Emotion and Reason in Social Change: Insights from Fiction

Emotion and Reason in Social Change Insights from Fiction John Girling Emotion and Reason in Social Change Also by ...

Author: John Girling

35 downloads 1291 Views 662KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Emotion and Reason in Social Change Insights from Fiction

John Girling

Emotion and Reason in Social Change

Also by John Girling THAILAND: Society and Politics AMERICA AND THE THIRD WORLD CAPITAL AND POWER MYTHS AND POLITICS IN WESTERN SOCIETIES CORRUPTION, CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND SYMBOLIC POWER

Emotion and Reason in Social Change Insights from Fiction John Girling

© John Girling 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-00019-3 ISBN-10: 0-230-00019-3

hardback hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Girling, J. L. S. Emotion and reason in social change : insights from fiction / John Girling. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-230-00019-3 (cloth) 1. Social change. 2. Emotions–Sociological aspects. 3. Social change in literature. 4. Emotions in literature. I. Title HM831.G48 2006 303.401–dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2005056622

My starting point is the undeniable evidence of powerful emotions at work in even the most advanced countries of the modern world. My aim is to understand this emotional involvement, not directly, but imaginatively, through fictions. My argument, however, is that structural conditions – in economy, politics and society – determine whether the flow of psychic energy is constructive or destructive. The result is an entirely new, critical approach to global capitalism, neo-imperialism and modernisation, and social change: notably the degradation of the environment and the contested role of women. Why can the passions which affect the will only be spoken of in the coded language of a mythics? Paul Ricoeur

I find my chief comfort more and more in . . . Plato and Shakespeare. Why is it so difficult to find a true combination of passion and intellect? J.M. Keynes

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Acknowledgements

x

Preface

xi

1. Introduction: Bridging the Emotional/Intellectual Divide Night and day Contradictions of modernity Magic realism Structure and ideology Words, dreams, myths Money, lust and magic Theory in context Note: on the Sociology of emotions

1 2 2 4 6 8 11 14 20

Part I

Possession

2. Democracy or Authoritarianism: the Economy and Politics of Modernisation in Japan Enduring the unendurable Rich country, strong army The turning point Madness to materialism Development and democracy

27 27 32 36 37 39

3. Global Capitalism Dominant economy Material foundation Emotional motivation Social implications

44 44 51 57 61

Part II

Power

4. Imperialism: the Perils of Globalism Things fall apart ‘Orientalism’ From involvement to intervention

vii

71 71 80 84

viii

Contents

America and Vietnam, Part I: neo-realism and the language of intervention America and Vietnam, Part II: the internal context and the linkage of intervention America and Vietnam, Part III: intervention explained Credibility

87 90 95 97

5. Violence Will to power Elemental drives Nation and power

99 99 106 113

6. The Enigma of Politics The Castle: force and law Democracy – and its ‘deficit’ Conflict and cooperation: power and values Human rights

119 119 127 135 140

Part III

Society: Vision and Division

7. Environment Feeling about nature Global warning Awareness and response The price of courage

145 145 148 156 161

8. Women Myths and social reality Transgression – and punishment Inequality and discrimination Factors for progress Achievement and frustration

164 164 170 173 181 184

9. Dark Energy Science and society Morality and power

190 191 195

Conclusion

201

Epilogue: Theatre of the Absurd The Janus aspect A fatal disease

203 203 205

Contents

Wizard of Oz Takes two to tango Story of O On reflection

ix

207 210 214 218

Bibliography

220

Index

226

Acknowledgements I am most grateful to the anonymous reader for Palgrave Macmillan for the constructive critique of an earlier version of this work; for very helpful suggestions; and for unerringly singling out weak points that needed attention. My thanks, too, to Rolf Hochhuth for his encouraging remarks; to Jill Lake and Melanie Blair of Palgrave for their friendly and effective cooperation; and Barbara Slater for scrutinising my text so thoroughly and well. The author and publisher have attempted to contact all necessary copyright holders; if any have been overlooked, they will make amends at the earliest opportunity.

x

Preface This book is about ways to understand human behaviour – in economy, politics and society – through the use of selected fictions: mostly novels, but also poetry, drama and painting. My premise is that emotionallycharged beliefs, often expressed in myths and imaginative literature, play a vital role in contemporary society, notably because of the emotional force, or psychic energy, that enters into both public and private decisions.* Yet the rational tradition of the social sciences does not provide a satisfactory explanation of what is undoubtedly an ‘extraordinary’ state of affairs. Two distinct methods of investigation are therefore required: analysis of the subject-matter guided by informed hypotheses, which satisfies rational criteria, on the one hand; and vicarious experience drawn from works of imagination, which is emotionally fulfilling, on the other. Neither offers a sufficient explanation in itself: instead, each complements the other. My aim, therefore, is to bring together the ‘imaginative truths’ of fiction and the ‘rational’ truths of sociological analysis in order to produce a fuller explanation of such crucial issues as modernisation, global capitalism, nationalism and imperialism, political violence, environmental degradation, civil society and women’s rights. I read Balzac’s novels, for example, in understanding capitalism. As the critic Martin Turnell (1962: 227–8) writes: money, lust and magic motivate the Comédie humaine; money, gained by whatever means has become the symbol of the deepest aspirations of society. Consider, too, Maurice Bowra’s (1968: 26, 30) observation of classical Greek literature, which made abundant use of symbols derived from myths: ‘Such symbols concentrate in themselves a mass of associations which are instinctively apprehended, and are therefore more urgent, more vivid, more intimate, more charged with personal emotion than the usual run of abstractions.’ It was these emotions, he goes on, ‘that set the intelligence to work . . .’ Through such fictions, in my view, it is not only possible to probe more deeply into social problems but also to cope more effectively with the ‘uncontrollable’ aspect of emotional drives. For this work, I have drawn on my experience as a researcher in various fields, with books on insurgency and US foreign policy, social change in developing countries, ‘capital and power’, political myths, corruption, and civil society. These form the analytical part of the book. As for the fictional side: this is not a question of literary criticism, needless to say, xi

