel that there was a real alternative to this country’s overbearing assertiveness.[5]

                Barak Obama was on a good track to consolidating the second chance that Brzezinski had alluded to. His foreign policy helped much in regaining international credibility and standing for his country, and the Bush years began to be seen as just a bump on the road of America’s foreign policy. Unfortunately, Donald Trump was the next President. And Trump coming just eight years after Bush, was more than what America’s allies could swallow.

    Dog-eat-dog foreign policy

                The Bush and Trump foreign policies could not be put on an equal footing, though. The abrasive arrogance of Bush’s neoconservatives, however distasteful, embodied a school of thought in matters of foreign policy. One, characterized by a merger between exalted visions of America’s exceptionalism and Wilsonianism. Francis Fukuyama defined it as Wilsionanism minus international institutions, whereas John Mearsheimer labelled it as Wilsionanism with teeth. Although overplaying conventional notions to the extreme, Bush’s foreign policy remained on track with a longstanding tradition. Much to the contrary, Trump’s foreign policy, according to Fareed Zakaria, was based on a more basic premise– The world was largely an uninteresting place, except for the fact that most countries just wanted to screw the United States. Trump believed that by stripping the global system of its ordering arrangements, a “dog eat dog” environment would emerge. One, in which his country would come up as the top dog. His foreign policy, thus, was but a reflection of gut feelings, sheer ignorance and prejudices.[6]

                Trump derided multilateral cooperation and preferred a bilateral approach to foreign relations. One, in which America could exert its full power in a direct way, instead of letting it dilute by including others in the decision-making process. Within this context, the U.S.’ market leverage had to be used to its full extent, to corner others into complying with Washington’s positions. At the same time, he equated economy and national security and, as a consequence, was prone to “weaponize” economic policies. Moreover, he premised on the use of the American dollar as a bullying tool to be used to his country’s political advantage. Not only China but some of America’s main allies as well, were targeted within this approach. Dusting off Section 323 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, which allowed tariffs on national security grounds, Trump imposed penalizations in every direction. Some of the USA’s closest allies were badly affected as a result.

                Given Trump’s contempt for cooperative multilateralism, but also aiming at erasing Obama’s legacy, an obsessive issue with him, he withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in relation to Iran. He also withdrew his country from other multilateral institutions, such as the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission and, in the middle of the Covid 19 pandemic, from the World Health Organization. Trump threatened to cut funding to the U.N., waged a largely victorious campaign to sideline the International Criminal Court, and brought the World Trade Organization to a virtual standstill. Even more, he did not just walk away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in relation to Iran, but threatened its other signatories to impose sanctions on them if, on the basis of the agreement, they continued to trade with Iran.

    Trump followed a transactional approach to foreign policy in which principles and allies mattered little, and where trade and money were prioritized over security considerations.

                Trump followed a transactional approach to foreign policy in which principles and allies mattered little, and where trade and money were prioritized over security considerations. In 2019, he asked Japan to increase fourfold its annual contribution for the privilege of hosting 50,000 American troops in its territory, while requesting South Korea to pay 400 percent more for hosting American soldiers. This, amid China’s increasing assertiveness and North Korea’s continuous threats. In his relations with New Delhi, a fundamental U.S. ally within any containment strategy to China, he subordinated geostrategic considerations to trade. On the premise that India was limiting American manufacturers from access to its market, Trump threatened this proud nation with a trade war.[7]

                Irritated because certain NATO member countries were not spending enough on their defence, Trump labelled some of Washington’s closest partners within the organization as “delinquents”. He also threatened to reduce the U.S.’ participation in NATO, calling it “obsolete”, while referring to Germany as a “captive of Russia”. At the same time, Trump abruptly cancelled a meeting with the Danish Prime Minister, because she was unwilling to discuss the sale of Greenland to the United States. This, notwithstanding the fact that this was something expressively forbidden by the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, represents the cornerstone of European stability. The European Union, in his view, was not a fundamental ally, but a competitor and an economic foe. Deliberately, Trump antagonized European governments, including that of London at the time, by cheering Brexit. Meanwhile, he imposed tariffs on steel and aluminium on many of its closest partners and humiliated Canada and Mexico by imposing upon them a tough renegotiation of NAFTA. One, whose ensuing accord did not bring significant changes. Moreover, he fractured the G7, a group integrated by Washington’s closest allies, leaving the United States standing alone on one side with the rest standing on the other.

    In June 2018, Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, expressed his bewilderment at seeing that the rules-based international order was being challenged precisely by its main architect and guarantor– the United States. Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf summoned up all of this, by expressing that under Trump the U.S. had become a rogue superpower.

                Unsurprisingly, thus, America’s closest allies reached the conclusion that they could no longer trust it. Several examples attested to this. In November 2017, Canberra’s White Paper on the security of Asia expressed uncertainty about America’s commitment to that continent. In April 2018, the United Kingdom, Germany and France issued an official statement expressing that they would forcefully defend their interests against the U.S.’ protectionism. On May 10, 2018, Angela Merkel stated in Aquisgran that the time in which Europe could trust America was over. On May 31, 2018, Justin Trudeau aired Canada’s affront at being considered a threat to the United States. In June 2018, Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, expressed his bewilderment at seeing that the rules-based international order was being challenged precisely by its main architect and guarantor– the United States. In November 2019, in an interview given to The Economist, Emmanuel Macron stated that the European countries could no longer rely on the United States, which had turned its back on them. Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf summoned up all of this, by expressing that under Trump the U.S. had become a rogue superpower.[8]

    The return of liberal internationalism

    Politically and geopolitically Biden rapidly went back to the old premises of liberal internationalism. Cooperative multilateralism and collective action were put back in place, and alliances became, once again, a fundamental part of America’s foreign policy. 

               As mentioned, George W. Bush followed a few years later by Donald Trump was more than what America’s allies could handle. Fortunately for that country, and for its allies, Trump failed to be re-elected in 2020, and Joe Biden came to power. True, the latter’s so-called foreign policy for the middle classes kept in place some of Trump’s international trade policies. However, politically and geopolitically he rapidly went back to the old premises of liberal internationalism. Cooperative multilateralism and collective action were put back in place, and alliances became, once again, a fundamental part of America’s foreign policy.  Moreover, Biden forcefully addressed some of his country’s main economic deficiencies, which had become an important source of vulnerability in its rivalry with China. In sum, Biden strengthened the United States’ economy, its alliances, and its international standing.

                Notwithstanding the fact that Biden had to fight inch by inch with a seemingly unconquerable opposition, while continuously negotiating with two reluctant senators from his own party, he was able to pass a group of transformational laws. Among them, are the Infrastructure Investment and Job Act, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Together, these legislations allow for a government investment of a trillion dollars in the modernization of the country’s economy and its re-industrialization, including the consolidation of its technological leadership, the updating of its infrastructures and the reconversion of its energy matrix towards clean energy. Private investments derived from such laws would be gigantic, with the sole CHIPS Act having produced investment pledges of more than 100 billion dollars. This projects, vis-à-vis China’s competition, an image of strength and strategic purpose. Moreover, before foes and friends, these accomplishments prove that the U.S. can overcome its legislative gridlocks, in order to modernize its economy and its competitive standing.