xii


but of bringing out from selected works the emotional and motivational expression. For imaginative novelists are far more aware of the relationship of their work to society (consider Grass’s The Tin Drum or Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children) than are social scientists in the reverse situation, that is, their appreciation, or lack of it, of fiction. Yet society is formed of and by (and for?) human beings. The necessary interrogation – for whom in particular? And for what purpose? – is the starting point for the creative enterprise of writers and scholars. * On emotion, feeling and affect. ‘Affect’ refers to psychic energy, expressed in everyday terms as ‘emotion’ or, more subjectively, as ‘feeling’. Dictionary definitions are either circular – affect being defined as feeling, emotion or desire, and vice-versa – or polysemic: feeling is emotion or physical sensation, given that words may have more than one meaning. This is not a defect, as Paul Ricoeur points out in The Rule of Metaphor, but rather the characteristic of ‘ordinary language’, which refers not to an ideal world, but to the world we live in. This ‘indirect and metaphorical’ language preserves the highest descriptive power as regards human experience.

1 Introduction: Bridging the Emotional/Intellectual Divide

Rejoyce! Deliberation is at hand! (Fictional Joyce. The genuine article is too costly for words) . . . the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth . . . (Foucault) The following themes are discussed in this chapter: 1. From different perspectives on ‘Night and Day’ to the ‘Contradictions of Modernity’: the expectation of ever-increasing rationality in economic enterprise and in bureaucratic administration confronts violent outbursts of ‘irrational exuberance’. 2. The Enlightenment tradition of social science and its belief in the ‘rational actor’ find great difficulty in accounting for the role of the ‘irrational’. 3. The use of fictions, as source of emotions, restores the repressed affective dimension of society. 4. The two components – emotional and rational – are represented in Kant’s ‘trilogy of passions’, fusing imaginative truths with the existential conditions of economic ‘possession’, political ‘power’ and social values. These conditions are necessary for the production of wealth, political order and social identity; but they may take either a destructive or constructive form (power, for example, may be used cooperatively for the common good, or abused in the interest of an elite). 5. ‘Theory in Context’: the challenge of change, through economic innovation, war, internal unrest. Stimulating conditions (inspirational or traumatic) provoke an emotional reaction, which then has a social 1

2


impact. Such is the theme, in economics, politics and society (vision and division), of the following chapters.

Night and day The mysterious ‘night world’ of feelings and emotions, of hidden or unconscious desires, is sharply contrasted in the Western mind with the day world of rationality and logic, definition and calculation. Indeed, the distinction goes back to ancient Greece, when mythos (fable, myth) yielded to logos (reason, the word). Joyce’s procedure is the reverse: the largely dayworld of Ulysses – a journey of self-discovery – merges into the night-world of Finnegans Wake: dream-history of humanity. The Chinese tradition, too, differs from that of the West. The yin and yang – also symbolising night and day – are equally perceptions of the female and male principles, negative and positive, cold and hot, dream and reality; but to the Chinese these are complementary rather than antagonistic. In their view, neither dimension is to be excluded in the world of humanity. As a Chinese philosopher argues, Chinese thought is not directed solely at the intellect, but at the whole person – less to argue rationally than to practise how to live (Chen, 1997: 34; and on yin/yang, 253–5). Western rationality versus Oriental mysticism? Rather, I argue that despite the Enlightenment conception of progress and reason driving out prejudice and superstition (and other barbarous forms of irrationality) nevertheless emotional behaviour thrives. Paradoxically, the very prophet of rationality, Max Weber (1948), also accounts for the force of ‘unreason’: that is, the ‘warring gods’ of conflicting values that go beyond – and cannot be reconciled by – pure reason. But can we, as Weber suggests, isolate the sphere of reason (his ‘ethic of responsibility’) from that of emotionallycharged values? In my view, this is an illusion. The realm of ‘magic’ – dreams, myths, values and fictions – does not merely coexist with that of reason, but permeates it at all levels. Together, they form the imaginative truths of our existential condition, conceptualised in the Kantian trilogy of possession, power and ‘esteem’: the latter being interpreted as consciousness of oneself and one’s place in society. These are the themes I seek to develop in this introductory chapter.

Contradictions of modernity The founder of modern sociology, Max Weber, was convinced that ‘disenchantment’ – the end of myth and magic – would inexorably result from the growth of ever more rational and bureaucratic systems of economy,

Introduction: Bridging the Emotional/Intellectual Divide

3

politics and social order. This has not been the case – far from it. Enchantment persists, taking both sublime and terrible forms. As I wrote in an earlier work: Despite Max Weber’s assumption of ever-increasing rationality in the modern world, events of this [twentieth] century have demonstrated – along with the spread of legal-rationality, organizational norms, and cooperative regimes – the power of entirely opposite elements: mass movements of unreason, whose violence and destructiveness were unmatched (even unimaginable) in the West in the previous century. . . On the positive side, meanwhile, the end of the Cold War, the construction of a new Europe, and efforts to maintain the liberal trading regime contrast with new forms of irrationality: nuclear armed ambitions, ethnic and religious conflicts, and environmental degradation. (Girling, 1993: 1) It is not unreasonable, faced with such contradictions, to argue that emotionally-charged beliefs, often expressed in myths, do play a powerful role in contemporary society and politics, as they have done in the past, and that so far there has not been a satisfactory explanation of this extraordinary state of affairs. Despite the abundant evidence of irrational conduct, effective investigation (I surmise) is impeded by the Enlightenment tradition of the rational actor (Girling, 1993: 1). But note the admission by the celebrated economist J.M. Keynes that rational civilisation ignores the formidable part of irrational forces and ‘certain powerful and valuable springs of feeling’ (cited by Leavis, 1962: 258). Weber’s work does, however, suggest a resolution. For he notably distinguished, in ‘Politics as a Vocation’, between an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ demanding the fulfilment of values and an ‘ethic of responsibility’ pragmatically concerned with the consequences of action. In the former case, he asserts, politicians insisting on an ‘absolute ethic’ will only obscure the truth by the wilful ‘unleashing of passion’. The reason, as Weber points out in ‘Science as a Vocation’, is that the ‘various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other’. Such is Weber’s famous evocation of the ‘warring gods’ of Olympus (Weber, 1948: 148, also 120). We live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons, only we live in a different sense. As Hellenic man at times sacrificed to Aphrodite and at other times to Apollo, and, above all, as everybody sacrificed to the gods of his city, so do we still nowadays, only the bearing of man has been disenchanted

4


and denuded of its mystical but inwardly genuine plasticity. Fate, and certainly not ‘science’, holds sway over these gods and their struggles. For Weber, only the ethic of responsibility came within the scope of political or social analysis. Indeed, he considered that only such ‘value-free’ behaviour was an appropriate subject of study. Insistence on absolute values evoked the arena of warring gods – a conflict that could not be decided on rational grounds. The issue of religion is exemplary. Consider the worshippers of Christianity, Islam and Judaism – all ‘people of the Book [Old Testament]’, as Muslims affirm. For all that, their doctrines are irreconcilable. Christ as the Son of God is a blasphemy to Muslims; the belief in the guilt of Jews – and their descendants – as the murderers of Christ inspired centuries of persecution; while the unique Jewish claim to be the ‘chosen people’ is unacceptable to ‘Gentiles’. Such a spirit of exclusiveness between and within religions is a source of conflict rather than harmony; nevertheless, the certainty of believers in their version of the truth – however partial in the view of outsiders – provides an extraordinary sense of identity, of belonging to a community. Moreover, these ‘contrasting visions of life’, as C.H. Peake observes of the moral drama of Joyce’s Ulysses (1977: 339), ‘must be shown, not described, felt rather than understood’. Indeed, to recall Maurice Bowra’s observation of classical Greek literature (1968: 26, 30) is to realise the abundant use of symbols derived from myths, ‘which are instinctively apprehended and therefore more urgent, more vivid, more intimate, more charged with personal emotion than intellectual abstractions’. Responding to Greek tragedy, the playwright Edward Bond in turn asks: ‘how can theatre transform the meaning of the world?’ We must try, like the Greeks, to make the theatre an arena of justice – ‘otherwise we will sink into an increasingly violent, corrupt and authoritarian society’ (interview with Fabienne Darge, Le Monde, 19 April 2003). And consider the visionary Antonin Artaud, poet and critic: ‘The theatre, like the plague . . . unleashes conflicts, lets loose forces, reveals possibilities and if these possibilities and forces are dark this is not the fault of the plague or theatre, but of life’. For ‘the idea of theatre’ is ‘a magical, atrocious link with reality and danger’ (Artaud, 1964: 45, 137, and see 18–19, 61–9, 109–10, 123–4, 157–61, 177).

Magic realism These warring values of religion and legend are ‘magic’: the realm of myths, dreams, fiction, the ‘night world’ of humanity. That is why I have


5

borrowed the term ‘magic realism’ from literary criticism to convey the imaginary situations in which participants, nevertheless, act realistically: they pursue each other with passionate intensity, swayed by overriding emotions, but are aware of the appropriate means to achieve their unruly desires. Indeed, magic realism represents in fiction what value-conflicts represent in political and social behaviour. For ‘magic’ is the inexplicable event – either an ‘extraordinary’ achievement or an unforeseen catastrophe – in real life. Thus, to return to Ulysses, the precursor, where reader and artists realise – as S.L. Goldberg shows (1961: 313) – a sense of the wholeness of life, of its irrational paradoxes, intermingled decay and vitality, absurdity and mystery: where moral criticism and mythic parallels converge. The inexplicable event. Who, even in Weber’s time, could have foretold the Holocaust? Who could have believed, a century ago, that people would be flying across the oceans as an everyday reality? Who in the eighteenth century – ‘the age of reason’ – had the notion of steam trains, still less of motor cars or space machines? All these achievements, from television and computers to organ transplants and genetic discoveries, now taken for granted, were literally unimaginable only a few generations ago – apart from some works of fiction, which could hardly be taken seriously. ‘Magic realism’, according to Margaret Drabble’s edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature, is expressed in stories and novels which ‘have, typically, a strong narrative drive, in which the recognisably realistic mingles with the unexpected and the inexplicable, and in which elements of dream, fairy story, or mythology combine with the everyday, often in a mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence’. The concept has been used to describe the work of writers such as Borges and Garcia Marquez in Latin America or Gunter Grass, John Fowles and Italo Calvino in Europe and Salman Rushdie’s fabulous depiction of India, Pakistan and the Muslim world. Thus, Borges is noted for bringing together in his works fiction, truth and identity, while Garcia Marquez mingles the ordinary and the miraculous, the semi-supernatural and the concrete detail, charged with heightened power and colour. Existential conditions Now, the imaginative truths of literature and the visual arts relate to the philosophical insights of Kant’s ‘trilogy of passions’ – possession, power and esteem – as well as to the Buddhist trilogy of greed, anger and illusion. The latter can be seen as Kant’s ‘passions’ taken to extremes, which for Buddhists are the causes of suffering in this world. It may not be fanciful to consider Freud’s trilogy of id, ego and superego in this context.