                Meanwhile, Washington’s alliances have significantly strengthened. In Europe, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Washington’s firm reaction to it had important consequences. While the former showed to its European allies that America’s leadership was still indispensable, the latter made clear that the U.S. had the determination and the capacity to exercise such leadership. Washington has indeed led in response to the invasion, in the articulation of the alliances and the revitalization of NATO, in sanctions on Russia, and in the organization of the help provided to Ukraine. It has also been Kyiv’s main source of support in military equipment and intelligence, deciding at each step of the road what kind of armament should be supplied to the Ukrainian forces. In short, before European allies that had doubted Washington’s commitments to its continent, and of the viability of NATO itself, America proved to be the indispensable superpower.

                Meanwhile, American alliances in the Indo-Pacific have also been strengthened and expanded, with multiple initiatives emerging as a result. As the invasion of Ukraine made evident the return of geopolitics by the big door, increasing the fears of China’s threat to regional order, Washington has become for many the essential partner. America’s security umbrella has proved to be for them a fundamental tool in containing China’s increasing arrogance and disregard for international law and jurisprudence. Among the security mechanisms or initiatives created or reinforced under its stewardship are an energized Quad; the emergence of AUKUS; NATO’s approach to the Indo-Pacific region; the tripartite Camp David’s security agreement between Japan, South Korea and the U.S.; a revamped defence treaty with The Philippines; an increased military cooperation with Australia; and Hanoi’s growing strategic alignment with Washington. On the economic side, we find the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity and the freshly emerged Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment & India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor.

    Enough would be enough

                Although the Global South has proved to be particularly reluctant to fall back under the security leadership of the superpowers, Washington has undoubtedly become the indispensable partner for many in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Thanks to Biden, the United States has repositioned itself on the cusp of a potent alliance system, regaining credibility and vitality. What would happen, thus, if he is defeated in the 2024 elections and Trump regains the White House? In 2007, Brzezinski believed, as mentioned, that although America had deeply eroded its international standing, a second chance was still possible. Actually, with Biden (and thanks in no small part to the Russian invasion and China’s pugnacity), the U.S. got an unexpected third chance. But definitively, enough would be enough. Moreover, during Trump’s first term in office, a professional civil service and an institutional contention wall (boosted by the so-called “adults in the room”), may have been able to keep at bay Trump’s worst excesses. According to The Economist, though, that wouldn’t be the case during a second term, where thousands of career public servants would be fired and substituted by MAGA followers. The deconstruction of the so-called “deep State” would be the aim to be attained, which would translate into getting rid of anyone who knows how to get the job done within the Federal Government. Hence, for America’s allies, Trump’s nightmarish first period would pale in relation to a second one. Trump followed four years later by Trump, no doubt about it, would shatter America’s trustiness, credibility, international standing, and its system of alliances. [9]

    Notes:

    [1] “Bracing for Trump 2.0”, Foreign Affairs, September 5, 2023

    [2] The Economist, 19th February, 2005; Walt, Stephen M, Taming American Power, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005, p.72.

    [3] Second Chance, New York: Basic Books, 2007, p. 191, 192, 206.

    [4] Hass, Richard, “America and the Great Abdication”, The Atlantic, December 28, 2017.

    [5] Campbell, Kurt, The Pivot, New York: Twelve, 2016, pp. 11-28.

    [6] Steltzer, Irwin, Neoconservatism, London: Atlantic Books, 2004, pp. 3-28; Fukuyama, Francis, “After the Neoconservatives”, London: Profile Books, 2006, p. 41; Zakaria, Farid, “The Self-Destruction of American Power”, Foreign Affairs, July-August 2019.

    [7] World Politics Review, “Trump works overtime to shake down alliances in Asia and appease North Korea”, October 14, 2019.

    [8] White, Hugh, “Canberra voices fears”, The Strait Time, 25 November, 2017; Breuninger, Kevin, “Canada announces retaliatory tariffs”, CNBC, May 31, 2018; The Economist, “Emmanuel Macron warns Europe”, November 7th, 2019; Kishore Mahbubani, Has China Won? New York: Public Affairs, 2020, p. 56; Cooley, Alexander and Nexon, Daniel, Exit from Hegemony , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, p. 70.

    [9]  The Economist, “Preparing the way: The alarming plans for Trump’s second term”, July 15th, 2023.

     

    Feature Image Credit: livemint.com

    Cartoon Credit: seltzercreativegroup.com

  • Balancing Civilizations: Neither Clash, mere Multiplicity nor Conversion

    Balancing Civilizations: Neither Clash, mere Multiplicity nor Conversion

    The modern world is a product of intense competition and conflict that evolved from the European ‘system of states’ propensity and greed for the acquisition of territory and resources through colonialism and imperialism. The post-1945 world continues to suffer the ills of Western domination and exploitation as is evidenced by the innumerable number of wars, conflicts, and interventions….supposedly part of the imperial civilising missions. As the non-Western world rises the choices are either conflict or cooperation. The G20 Summit 2023 being held in New Delhi is an opportunity to recognise and chart a new path for the world. The authors, Andreas Herberg-Rothe and Key-young Son, emphasise the importance and need for cooperation and harmony amongst the civilisations of the world.

    G20 Summit 2023 in New Delhi is underway on September 9-10, 2023. 

    We propose the non-binary concepts of Clausewitzian floating equilibrium, Confucian harmony, and Arendtian politics of plurality as key ideas to avert and mitigate contemporary conflicts.

    In many of the world’s hot spots, both civil and governmental combatants have become embroiled in unending conflicts based on a binary position: “us against the rest.” After two hundred years of imperialism and Euro-American hegemony that have produced varying degrees of adaptation or rejection of Western modernity, it may be time for the world’s great civilizations to learn how to live harmoniously with one another. The world order of the twenty-first century will not be based entirely on modernist ideas and institutions such as nation-states, laissez-faire capitalism, individualism, science and technology, and progress. How then can we accommodate other civilizations and cultures?

    We propose mediation, recognition, harmony and floating balance as key principles for inter-civilizational and inter-cultural dialogue and conviviality, accompanied by the awareness that we are all descended from a small group of African ancestors. Mediation and recognition between friends and enemies will be the initial recipes for transforming hostility into partnership, while harmony and floating balance between and within opposites, such as individual versus community, freedom versus equality, will help sustain the momentum for forging constructive relationships.

    After the process of political decolonization in the twentieth century, we still need to decolonize our way of thinking. The values of the East and the West cannot survive in their absolute form in this globalized world.

    As former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin put it, “You don’t have to make peace with your friends; you have to make peace with your enemies. As a legacy of previous centuries, however, the binary thinking of “us against them” has paradoxically retained a strong presence in twenty-first-century international relations. If this thinking continues to be the decisive force, we could repeat the catastrophes of the twentieth century. After the process of political decolonization in the twentieth century, we still need to decolonize our way of thinking. The values of the East and the West cannot survive in their absolute form in this globalized world. It is our deepest conviction that the Western and like-minded states could only hold on to values such as freedom, equality, emancipation and human rights if they could be harmoniously balanced with the contributions of other civilizations and cultures.