6


The id represents the unacceptable urges – the seething emotions – of the unconscious; the ego is the conscious reality; and the superego is one’s conscience, the ‘harsh taskmaster’ which represses, censors and distorts the unruly passions. Kant’s trilogy (Ricoeur, 1965: 222) presents the existential conditions of survival: possession, power, esteem (here, knowledge of society and one’s place in it: a sense of identity). In Ricoeur’s re-statement of the problem, these passions can take both negative forms (greed, domination, selfishness – here, ‘production of knowledge’ to legitimise power) and positive, redemptive forms. People may use power, for example, to dominate and exploit; but it can also be used for cooperative purposes. Myths and fables dramatise these abstract conceptions: they ‘tell a story’ that believers enact in life. For the world of fiction by mimetic intention, in Ricoeur’s words (296), leads us to the heart of the real world of action. Kant’s passions, to repeat, are existential: ‘possession’, that is, rules guaranteeing individual or collective ownership, is essential for the production of goods and services on which everyone depends; ‘power’ to make someone do what he or she would not otherwise do (and vice versa) is essential to any social order; and ‘esteem’ is that knowledge of self and society, however derived, that makes that order meaningful. It is when these ‘neutral’ qualities are taken to extremes – considered as ends in themselves – that possession becomes ‘greed’, power becomes ‘anger’ and esteem becomes ‘illusion’: the causes of suffering in this world.

Structure and ideology Now, structural conditions in my view determine whether these existential imperatives (Kant’s trilogy) are constructive or destructive for a given society. ‘Determine’ if only in the sense that they tip the balance one way or the other. ‘Structural conditions’ result from the need to systematise the means of production, power and knowledge in order to maintain and reproduce the existing order: for it is more effective to keep the system going when subordinates believe in it rather than when they are forced to obey. Hence the importance of ideology. Consider medieval Europe: society was divided between those who worked (peasants, labourers), those who fought (nobles) and those who prayed (clergy). It was believed – and certainly predicated – that these social divisions were divinely ordained. As a result, those born in the lowest category (workers), with few exceptions, could never move upwards – indeed, could never aspire to move upwards. Moreover, ‘values’ were designed to fit the appropriate category: ‘warrior’ values of honour, loyalty, courage, endurance and the like


7

were infinitely superior to the ‘menial’ values of toil, obedience, sacrifice and endurance. In India, the caste system (similarly of divine origin) sanctified the insurmountable division, from top to bottom, between warriors, priests, farmers and (significantly low) merchants. Doubly reinforcing these desirable social dispositions was the belief in karma – good deeds are rewarded in present or future lives, and vice versa – serving to demonstrate that those in positions of power deserved their rank because of previous meritorious conduct . . . As for the Chinese imperial order, the emperor was the essential mediator between heaven and earth: the cosmic order was reflected in the harmony of the empire, while the emperor possessed the ‘mandate of heaven’. Established order and social change All such means – ideological, material and juridical – were designed to perpetuate the existing systems of hierarchical order and discrimination. But they all faced change. (Indeed, from the Buddhist perspective, belief in the permanence of social institutions – or the self – is an illusion.) Societies change, above all, as a result of economic innovation, or the devastating impact of war, or political unrest, indeed new ways of thinking. Change is all the more devastating when it is unforeseen, unimaginable. (Consider the overwhelming impact on the Japanese people of the appearance of Commodore Perry’s squadron in 1853, intent on opening the country to trade and thus breaking more than two centuries of self-imposed isolation. ‘Most of the Japanese had never seen or imagined’ steam ships: Storry, 1965: 84, 87. Nor could such a powerful alien force be resisted, because the administrative capital, with more than one million inhabitants dependent on water-borne food supplies, was completely vulnerable to a naval blockade: Reischauer and Craig, 1978: 119.) Confronted by such ‘unimaginable’ change, the response of the anciens régimes varied from rejection (the Bourbons) to adaptation (the Meiji empire in Japan) and even submission (the fall of the Ching dynasty in China). But in each case there was social upheaval: some people gained, some lost and some were destroyed, such as the handloom weavers in industrialising England and the traditional handicraft workers in India, ruined by the competition of cheap (English) imports, brought about by imperialism and free trade. Social change in a profound sense reflects the Freudian world of tension – and neurosis – between the seething passions from below, the attempt of moderates to maintain a realistic course, and the punitive efforts of rulers to maintain their accustomed sway. The Freudian trilogy, in turn, ‘drives’

8


the Kantian trilogy of possession, power and knowledge. Whether the latter set takes a constructive form (as with the Meiji revolution) or destructive (greed, anger and illusion: as with Nazi Germany) however depends both on the structural conditions of the economy, politics and society – endemic crisis in the case of early twentieth-century Germany – and the intensity of passions aroused by these conditions. Such structural conditions can be and need to be rationally analysed; but the choice of values – such as between freedom and order or equality and merit, all of which are highly charged emotionally – is not rationally decidable, as Weber recognised. Indeed, collective emotions are most appropriately understood by other means: that is, indirectly and intuitively and especially through the ‘imaginative truths’ of fiction, of magic realism.

Words, dreams, myths Because values are conflicting, Weber sought instead to establish ‘valuefree’ concepts – such as ‘party’, ‘state’, ‘class’ and so on – on which scholars could agree in terms of common definitions. (Hitherto, such concepts had been very loosely applied, resulting in different interpretations.) Yet, however laudable Weber’s intent, the notion of such value-free concepts is contestable. The very word ‘state’, for example, has powerful emotional connotations that vary from strong attachment (still the case in France) to indifference (Britain?) and even hostility (among Americans). Whatever the definitional agreement among scholars, which is doubtful, people’s behaviour is evidently affected by these different expectations of the state. The affective component of such word-concepts – and the social consequences – cannot simply be ignored, whatever the problem this creates for theory. In the case of words like ‘society’, ‘culture’, ‘identity’ and ‘homeland’, for example, historical or sociological analysis may provide an adequate theoretical explanation, but it is the affective content that makes these words meaningful. In this sense, consider the emotional resonance of words such as the Anglo-Saxon ‘murder’ in contrast to the clinical, Latin-derived ‘assassination’ or ‘suicide’. (The German ‘selbstmord’, ‘selfmurder’, retains the horrific association.) ‘In the beginning was the Word’, soliloquises Goethe’s Faust as he prepares for his pact with the devil, for ‘we value the supernatural and long for revelation’. But how to ‘translate’ the word so as to be enlightened by it? First of all, the word has ‘meaning’, but is that sufficient? The word also has ‘power’, but this too is incomplete unless translated into action. ‘In the beginning was the Act!’ (Faust, Part One, lines 1216–37).


9

But the ‘meaning’ of words also changes over time and according to circumstance. In a famous passage, Thucydides bitterly describes the decline of Athens following its disastrous defeat by Sparta and its allies. ‘In times of peace and prosperity’, he writes, ‘cities and individuals alike follow higher standards, because they are not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But war is a stern teacher . . . it brings most people’s minds down to the level of their actual circumstances . . . To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings’ (The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner, 1954: 208–10). Thus, at a time when ‘money and life’ seemed equally ephemeral, what was ‘honourable and valuable’ no longer referred to civic culture, arts and sciences but to ‘the pleasure of the moment’. As for the gods, it seemed to be the same whether one worshipped them or not, ‘when one saw the good and the bad dying indiscriminately’ (127). Dreams, too, represent a regression from words and concepts (of rational consciousness) to sequences of images and feelings drawn from the unconscious: vivid, distorted, condensed, abrupt – bizarre to awakened recollection, but telling a story that requires interpretation. For dreams, according to Freud, are the displaced expression of unconscious feelings, all that the ‘censorship’ allows to come to consciousness. In extreme cases, moreover, traumatic conditions experienced by the psyche, whether in imagination or reality – as in the Athenian disaster – are repressed so severely by the conscious mind that they can only emerge, distortedly, in dreams or neurotic symptoms. What dreams are for the individual, so are myths for the community. Myths are emotionally-fulfilling ways of understanding the formative experiences of peoples or nations. Myths are symbolic representations of reality that, from a rational standpoint, contain incorrect assumptions; but they are nonetheless authentic, deeply felt responses to critical social conditions. Modern myths – such as ‘manifest destiny’ in the United States and ‘will to power’ in imperial (and Nazi) Germany – provide a key to people’s attempts to come to terms with powerful economic and political forces; they help to explain the way in which psychic energies are mobilised in the service of these drives; and they relate to particular conjunctures, which ‘activate’ these myths. Consider, for example (Girling, 1993: 2–3), the aggressive record of imperialist Japan – also discussed in the following chapter – in relation to the Japanese myths of the time: the ‘imperial’ myth of a divine leader embodying the destiny of his country, the ‘warrior’ myth, or code of Bushido, and the ‘exclusive’ myth of a chosen race. Such myths provided

10


the Japanese people, from whom the imperial soldiers were drawn, with a way to understand the powerful forces at work in their society; such myths mobilised the people for war; and finally these myths appeared to justify violent actions against an ‘inferior’ or ‘degenerate’ enemy. (Note that when conditions radically changed in postwar Japan, new myths appeared or old ones took new forms, such as the consensus approach to decisions, priority to economic growth and an international ‘low profile’.) To appreciate the significance of such formative periods in history indeed demands rational, causal analyses; but such an appreciation also requires a feeling for the horror, sublimity, inspiration or repulsion aroused by such events. The historian’s empathy for his or her subject is an example. So, too, is the interpretation of myths. Between dreams and myths is the realm of imaginative writing and, above all, of magic realism. The latter shares the hallucinatory aspect of dreams with the strong narrative drive of myths. And both are the imaginative expression of traumatic social conditions. Note the work of such major novelists as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, reflecting the terrible ‘violencia’ of the last half-century in Colombia: in such a context, he affirms, if you impose ‘unitary, orthodox language’ then ‘you kill the novel, but you also kill the society’, whose ‘great debates are conducted in the “privileged arena” of the novel’ (quoted by Salman Rushdie in his 1990 Herbert Read Memorial Lecture: see also Garcia Marquez’s memoirs, 2004: 276–99, 355–7). Note, too, the Peru of impoverished peasants, authoritarian rulers and ruthless guerrillas of Mario Vargas Llosa: The War of the End of the World, and Death in the Andes; the India – Midnight’s Children – of political deception, ethnic antagonism and humiliating defeat (by China) followed by triumph (against Pakistan) of Salman Rushdie; the atomic devastation and the ruthless incendiary bombing of Kenzaburo Oe’s Japan, on the verge of disaster; and the enormity of Nazi rule over its ‘enemies’ in Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum. It is in these powerful works that we feel the ‘magic’ of exaggerated or supernatural qualities and the rationally inexplicable horrors (the Holocaust, the use of atomic weapons, the senseless violence) amid the ‘realism’ of the remorseless logic of events. Historians explaining concrete situations and anthropologists concerned with particular communities cannot, of course, avoid discussing the emotional forces that are so evidently at work. But it is my argument that fiction, and magic realism in particular, being free to transcend natural bounds, gives greater scope to the ‘understanding’ imagination. It does so in two ways, which are often combined. First, unhampered by conventional representation, it reveals the intensity of emotional drives and their dramatic effects on people and society, which are vicariously experienced