    The concept of floating equilibrium, derived from our interpretation of the “wondrous trinity” of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, means not relativity, but relationality and proportionality. At the end of his life, Clausewitz drew the conclusion for the theory of violent conflict that every war is composed of the three opposing tendencies of primordial violence, which he compared to hatred and enmity as a blind natural force, to chance and probability, and to the subordination of war as a political instrument, which makes war subject to pure reason. With Clausewitz’s concept, it is clear that war involves two extreme opposites – primordial violence on the one hand and pure reason on the other. By adding the third tendency, chance and probability, wars become different in their composition.

    We use Clausewitz’s concept as a methodological starting point to find a floating balance between various contrasts and contradictions that are evident in the current phase of globalization, which Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity”. These contrasts include those between the individual and the community, equality and freedom, war and peace, and recognition and disrespect. We argue that Clausewitz’s wondrous trinity and “floating equilibrium” can be used as a way to interpret and mitigate today’s conflicts, although Clausewitz developed these notions to analyze the warfare of his time.

    Globalization has led to the “rise of the rest” or Amitav Acharya’s “multiplex world” of nation-states, NGOs, global institutions, global terrorism, and violent gangs of young people from the suburbs of Paris to the slums of Rio who are excluded from the benefits of globalization. This includes both of the following macro developments:

    On the one hand, globalization allows the former empires (China, Russia and India) and some developing countries with large populations (Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa) to regain their status as great powers. This development could lead to a global network of megacities competing on connectivity rather than borders, as in China’s efforts to reestablish the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road. On the other hand, it dissolves traditional identities and forms of governance to some extent as a result of social inequality, leading to fragmented societies and a re-ideologization of domestic conflicts, as already seen with the rise of the far right in the US, Europe and Russia, but also Salafism, exaggerated Hindu and Chinese nationalist movements.

    the terrible inequalities in this world, where 1% of the world’s population has as much as 99% of the “rest”, or 62 billionaires own as much as 3.5 billion people, are the result of unrestricted and unbalanced freedom. We need to reinvent a balance between freedom and equality so as not to legitimize the inversion of freedom in the name of freedom by the aristocracy of property owners.

    Failed states, the wave of migrants and refugees around the world, climate catastrophes, and growing inequalities are the result of the “liquid modernity” that accompanies the dissolution of individual, community, and state identities. Ideologies did not dissolve with the end of the twentieth century or the advent of globalization but rather shifted from modern, utopian ideologies such as socialism and democracy and their aberrations such as Nazism and Stalinism to postmodern ones. The rise of postmodern ideologies such as Salafism is the result of globalization and the West’s refusal to recognize other civilizations and cultures. Moreover, the terrible inequalities in this world, where 1% of the world’s population has as much as 99% of the “rest”, or 62 billionaires own as much as 3.5 billion people, are the result of unrestricted and unbalanced freedom. We need to reinvent a balance between freedom and equality so as not to legitimize the inversion of freedom in the name of freedom by the aristocracy of property owners.

    In short, we propose the non-binary concepts of Clausewitzian floating equilibrium, Confucian harmony, and Arendtian politics of plurality as key ideas to avert and mitigate contemporary conflicts. Both Confucian harmony and Hanna Arendt’s concept of plurality are based on the harmonious relationship between different actors, or the floating balance of equality and difference, given that all human beings are similar enough to understand each other, but each is an individual endowed with uniqueness.

    Due to the speed and scale of information processing and transmission, the contemporary world is turning much faster than the commonly known modern world. If modernity is a temporal and spatial playground for rationality, the contemporary world is rather a playground for the mixture of the Clausewitzian trinity: reason, emotion, and chance. This means that while we would like to use reason in making decisions, we are often swamped by emotion and ultimately forced to take chances, given the short time frame available for any reasonable calculation and the ever-changing, chameleon-like internal and external environments. As an analyst of war, Clausewitz had long studied this trinity, for war, as a microcosm of human realities, is where reason, emotion, and chance play their respective roles.

    In this everyday situation of war, Clausewitz’s revived ideas can offer his posterity many valuable insights. All in all, Clausewitz diverts our attention from the unbalanced diet of the modernists in favour of rationality and offers a healthy recipe for analyzing contemporary problems where reason, emotion, and chance intersect, often with an unexpected outcome.

    No matter how powerful a single state may be, it will remain a minority compared to the rest of the world. In this globalized world, there would be no room for any kind of exceptionalism, American or Chinese, but only a floating balance between the world’s great civilizations.

    It is a choice between repeating the same mistake of forcibly imposing our own values on the rest of the world, as we did in the twentieth century, or embarking on a new civilizational project of harmony and co-prosperity. No matter how powerful a single state may be, it will remain a minority compared to the rest of the world. In this globalized world, there would be no room for any kind of exceptionalism, American or Chinese, but only a floating balance between the world’s great civilizations. Such a floating balance is a kind of mediation between the opposites of Huntington’s clash of civilizations on the one hand and the generalization of the values of only one civilization on the other. A mere multiplicity of approaches would only lead to a variant of the clash of civilizations. The first step in this direction is to recognize that in a globalized world, great civilizations must learn from each other for their own benefit and interest. If the values of the Western world lead to such terrible and immoral inequalities, we need to rethink our value systems – and if the concept of hierarchy in the Eastern world leads to violations of a harmoniously balanced society, we need to rethink those value systems as well. Whereas in classical Confucianism harmony was based on strict hierarchical oppositions, in a globalized world we need a floating balance between hierarchical and symmetrical social relations, combining Clausewitz and Confucius.

    Feature Image Credit: Storming of the Srirangapattinam Fort by the British. Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, 1799. Consolidation of colonialism and imperialism. www.mediastorehoise.com

  • The Atomic Executioner’s Lament

    The Atomic Executioner’s Lament

    While the world focuses on the trials and travails of the scientists who invented the atomic bomb, little attention is paid to the hard positions taken by the nuclear executioners, the men called upon to drop these bombs in time of war.

     

    Crew of the Enola Gay, returning from their atomic bombing mission over Hiroshima, Japan. At center is navigator Capt. Theodore Van Kirk; to the right, in foreground, is flight commander Col. Paul Tibbetts. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

     

    There is an interesting scene in Chris Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, one which could easily get lost in the complexity of telling the story of the man considered to be the father of the American atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

    The Trinity test of the first nuclear device has been successfully completed, and Oppenheimer is watching as two men in military uniform are packing up one of Oppenheimer’s “gadgets” for shipment out of Los Alamos to an undisclosed destination.

    Oppenheimer talks to them about the optimum height for the detonation of the weapon above ground, but is cut off by one of the soldiers, who, smiling, declares “We’ve got it from here.”

    Such men existed, although the scene in the movie — and the dialogue — was almost certainly the product of a scriptwriter’s imagination. The U.S. military went to great lengths to keep the method of delivery of the atomic bomb a secret, not to be shared with either Oppenheimer or his scientists.

    Formed on March 6, 1945, the 1st Ordnance Squadron, Special (Aviation) was part of the 509th Composite Group, commanded by then-Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets. Prior to being organized into the 1st Ordnance Squadron, the men of the unit were assigned to a U.S. Army ordnance squadron stationed a Wendover, Utah, where Tibbets and the rest of the 509th Composite Group were based.