11

by readers. Second, its predisposition for the absurd or the grotesque is designed to jolt the reader out of his or her habitual expectations so as to confront the ‘unimaginable’. It is the particular gift of the imaginative novelist to create a world that is, in this sense, more real than real life. As the Japanese novelist Oe puts it, the originality of literature is to ‘suppress the boundaries between the world of imagination and history’. When it is a matter of events ‘produced by my own imagination’, he writes, ‘I try to describe my characters realistically, precisely so that they can participate in a realism, whether historical, ethnographic, human or mythological’ (2005: 40–1). (And see ‘Theory in Context’ below.) There is a further consideration: abstractions, such as ‘possession’, are static; it is the dynamic flow of psychic energy, including imagination, that gives life to these abstractions. Thus, the ‘structural conditions’ of possession, power and knowledge – which are socially and historically constituted – cannot be understood without also being aware of the emotional charges that, in concrete reality, drive ‘possession’ to take destructive forms, such as greed and panic (through fear of loss), or constructive ones: thus, ‘The magic of property turns even the sands into gold’, wrote an eighteenth-century English agricultural reformer, contrasting this fortunate state with the lack of incentive to produce among the landless French peasantry of the time. In other words, structural conditions – such as the ‘feudal’ land tenure above – determine (tip the balance) whether psychic drives play a socially constructive or destructive role: in this case, whether there is an incentive to produce or not. But these structural conditions are themselves articulated, as we have seen, with emotional drives: indeed, landlord possession was violently overthrown in France as a result of the mounting anger of a deprived peasantry.

Money, lust and magic To repeat: the imaginative truths of fiction convey the intensity of feeling needed to produce such striking effects. Fiction and ‘reality’ are ineluctably mixed, symbiotic. To understand this process, as I have argued, requires two distinct methods of investigation. The first is that of the social sciences: analysis, guided by informed hypotheses, according to rational criteria; the second, as I emphasise, is expressed by works of imagination, creating a ‘life-world’ of vicarious experience. Neither offers a sufficient explanation in itself, that is, one that is both emotionally and intellectually fulfilling. Instead, each complements the other.

12


Consider De Quincey’s essay (on Pope) where he discusses, first, the ‘literature of knowledge’ – read, rationality – and then the ‘literature of power’, that is, that which is emotionally-charged. As he puts it, ‘The function of the first is to teach; of the second is to move. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding, the second speaks ultimately to the higher understanding or reason, but always through the affections of pleasure and sympathy . . .’; this is a rarer thing than truth, namely power or ‘deep sympathy with truth’. And to conclude: ‘All that is literature seeks to communicate [emotional] power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge . . .’ (quoted by E. De Selincourt, editing Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1970: 265). It is at the level of ‘power’ that magic realism expresses, as in a dream, the emotional investment of energy called upon to promote, sustain or resist decisions made in the world of economics, politics and civil society. As the critic Martin Turnell writes of Balzac’s great work: money, lust and magic motivate the Comédie humaine. The problem of money was fundamental in his writing, argues Turnell, because money was the great problem of Balzac’s age, ‘as it is becoming the great problem of our own’. Accordingly, ‘The warrior of classic literature has been replaced by the merchant, honour by commercial probity and the rules of the stock exchange.’ The moral that emerges, however, is that in nineteenth-century society it is practically impossible to be both honest and successful. For money, gained by whatever means, has become the symbol of the deepest aspirations of society (Turnell, 1962: 227–8). Significantly, Turnell brings together ‘passion’ and ‘condition’ (read ‘emotion’ and ‘structure’). All Balzac’s characters, he says, are endowed with charges of powerful anonymous passion, which must find an outlet. The form and effect of this passion are determined by the character’s condition (232). It is in this way, moreover, that Turnell appreciates Stendhal, one of the greatest of French writers. ‘Stendhal’s characters are the direct product of their age and are only comprehensible when seen in relation to it. They are left to work out their destiny in a chaotic society . . .’ But they can only become integrated personalities by observing their feelings at the actual moment of action. This where logique (reason) and what Stendhal called espagnolisme (emotionalism) play an important role. ‘The function of logique is to integrate personality, to control and direct the blind forces of espagnolisme’ (253, 255–6). Where Stendhal discerned relations of power, Balzac observed the pursuit of wealth, and the combination of the two: ‘The idea that money is power is the dynamic behind many of [Balzac’s] novels’ (Turnell, 228). Or, as another critic puts it: ‘Reality’, which for Balzac is the ‘fallen world’


13

of capitalism, resists ‘Desire’ (the social aspect of emotions), but can be disclosed only by ‘Desire’ (Jameson, 1981: 184), which is close to my own approach. Consider modern capitalism in this light: namely, capitalism as an overwhelming force (Schumpeter’s ‘creative–destructive’ machine) subordinating political power to economic ‘interest’. Apart from ‘security’ crises, political rivalry has been all but transformed into economic rivalry: the question now is which party, Left or Right, can best ‘manage’, meaning serve, the demands of an (increasingly global) economy. Relations of possession, power and knowledge form the framework of my inquiry. These ‘existential conditions’, to repeat, are neutral: whether they are socially constructive or destructive depends on the institutional structures that have evolved to maintain or to adapt to the existing order. But even the most enduring structures face what at times seem to be inexplicable or ‘unimaginable’ forces of change – economic, political, strategic, social. The challenge to the existing order therefore creates enormous emotional tension: this flow of psychic energy may be channelled constructively or may burst out of control. The way I proceed, accordingly, is to bring out the emotional ‘charge’ of a chapter/theme, revealed in fiction, and then analyse the structural conditions that stem or divert the flow of psychic energy – and the social consequences. (These are elaborated in the following section.) The perception of selected works (novels chiefly, but also plays, poetry and painting) thus forms an integral part of each chapter. Such fictions have been chosen for their imaginative power and their relevance to the theme in question: but, of course, other choices are conceivable. Indeed, it is significant in understanding the experience of Japan (the first theme to be discussed), that the Japanese literary tradition ‘recognizes the primary importance of the emotions’. Poetic truth, analogous to the teachings of the Buddhist scriptures, as one critic observes, is the novelist’s aim; it is the justification for a ‘subjective stress on feelings instead of facts’ (Hibbett, 1976: 306). Here, as in the chapters that follow, I consider the challenge of change, intuitively apprehended in fiction, resulting in new economic-political-ideological structures. Consider ‘blood and iron’, the armed foundation, in Bismarck’s words, of the German empire. They are powerful words. ‘Blood’ symbolises emotion, energy, force; iron, the ‘iron laws’ of economics, political systems and social structures. Yet despite – or rather because of – these affectively-charged symbols, the Western intellectual tradition, with few exceptions, has privileged reason over emotion, analysis over synthesis (the fusion of ‘blood and iron’). It is from poets and novelists – and particularly the

14


writers of magic realism, as I argue – that the repressed affective dimension of human experience has been restored.

Theory in context: stimulating conditions (inspirational or traumatic) → emotional reaction → social impact Note, first, that even traumatic situations may have positive as well as negative outcomes. A foreign invasion, for example, may stimulate fervent patriotic resistance, at one extreme, or abject surrender through fear, at the other. Similarly, the reversal of values marking capitalist ascendancy – honour and loyalty replaced by profit motive and market forces – may be conducive to the equitable distribution of the economic product and higher living standards, on the one hand, or lead to selfish materialism and mindless consumerism, on the other, or indeed a mixture of the two. Such are the three components of my thesis: conditions, emotions, society. The first component – inspirational or traumatic conditions (provoking an emotional response) – appears in the previous section, ‘Money, lust and magic’, and in the passage above. The second component – emotional reaction – is expressed in culture and revealed especially in literature: testimony from Eulau to Elster, below. The third component – social impact of emotional drives – is examined in the form of ‘confrontations’, below, and in successive chapters under the three main heads: possession (economic), power (politics) and society (vision and division). Importantly, these three components are phases in a dynamic process, which relates theory – how to understand this process – to context: that is, conditions, emotions and the resulting social impact, which in turn creates new emotional stimuli . . . in an endless chain. At each stage conditions change: but the process remains. Thus, to re-state the theme in the words of an American social scientist: Whether politics is experienced as a life-and-death struggle for existence, as a competitive though friendly game, or a cooperative enterprise for mutual aid, is likely to be the function of widespread affective components in the culture. (Heinz Eulau, 1967: 72, italics added) Then consider the reaction of Tolstoy to ‘The Forces that Move Nations’, the second epilogue of War and Peace: in no case can one admit that intellectual activity controls people’s actions, for that view is not confirmed by such facts as the very cruel


15

murders of the French Revolution resulting from the doctrine of the equality of man, or the very cruel wars and executions resulting from the preaching of love. And appreciate the reflection of the polyvalent Jon Elster: Some novelists and playwrights, in particular, display a superb understanding of the human emotions . . . these writers – playwrights and novelists, moralists and philosophers – remain the most important sources for the study of human emotions . . . Because social life is embedded in an extraordinarily dense network of beliefs, emotions are central to all human activities. (Elster, 2000: 14–15, 205) Salman Rushdie echoes these sentiments. ‘Literature’, he points out, ‘is that intimate articulation between truth and fantasy’. And again: I think that it is only literature that has this almost supernatural faculty of permitting people to penetrate into the most profound of these unknown worlds . . . For me, it is literature that has opened these mysterious and decisive entrances of the imagination and of understanding. (Interview with Lila Azam Zanganeh in Le Monde des livres, 27 May 2005) I argue, in addition, that whether these emotional ‘drives’ have a constructive or destructive outcome depends not only on structural conditions but also on the intensity of passions aroused by these conditions. For the surge of psychic energy continually expands, often with extreme rapidity, until it is either discharged or it is superseded, in one way or another. This is the social impact of emotions, whose consequences may be momentous. Nevertheless, how do individuals act collectively – to change their situation? Motivation is essential, when people share passionate emotions of anger against a discredited, corrupt or repressive regime, for example, and are inspired by the hope of a better future. But spontaneous popular manifestations are ephemeral unless organised – by opposition political parties perhaps, but mainly by civil society – to keep up the pressure day by day until the existing regime, when shaken by crises and internal doubts, either yields or disintegrates. ‘Only when the “lower classes” do not want the old way, and when the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way – only then can revolution triumph’, in Lenin’s words (1950: 115, Lenin’s

16


italics). But Lenin’s prediction can be enlarged to cover the great majority of the people (and not just a particular class or classes) and may be achieved not solely by armed force but also in the form of a peaceful revolution: such as the establishment of the welfare state in Western Europe, or the ‘orange revolution’ in the Ukraine. It is under such dramatic circumstances that myths, as emotionallycharged beliefs, and imaginative literature help to make intelligible – give meaning to – these powerful forces at work. To sum up: creative fictions share with certain anthropological and historical studies two important characteristics: first of all, they express universal themes in a particular setting; as a result, secondly, the ‘recognisably realistic’ portrayal of human behaviour enables the reader to experience vicariously – to understand through feeling – the themes that are being expressed. But imaginative literature has a further, unique, characteristic: the sequence of images and feelings that are vividly aroused in fiction encapsulates – condenses – in one work an entire historical situation; it is the essence of an era (Russia and the Napoleonic war, for Tolstoy); it speaks to the human condition (in an Observer review by William Boyd cited in the blurb of Don DeLillo’s extraordinary American saga Underworld – and this can be said of all the fictions I have selected). Observe Tolstoy on the war of 1812: ‘and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes . . . they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people’. Then Tolstoy on peace: ‘Just as in a dream when all is uncertain, unreasoning, and contradictory, except the feeling that guides the dream, so in this [conversation between the married couple, Pierre and Natasha], contrary to all laws of reason, the words themselves were not consecutive and clear, but only the feeling that prompted them.’ Conditions → emotion → social consequences: such is the process, revealed imaginatively by fiction and notably magic realism, as I emphasise, that informs the themes of possession (economy), power (politics) and society (vision and division) examined in more detail below. Here a series of confrontations emerges. In terms of ‘possession’, militarism versus constitutionalism; and more generally the tension between capitalism and democracy. In terms of ‘power’, externally, force versus law; internally, elitist versus participatory democracy. In terms of ‘society’, the vision of a just, egalitarian and responsible order – for the protection of the environment, the rights of women and the beneficial use, and not