    Mission map for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945. Scale is not consistent due to the curvature of the Earth. Angles and locations are approximate. Kokura was included as the original target for Aug. 9 but weather obscured visibility; Nagasaki was chosen instead. (Mr.98, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

    While Oppenheimer and his scientists designed the nuclear device, the mechanism of delivery — the bomb itself — was designed by specialists assigned to the 509th. It was the job of the men of the 1st Ordnance Squadron to build these bombs from scratch.

    The bomb dropped on Hiroshima by Paul Tibbets, flying a B-29 named the Enola Gay, was assembled on the Pacific Island of Tinian by the 1st Ordnance Squadron.

    Concerned about the possibility of the B-29 crashing on takeoff, thereby triggering the explosive charge that would send the uranium slug into the uranium core (the so-called gun device), the decision was made that the final assembly of the bomb would be done only after the Enola Gay took off.

    One of the 1st Ordnance Squadron technicians placed the uranium slug into the bomb at 7,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean.

    The bomb worked as designed, killing more than 80,000 Japanese in an instant; hundreds of thousands more died afterwards from the radiation released by the weapon.

    For the pilot and crew of the Enola Gay, there was no remorse over killing so many people. “I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we’d be doing that I thought, yes, we’re going to kill a lot of people, but by God we’re going to save a lot of lives,’ Tibbets recounted to Studs Terkel in 2002. He added:

    “We won’t have to invade [Japan]. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people,” Tibbets told Terkel. “If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: ‘You’ve killed so many civilians.’ That’s their tough luck for being there.

    An atomic bomb victim with burns, Ninoshima Quarantine Office, Aug. 7, 1945. (Onuka Masami, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

    Major Charles Sweeney, the pilot of Bockscar, the B-29 that dropped the second American atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, held similar convictions about his role in killing 35,000 Japanese instantly.

    “I saw these beautiful young men who were being slaughtered by an evil, evil military force,” Sweeney recounted in 1995. “There’s no question in my mind that President Truman made the right decision.” However, Sweeney noted, “As the man who commanded the last atomic mission, I pray that I retain that singular distinction.”

    History records the remorse felt by Oppenheimer and his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Sakharov, and the punishment they both suffered at the hands of their respective governments. They suffered from designer’s remorse, a regret — stated after the fact — that what they had built should not be used, but somehow locked away from the world, as if the Pandora’s Box of nuclear weaponization had never been opened.

    Having designed their respective weapons, however, both Oppenheimer and Sakharov lost control of their creations, turning them over to military establishments which did not participate in the intellectual and moral machinations of bringing such a weapon into existence, but rather the cold, hard reality of using these weapons to achieve a purpose and goal which, as had been the case for Tibbets and Sweeney, seemed justified.

    Ignoring the Executioner

    Brigadier General Charles W. Sweeney, pilot of the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

    This is the executioners’ lament, a contradiction of emotions where the perceived need for justice outweighs the costs associated.

    While the world focuses on the trials and travails of Oppenheimer and Sakharov, they remain silent about the hard positions taken by the nuclear executioners, the men called upon to drop these bombs in time of war.  There have only been two such men, and they remained resolute in their judgement that it was the right thing to do.

    The executioner’s lament is overlooked by most people involved in supporting nuclear disarmament. This is a mistake, because the executioner, as was pointed out to Oppenheimer by the men of the 1stOrdnance Squadron, is in control.

    They possess the weapons, and they are the ones who will be called upon to deliver the weapons. Their loyalty and dedication to the task are constantly tested in order to ensure that, when the time comes to execute orders, they will do so without question.

    Image of a younger Petrov from a family album.
    (Stanislav Petrov’s Personal Library, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)

     

     

    Those opposed to nuclear weapons often point to the example of Stanislav Petrov, a former lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces who, in 1983, twice made a decision to delay reporting the suspected launch of U.S. missiles towards the Soviet Union, believing (rightly) that the launch detection was a result of malfunctioning equipment.

    But the fact is that Petrov was an outlier who himself admitted that had another officer been on duty that fateful day, they would have reported the American missile launches per protocol.

    Those who will execute the orders to use nuclear weapons in any future nuclear conflict will, in fact, execute those orders. They are trained, like Tibbets and Sweeney, to believe in the righteousness of their cause.

    Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian prime minister and president who currently serves as the deputy chairman of the Russian National Security Council, has publicly warned the Western supporters of Ukraine that Russia would “have to” use nuclear weapons if Ukrainian forces were to succeed in their goal of recapturing the former territories of Ukraine that have been claimed by Russia in the aftermath of referenda held in September 2022.

    “Imagine,” Medvedev said, “if the offensive, which is backed by NATO, was a success and they tore off a part of our land, then we would be forced to use a nuclear weapon according to the rules of a decree from the president of Russia. There would simply be no other option.”

    Some in the West view Medvedev’s statement to be an empty threat; U.S. President Joe Biden said last month that there is no real prospect of Russian President Vladimir Putin ordering the use of nuclear weapons against either Ukraine or the West.

    “Not only the West, but China and the rest of the world have said: ‘don’t go there,’ ” Biden said following the NATO Summit in Vilnius.

    Ignoring Russian Doctrine

    But Biden, like other doubters, emphasizes substance over process, denying the role played by the executioner in implementing justice defined on their terms, not that of those being subjected to execution.

    Russia has a nuclear doctrine that mandates that nuclear weapons are to be used “when the very existence of the state is put under threat.” According to Medvedev, “there would simply be no other option,” ironically noting that “our enemies should pray” for a Russian victory, as the only way to make sure “that a global nuclear fire is not ignited.”

    The Russians who would execute the orders to launch nuclear weapons against the West would be operating with the same moral clarity as had Paul Tibbets and Charles Sweeney some 88 years ago. The executioner’s lament holds that they will be saddened by their decision but convinced that they had no other choice.

    Proving them wrong will be impossible because, unlike the war with Japan, where the survivors were given the luxury of reflection and accountability, there will be no survivors in any future nuclear conflict.

    The onus, therefore, is on the average citizen to get involved in processes that separate the tools of our collective demise — nuclear weapons — from those who will be called upon to use them.

    Meaningful nuclear disarmament is the only hope humankind has for its continued survival.

    The time to begin pushing for this is now, and there is no better place to start than on Aug. 6, 2023 — the 78th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, when like-minded persons will gather outside the United Nations to begin a dialogue about disarmament that will hopefully resonate enough to have an impact of the 2024 elections.

     

    This article was published earlier in consortiumnews.com

    The views expressed are the author’s own.

    Feature Image: The devastated city of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb blast – bbc.com

  • From Civil Wars to Gang Wars

    From Civil Wars to Gang Wars

    Depending on the context, these uprooted and redundant young people can become terrorists, child soldiers, members of youth gangs that dominate the suburbs from Paris to Rio, drug cartels, mafia gangs, or human traffickers.

    With the end of the Cold War in 1991, interstate war seemed to have said goodbye. But even then, there was no end of history, as Francis Fukuyama had assumed. Instead, interstate war was largely replaced by wars of intervention in weak states and civil wars. At the latest since the war in Ukraine, however, interstate war is back on the agenda and a new arms race has begun – the wars of the present have been nationalized. What is often overlooked, however, is that civil wars have not completely ceased to exist but have been replaced by gang wars. This will be analyzed here using the example of South American gangs, but it applies equally to large parts of Africa, Iraq, or Southeast Asia.

    A Brief Review

    In order to analyze this, a brief review is necessary. After the fall of the USSR, a return to the Middle Ages was diagnosed in security policy, and a return to pre-modern weapon carriers such as child soldiers, warlords, and private security companies. After the attacks of September 11, the fight against a new totalitarianism, this time Islamist, seemed imminent, and the “war on terror” was proclaimed. Meanwhile, China and Russia have re-emerged as serious rivals to the U.S., at least militarily, and a new arms race is on the horizon. The U.S. has been weakened by its lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which even the much-vaunted and overestimated military-technological revolution could not stop.

    While in the 19th century the Western states conquered the whole world, in the 20th century the defeated empires and civilizations had to learn to live with the victorious West, and now the resurgent empires and the West have to learn to live with each other.

    Are there long-term trends in this rapid succession of different experiences and analyses of violent events? Two immediately come to mind: the “rise of the others,” as the influential US columnist Fareed Zakaria has called it, that is, the resurgence of the great empires and civilizations submerged by European colonization and US hegemony. These are primarily China and India, but also Russia and the littoral states of the North Pacific. In short, world affairs are shifting from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. Whereas the entire 20th century was dominated by the North Atlantic littoral states (with the exception of Japan), in the 21st century there are at least two such centers: the North Atlantic littoral states and the North Pacific littoral states.  Here, the United States has the unbeatable geostrategic advantage of being located on both oceans. These former great empires and civilizations have almost one goal: to no longer be considered underdeveloped or backward by the states of the West, but as equals. While in the 19th century the Western states conquered the whole world, in the 20th century the defeated empires and civilizations had to learn to live with the victorious West, and now the resurgent empires and the West have to learn to live with each other.

    more and more people are becoming aware that Western modernity has a Janus face.   What is the hallmark of Western modernity: human rights, democracy and the emancipation of women, or colonialism, racism, two world wars?

    While until well into the 20th century many assumptions were that the values of Western modernity would spread throughout the world, more and more people are becoming aware that Western modernity has a Janus face.   What is the hallmark of Western modernity: human rights, democracy and the emancipation of women, or colonialism, racism, two world wars? And even Auschwitz was not carried out by “barbarians” but by the Germans, of all people, who are often associated abroad with Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.  The opposing interpretations either argue that this is regrettable but has nothing to do with the nature of the West. And conversely, critics of the West argue just as one-sidedly that Western values are just empty words, and that the reality of Western politics is characterized by colonialism and racism. And Donald Trump’s current polemic against female Democratic Party politicians with immigrant backgrounds is racist, colonialist, and hostile to women. And the fact that there has been no outcry from the liberal West against this polemic may even indicate a concealed complicity because we Europeans also come to terms with racist and colonialist stereotypes. Donald Trump’s racism can be summed up in the simple formula: Make America white again. People of a different skin color or origin are only tolerated as long as they fit into the new hierarchy.

    Racist polemics like those of the new right in Europe, of White Power in the U.S., or even of Bolsonaro’s movement in Brazil can really only be understood against a backdrop of fundamental insecurity and grievance. The West feels deeply offended that the “others” who were always seen as less developed no longer want to copy it, and full of fear that they could even overtake the West. Fear rules the politics of the West, fear of the end of its feeling of superiority and of the fact that nothing could then be left if one no longer feels superior to the others.  Freely according to the motto: I am nothing, I can do nothing, but I am German – and this shows its ugly grimace in hate speech and violent outbursts. But we are not alone in this respect. For alongside the resurgence of the Others, which is significant in terms of world politics, civil wars around the world are turning into gang wars – the political community is disintegrating into ever new gangs. This has not been adequately perceived in the West until today because we have not been able to describe this process adequately with our conceptual system. In Western thought, the paradigm of Thomas Hobbes from the 17th century is still valid. It states that in a theoretically constructed state of nature, which always occurs when there is no longer a functioning state, the “state of nature” of the “war of all against all” occurs. In this conception, everyone is absolutely free and has a right to everything he can take, provided he has the power to do so. This life, however, according to Hobbes, is full of violence and fear eats the soul. To overcome this self-destructive “state of nature,” all individuals transfer all violence to a single sovereign, who in return provides them with protection and security. In this simple construction the modern state was born, secured by the state monopoly of violence. Here, only the state has a right to legitimately exercise violence, and non-state violence is criminalized.

    Gang Wars

    What is not included in this construction are gangs – groups of mostly young men left over from the civil wars since the end of the Cold War, uprooted in the refugee movements, or who have lost their identity in the dramatic transformation process we trivialize as globalization. Depending on the context, these uprooted and redundant young people can become terrorists, child soldiers, members of youth gangs that dominate the suburbs from Paris to Rio, drug cartels, mafia gangs, or human traffickers. The context varies, but the cause is the same everywhere: these young people feel marginalized, superfluous, and uprooted. Approaches that have analyzed related global violence have almost always emphasized individual violence or violent enrichment. Of course, there are civil war economies, markets of violence, and state collapse, including “new wars” (Kaldor and Münkler) characterized by the privatization and economization of violence and asymmetric warfare against the weakest in societies. In such markets of violence, people are traded first and foremost, and about 79% of them are women and children, but also weapons, drugs, rare earths, and the well-known blood diamonds as a synonym for precious stones. In many countries, however, violent gangs play at least as large a role.

    A characteristic feature of these gangs is that they are not exclusively concerned with private enrichment through violence, but paradoxically give their members a sense of identity and even home through their violence. This paradox is not provided for in our conceptual system for understanding violence.  Islamist terrorism can in no way be attributed to the pursuit of material interests. It is true that the Islamic State also used oil and that the Taliban dominate the opium trade in the Golden Crescent between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This only proves that there is a link between political and economic struggles, not that the struggles for recognition and identity in these organizations are economically determined. This means that there is still a link between violence and the market, perhaps it has just become more “invisible”, more visible at the micro level. Macro-violence, on the other hand, is increasingly characterized by struggles for identity and recognition.

    If we say there is a transition to a global war of all against all, I think there is a global transition to gang wars. These may or may not be youth gangs. Drug cartels and mafia organizations can also be based on gang structures. Of course, economic interests play an important role here, but I doubt that cohesion is guaranteed by economic interests alone. One example is the Japanese Yakuza. What are gangs?  A gang is a group that originally formed spontaneously and socializes and integrates its members through fighting and conflict. Typical behaviors include meeting in person, hanging out and occupying public space, traveling in a group, and having a high propensity for conflict – such as rocker groups.

    Many children, adolescents, and young adults in Central and South America are active members of youth gangs called “maras” or “pandillas”.

    The result of this behavior is the development of a distinct tradition, an unreflective internal structure, an esprit de corps, paradoxically solidarity and morality within the group, and a sense of belonging to a unified territory.  The leader must constantly maintain a threatening gesture against his own and also constantly rekindle the waning enthusiasm of his followers; in other words, respect for him must be constantly maintained. Many children, adolescents, and young adults in Central and South America are active members of youth gangs called “maras” or “pandillas”.

    After the end of the civil wars in Nicaragua in 1990, El Salvador in 1992, and Guatemala in 1996, there was a forced migration of illegal immigrants from the U.S. to their home countries, including the deportation of Central American-born members of street gangs formed in the U.S. to their parents’ home countries.  These young people had fled poverty and civil war, formed criminal gangs (maras) primarily on the West Coast of the U.S., and were now forced to return to their home countries, which they may never have seen. Back in Latin America, the mareros regrouped and received a large influx of both young people looking for direction and demobilized security forces and guerrillas (there were about 40,000 of them at the time).

    The most important aspects of a Latin American gang member’s life are honor, drugs, and violence. This is what a pandillero’s entire daily life revolves around, and in most cases, it also determines the when, how, and why of his death. In the gangs, there is a certain code of honor that states that gang solidarity and reputation are more important than anything else.  In a sense, the honor of the gang becomes the transcendence of the members, as the collective as such is religiously exalted and the individual counts for less and less. The individual is obligated to kill unconditionally for the honor of the group or die himself. There is also a paradoxical construction in another point: on the one hand, there is an absolute hierarchy, on the other hand, there is a feeling of being a gang: “We rule the barrio so that no one tells us what to do. If someone does, we silence them. You submit because we are many. We young people rule.  The response of the pandillero in a world where he is nothing is to attack, to dominate the barrio, to submit because he is submitted, to define a territory because he lives in uprootedness, to join an institution that gives identity because he lacks it. The pandillero strives to dominate in an environment that excludes him.

    Whoever belongs to a pandilla must not only master the exercise of violence, but must also be able to accept the suffering of violence. The initiation rituals for men and women are different: men must allow themselves to be beaten by existing members of the gang for a certain period of time, which varies from gang to gang, while women must allow themselves to be raped by any member of the gang. The unimaginable extent of violence in Central American youth gangs is an indication that gangs cannot be attributed to interests alone, for although these interests may be predominant in the exercise of violence, they are unlikely to play a role in voluntary submission to the group, self-sacrifice for it, and endurance of violence. Rather, the recognition by group members of having endured violence is the central aspect of one’s identity and loyalty to the gang. This is the too often overlooked connection between the wars of states and parastatal organizations (IS, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards) and the violence that takes place on a mass but individual level (Hobbes, war of all against all). They cannot be attributed to either level, but are the intermediate realm, the hybrid between the two.

    Feature Image: Salvadoran left wing revolutionary group Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front

  • Consumption as a Substitute Religion – A Critique of Capitalism

    Consumption as a Substitute Religion – A Critique of Capitalism

    Consumption is becoming the new substitute religion. This is certainly progress for former poor countries, but in the long run it dissolves the cohesion of society and is only apparently covered up by aggressive enemy declarations. The newly industrialised nations should take the dissolution of social cohesion in the West as a warning example.

    With the triumph of neo-liberalism, all forms of identity worldwide are becoming fluid, uncertain or even dissolved. It is true that it was right to leave behind the binary oppositions of Western modernity to “non-modern” societies, which were associated with static, entrenched forms of identity. But the orientation towards models of consumption does not lead to a real pluralisation, but reproduces ever new rigid identities and thinking in tribal opposites: “us against the others”, whoever the others are. The Chinese dream, New Russia, make America great again, the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the USA, the division of Israeli society and the temporary triumph of the extreme religious right there are all reactions to the dissolution of identities through the transformation of citizens into consumers. Consumption is becoming the new substitute religion. This is certainly progress for former poor countries, but in the long run, it dissolves the cohesion of society and is only apparently covered up by aggressive enemy declarations. The newly industrialised nations should take the dissolution of social cohesion in the West as a warning example.

    If about 6 people have as much property as 3.6 billion “others or in the near future 1% of the world’s population as much as the “remaining” 99%, then this is an absolutely obscene inequality, which we only accept becauseö the ideology of consumption, capitalism and neo-liberalism has become the new world religion. As Walter Benjamin already pointed out, it serves the same basic need as the monotheistic religions. “Then said the Lord unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, Ye have seen that I have spoken unto you from heaven. Ye shall set nothing by my side: silver gods and gold gods ye shall not have.” (Exodus 20:22). “And when the people saw that Moses came not down from the mount so long, they gathered themselves about Aaron, and said unto him, Arise, make us a god to go before us: for we know not what is befallen this man Moses. (…) And Aaron took the gold out of their hand and poured it into a clay mould, and made it a cast calf. Then they said: This is thy God, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” (Ex 32:1) We today may think ourselves exalted at the idea of worshipping a golden figure. But in reality, aren’t we merely replacing it with Wall Street or the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, or even globalisation, which is supposed to lead us to the promised land, i.e. prosperity and wealth? It is true that we do not entrust our wives’ and daughters’ earrings to the stock exchange, but often all our savings, individual fates as well as those of entire countries are determined by the price of coffee, bananas and other commodities. Gunter Henn, the architect of the VW Autostadt, one of the new temples, underlined the claim for the creation of meaning by companies: “Who else offers orientation, where does that leave us with our childlike religiosity? The churches are dead, the state is withdrawing, and the ideologues have lost their power. What remains are the companies.”

    This story of the Golden Calf, which was put in the place of God at the very moment when he had revealed his will to the people of Israel in the Ten Commandments, illustrates a fundamental problem of religion, of the religious. For religion is obviously based on a two-way relationship. On the one hand, there is a need for a god or gods to reveal themselves, to show themselves, and on the other hand, there is an ineradicable need, an insatiable human desire for the divine, for the religious. This deep-seated longing can have many different reasons. In the sociology of religion and philosophy, it is described in such a way that religion, the religious, has fundamental functions for individual people as well as human societies, for example, the endurance of the fear of one’s own death, the embedding in communities that outlast death, the giving of meaning to life, the transcending of one’s own boundaries in an ordered whole, the construction of something sacred, untouchable.  The problem that arises from this, however, is that this insatiable longing can obviously also refer to something other than the revealing God, precisely to a golden calf, but also to the God of reason, to one’s own nation or race, to the world-historical mission of the proletariat, or even to science and technology. Science and technology may relegate the religious to the very back seats – often with the sole effect of putting themselves in its place. Carl Schmitt, one of the most important as well as most controversial theorists of political theory, emphasised, for example, that at the beginning of the 20th-century religious belief in God was replaced by religious belief in technology and the omnipotence of man. With regard to National Socialism, this has been proven in many cases, as there was a deliberate and purposeful instrumentalisation of religious practices for party congresses and mass marches – incidentally an essential aspect of why this inhuman ideology could nevertheless be so successful.  “Führer, our daily bread give us today.”

    ‘As Walter Benjamin already noted, capitalism is a pure cult religion that has neither a dogma nor a theology’

    But let’s move on to the gods of the market, consumerism and cult marketing when brand companies and belonging to this community take on cultic, religious proportions. And let’s put it bluntly: This cult marketing appeals to religious feelings much more simply and directly than a reflected faith ever can, religious feelings that at best come to the fore in community experiences at church conventions. Their religious character is also not always overt, since there is an essential difference between consumption, cult marketing and the Christian understanding of religion. Substitute religions are usually polytheistic, but Christianity is monotheistic. For followers of monotheistic religions, polytheistic ones often do not appear as a religion at all, but as something that one shrugs off or is amazed at, but considers oneself to be superior to this preform of religion. Such a view fails to recognise that these polytheistic forms of religion nevertheless serve religious feelings, without which their success is difficult to explain. Moreover, as Walter Benjamin already noted, capitalism is a pure cult religion that has neither a dogma nor a theology – unless one also wants to understand the currently dominant neoclassicism as a substitute religion. A cult religion, in any case, is directly practically oriented, just like the archetypes of pagan religiosity, which practises its rite without God’s word, without revelation. Pagan is to be defined in such a way that the cult takes precedence over the doctrine, which only appears implicitly. Capitalism is a form of neo-paganism, Benjamin concludes.

    Just as religion tries to help life succeed by conveying a meaningful way of living, so advertising tries to do by suggesting to customers that they can only live fulfilled lives or belong to the in-group by buying, owning and using a certain product. It is striking that in many cases advertising no longer presents the real advantages of a product, but values such as friendship. Advertising instrumentalises religious motifs to turn people into customers and customers into brand believers. In doing so, it builds on the religious basis still dormant in the hidden human being, tries to appeal to this sacral subconscious and therefore creates new forms of cult marketing, through which modern man is supposed to find cosy, warm places for his longings. In the spiritual desert of modernity, marketing strategies fill the vacant position of religion with advertising in general and the positions previously held by God and the sacred with products in particular and everything connected with the use of such a product: instead of religious practice, consumption; instead of gods, idols of consumption; instead of churches, temples of consumption; instead of religious faith communities, those of consumption. In this context, belonging to the ingroup is considered constitutive in the choice of brand and ex-communication is threatened in an equally consistent manner if the wrong brand is chosen. The myth created around a brand gives its products a spiritual added value that is supposed to set them apart from the mass of competing products of the same quality.

    Consumerism was aggressively propagated as an alternative and implicitly as a substitute for religion vis-à-vis traditional religions by the media theorist Norbert Bolz in his Consumerist Manifesto. For him, consumerism is the immune system of world society against the virus of fanatical religions. Consumerism promises neither the goal nor the end of history, but “only the ever-new”.  Independent of the implicit and recurring criticism of monotheism, the question arises as to the price that must be paid for the production of the ever-new.

    Not only are quite normal products being elevated far beyond their utility value to cult brands, to a substitute for religion. In the new marketing, the customer is not only king, as it used to be called, but god-like. In largely saturated markets, it is mainly about creating ever-new desires. Customers are told that, compared to whatever they may already have, there are still many, many more possibilities, infinitely new possibilities. This amusement park has not yet been visited, that trip has not yet been taken, this hair shampoo could be cheaper or even better than that one, you can shop better in Frankfurt than in Kassel or vice versa or somewhere else. In the meantime, you can also fly to London in one day to go shopping, “how have you not yet been to Paris to go shopping?”

    The decisive factor is not whether one actually uses this or that offer, but that there are always even better, even fancier POTENTIAL possibilities that one has not yet realised…. “Anything goes” used to be a slogan of resistance against repressive social structures – today it is the symbol for the market of limitless possibilities. Due to this limitlessness of possibilities of consumption, a constant depressive feeling arises in MANY people that they have not yet exhausted any consumption possibilities – and if one were to devote one’s whole life to consumption, there would still be something that would have to be done without.

    This pressure of seemingly limitless possibilities to live like “God in France” is exacerbated for those whose financial possibilities are limited, such as in the case of unemployment, because here the tension between the real limited and the potentially infinite consumption possibilities is particularly great.

    From this tension follows a clinical picture that characterises modern capitalism, our market society, and depression as an awareness of what is potentially possible and what is actually possible. Depression threatens the individual who only resembles himself, just as sin pursues the soul turned towards God or guilt pursues the human being torn apart in conflict. It arises both when the awareness of potential possibilities far exceeds that of the real ones and in those cases where the consumer is called upon to constantly reinvent himself.

    This last problem can be illustrated by a cigarette advertisement that virtually signals the reversal of traditional advertising promises because it boldly states that this particular brand of cigarettes does not taste good to everyone – and that is portrayed as a good thing, according to the slogan. At the same time, of course, this advertising is aimed at the largest possible group of buyers, the more the better. This gives rise to the deliberate paradox that one is all the more an absolutely unique individual if one consumes exactly what everyone is buying.

    The individual here is not something self-evident, born or given by nature, but a laboriously constructed social role. As an individual, man makes himself the cult centre of a religion of uniqueness. That’s why Buddhism is often in vogue today – as a doctrine of self-redemption without a saviour god. And for those who find that too spiritual, self-excitement and self-challenge remain. You take drugs, get high on the body’s own endorphins – or best of all: on the drug “I”. But it would be a misunderstanding to believe that the cult of the ego is a step towards liberating the individual from the shackles of society. In the cult of the ego, the human being is less a sovereign individual than an unhappy prosthetic god. He surrounds himself with auxiliary constructions from the world of fashions, drugs and distractions.

    The emancipation of the sixties and seventies has often freed us from the dramas of guilt and obedience, but it has brought us new dramas of responsibility and action in an uncertain and conflicting world.

    In this invention of a seemingly unique individuality through the consumption of branded products, individuals are overburdened without limits – the customer is no longer king, but god-like in marketing strategies – we fulfil their most secret wishes, everything they desire, there are no limits to their desires. But people remain humans, they are not gods and often break down at this imposition of being equal only to themselves. Only God, who in the Old Testament logically demands that there should be no gods beside Him, is equal only to Himself. The emancipation of the sixties and seventies has often freed us from the dramas of guilt and obedience, but it has brought us new dramas of responsibility and action in an uncertain and conflicting world. Thus, through human self-empowerment and the marketing strategy of the individual responsible only to himself, depressive exhaustion accompanies neurotic anxiety not only on an individual level but could be also witnessed in Western societies as a whole. The alternative to rigid forms of identity and political systems is not consumerism, which only leads to new forms of such ideologies. What is needed is a floating balance of the individual and the community.

  • Women in Afghanistan: The Fight Back

    Women in Afghanistan: The Fight Back

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    Introduction:

    Women and men undergo varied experiences in the event of an absolute collapse of the socio-political order. When combined with a catastrophic political transformation, their exposure to systemic abuse and violence dramatically increases. The vulnerability of women and their exposure to such violence is much more pronounced compared to what men face. This paper attempts to map the violence and abuse of rights women in Afghanistan are facing under the new Taliban rule after the American withdrawal. It also focusses on their response to the same. 

    Women under Taliban 1.0

    Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic country with a diverse population. Women’s issues have always had a central role in the governance system. From the beginning of the birth of modern-day Afghanistan, different monarchs have played a key role in determining the status of women in society, in line with their Islamic worldview. However, though women were considered inferior to men, they had their share of rights that were in no way meant to keep them confined to their houses. Instead, their free movement was hardly restricted. Covering their heads or wearing a burqa was not mandatory. There were organizations like the Anjuman-I-Himayat-I-Niswan(Organization for Women Protection), which worked to encourage women into reporting any kind of injustice meted to them. 

    After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, women’s rights were further amplified with universities in most cities, especially Kabul admitting them. After the departure of the Soviets in May 1988, the Mujahedeen overturned all that the Soviet Union had stood for, which included women’s rights regarding employment and education. Women were pushed away from public life and forced to wear a burqa. Fewer women were visible on television.

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  • Gendered Politics at the Local Level: An Analysis of Tamil Nadu

    Gendered Politics at the Local Level: An Analysis of Tamil Nadu

    The institution of panchayat raj, a milestone in the journey of administrative institutions at the grass-root level, is not an exception to proxy candidature, caste-based violation of rights or gendered politics

    The political domain continues to be considered a male bastion, with women in politics often seen as a paradox. The domain is conspicuous by the very low presence of women, with very few of them making it to positions of power. Elizabeth I, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Golda Meir have often been regarded as minorities in politics despite being some of the most powerful women in domestic and international politics. In the minuscule group of women politicians, ‘self-made’ women are often considered an exception rather than a rule. The political transitions are short-term solutions to break the pattern of exclusion. From the suffragette of the 20th century up till now, feminists have fought a lengthy battle for women’s right to vote and hold office. With the development that is slow and choppy, women continue to be underrepresented in politics, and parliament. While we talk about women’s political participation, it is easy for us to imagine empty seats in the parliament. However, women in India have been involved in politics since pre-independent times even when they had no voting rights. The aspect of politics that has always held an uncertain position in our minds is the relationship between women and politics.

    Constitutional Provision

    The world of urban local politics associated with political decentralisation in India was constitutionalised in 1992 through the 74th Constitutional Amendment. It ensured a reservation of at least one-third of the total number of seats for women. Additionally, for the office of chairperson one-third of the seats are reserved for women in the Urban Local Body (ULB). However, the bill for the reservation of seats for women in parliament has remained pending for years. The Constitution allows 50% of seats to be reserved for women in the local body elections. In Tamil Nadu, the High Court has directed the State Election Commission to ensure that the reservation stays at 50% in ULB as mandated by law.

    Proxy Politics and Tamil Nadu

    Despite the reservation mandated by law, the participation of women in state and national politics has barely improved. Gender inequality, hierarchy, and stigma against women in politics along with structural, social, economic and cultural barriers continue to obstruct women’s effective participation in politics. Within the urban local body, it is witnessed that husbands or male relatives wield actual power and control even though women relatives or wives are the ones elected for the position and appointed officially. Men continue to control the wards while most elected women work as proxies. This is evident in the case of the Tambaram corporation where Nagarajan, husband of DMK councillor Geetha, took the chair on her behalf in official meetings, a clear violation of legislative procedures and law. In such cases, women are shadowed and they are not free to make their own decisions. Proxy politics is rampant at the grassroots level of panchayat and local body elections where women get posts filled with responsibilities but without effective power or control.

    The term ‘proxy women’ needs further elaboration. In the 2022 urban local body elections in Tamil Nadu, while women councillors were elected in accordance with the 50% reservation policy, the actual power and control were exercised by their husbands. Though the Greater Chennai Corporation has a majority of women in elected seats, it is effectively run by men. In a few wards, for instance, in wards number 24 and 34, it was the husbands who were attending to complaints, and deciding over issues, while operating the office. In some wards, husbands address themselves as councillors.  And while people in the ward complain of not having seen their councillor since her election to the post, it is to be noted here that this problem does not end with councillors. Even the top-most positions held by women in the municipal body continue to be dictated by her veteran politician family members or, they are in the hands of the political party itself. 

    Participation in PRI

    The institution of panchayat raj, a milestone in the journey of administrative institutions at the grass-root level, is not an exception to proxy candidature, caste-based violation of rights or gendered politics. Retired IAS officer Ashok Varadhan Shetty stated a case in Dindigul in 2008 where the husband of a woman member of block panchayat was caught participating in council meetings while she stayed at home. Even when the obstacles for women in politics and panchayats in specific are diverse, male dominance automatically tops the list of obstructing women’s participation in politics.

    Theories of Representation

    The gendered pattern of politics in most parts of India is deeply patriarchal with low sex ratio, patrilocal marriage, and patrilineal inheritance, with women being denied access to the public sphere. In Omvedt’s words, “Girls are socialised to be mothers, wives and domestic workers under other’s authority”. As literature explains, women in political bodies argue that mere representation is not sufficient. A formal seat is not the same as active participation. In India, most women are less educated, less exposed, and more dependent, and proxy women are more likely to be seen as token representatives in political organisations.

    Philip’s study of the political representation of women has set up a foundation to shift from ‘politics of ideas’ to ‘politics of presence’. The twin democratic principles of equality in politics and popular control, help in ensuring equal representation of men and women. He has presented four arguments for politics of presence: the importance of symbolic representation; the need to tackle exclusion inherent in ideas of the political party; the need for vigorous support to the disadvantaged groups; and the importance of politics of presence in arriving at policy options.

    Does the concept of proxy politics leave a mark on female politicians alone? Certainly not. Various male politicians act as mere mouthpieces of the political party. Hence, it is not just women who become prey to proxy politics, the practice is widespread at the lower level. But the difference that lies here is men are instructed while women are dominated. Gender equality is, thus, an essential element for the sustainable progress of any nation. The goal of all-round development can be achieved only through equal representation of all genders in various fields. In the Global Gender Gap Report, released by the World Economic Forum, based on the key dimensions of Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health, Survival and Political Empowerment, India has ranked 140 out of 156 countries slipping 28 ranks from the 2020 report. It is evident how deep and strong the roots of discrimination in the country are.

    References

    The Constitution 112th Amendment. (n.d.). Amendment to Article 243T of the Constitution to provide for 50 percent reservation for women in Urban Local Bodies. Retrieved August 9, 2022, from https://mohua.gov.in/upload/uploadfiles/files/243T_Constitution_15.pdf

    Mahanta, K. (n.d.). Home | Government of India. Retrieved August 9, 2022, from https://censusindia.gov.in/census.website/

    Menon, J. (2021, October 8). Tamil Nadu: Many women in panchayat race, but will they take the podium? | Chennai News. Times of India. Retrieved August 9, 2022, from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/tamil-nadu-many-women-in-panchayat-race-but-will-they-take-the-podium/articleshow/86858818.cms

    Omvedt, G. (n.d.). Women in governance in South Asia. Economic and Political Weekly.

    Phillips, A. (1998). The Politics of Presence. Clarendon Press.

    Sarpanch Pati Culture: DMK’S Women Councillors, Their Proxy Husbands, Relatives Abuse Power in TN. (2022, April 9). Times Now. Retrieved August 9, 2022, from https://www.timesnownews.com/videos/times-now/specials/sarpanch-pati-culture-dmks-women-councillors-their-proxy-husbands-relatives-abuse-power-in-tn-video-90747544

    Tamil Nadu Municipal Laws (Amendment) Act, 2016. (2016, February 27). TAMIL NADU GOVERNMENT GAZETTE. Retrieved August 9, 2022, from http://www.stationeryprinting.tn.gov.in/extraordinary/2016/56-Ex-IV-2.pdf

    Feature Image Credits: The Federal