17

abuse, of science – versus division: hierarchical structures of authority enforcing arbitrary and often repressive decisions. To elaborate: the ‘lesson’ of Chapter 2 is the exemplary case of imperial Japan, emerging from two centuries of isolation and confronting the more powerful, wealthy and menacing empires of the West. The reactive policy of Japanese leaders was rapid modernisation with the emotional slogan of ‘Rich Country, Strong Army’. Trapped between the contradictory pressures of an authoritarian bureaucracy and incipient political parties pressing for reform, imperial Japan reached the fatal crossroads: either towards constitutional democracy or militarist expansion. The chosen course of aggression in China followed by war against America unleashed passionate emotions of hatred and revenge among the militarists, fear and despair among the occupied Chinese and then, as the war turned against Japan, among its own people. These violent emotions are incarnate in the grotesque and terrifying figure of the father in Kenzaburo Oe’s powerful story, grouped with others under the title: Teach us to Outgrow our Madness. The ‘lesson’ of postwar Japan, as elsewhere, was that it required capitalism – with (or without) democracy – to outgrow the madness of militarism. The capitalist system, considered in Chapter 3, produces wealth, but distributes it according to its own requirements – and not those of society. The greater the growth of the economy, the more the material values sustaining it prevail over political and social values – those of democracy included. For capitalism structures society, dictating how people work and what they have to live on, according to the assets they have (or do not have) to exchange in the ‘free market’. Conversely, the political system also structures society – but indirectly and intermittently. Indeed, political equality (in a democratic society) is contrasted with economic inequality. Yet it is precisely the inequality of economic assets combined with the necessity for any political system to sustain itself materially that form the basis for capitalist penetration of what once were autonomous political and social spheres. Moreover, capitalist predominance and the prevalence of market values – so well understood by Balzac: greed, corruption, everything has its price – undermine the basic reciprocity of the original trade-off between the economic and political systems: one that legitimises the former by its material contribution to the latter. Yet, with the ascendancy of capitalism, social welfare is subordinate to economic welfare just as the political system (apart from ‘security’ crises) is subordinate to the economic. Given such unequal development, the dilemma for democrats is that their contestation of state power and economic power (so as to preserve the freedom of individuals) at the same time depends on a measure of state control to maintain order. Similarly, without

18


economic growth (facilitated by the political system) there is little possibility of improving health, education and social security: that is, the welfare of citizens that reformers seek to achieve. Politics: the confrontation/coexistence of force and law (Chapters 4 to 6). In Clausewitz’s celebrated definition, war – the external projection of force – is the continuation of politics by other means. It forms a trinity ‘composed of the original violence of its elements, hatred and animosity . . . of the play of probabilities and chance . . . and of the subordinate nature of a political instrument’. (‘Law’, contrary to force, signifies acceptance of rules that regulate – and restrain – conduct.) Clausewitz makes two crucial points: first, the importance of emotions, and second, that of specificity. As he puts it, war is ‘chamelion-like in character’, because it ‘changes its colour in some degree in each particular case’ (Clausewitz, 1968: 119, 121). In other words, it is a particular context that evokes in any act of force the interplay of emotions, chance and political design. Understanding such critical situations requires recognition of specificity rather than the stereotyped uniformities of the age of imperialism, the cold war or the ‘war against terror’. Nevertheless, common patterns of behaviour can also be found. Consider this scenario: it is customary for newly-independent third world countries to provide themselves with a legal constitution as a mark of civilised behaviour. But principles at times give way to practice: for colonial rulers are replaced by an indigenous elite which, in addition, may be corrupt, inefficient, disorganised, repressive and divisive. How to return to the rule of law? Rebellion – Locke’s justification of force to overthrow tyranny – is hazardous when the rulers have weapons and the people do not. But there is a solution: in many countries the army – rather than cliquish political parties – is the one nationwide organisation that has the opportunity to understand the situation of the people and may sympathise with their grievances. Accordingly, it is often quite sincerely that military leaders invoke democracy to legitimise their forcible removal of the old order – to bring about the new. But once in power they appreciate the privileges of power, which they then must defend even against their former supporters . . . (see Chapter 4). The context, too, is all-important for the study of violence in an advanced industrial power (Chapter 5). Germany, for centuries a congeries of large and small states, was only unified late in the nineteenth century, as a result of the ardent desire of nationalists, humiliated by a series of defeats. A previous attempt at unification by the constitutionalist movement had ignominiously petered out. It was Bismarck’s ‘blood and iron’, not parliamentary resolutions, that unified the country by war.


19

What is astonishing – and ominous – is not so much the pride of idealistic Germans in this achievement but their abasement before the embodiment of force: Prussian landowners and military officers. Typically, a confessed liberal academic apologised for having once believed that the democratic movement could transform Germany. Instead, as if by a ‘miracle’, the ‘defeat of our principles has brought us boundless salvation’. After Bismarck’s victory, ‘we start life anew with ‘faithful obedience’ (quoted by Kohn, 1960: 156, 159). Force, not law, was idolised. However, Clausewitz’s trinity of violent emotions, chance and political design led to disaster. Imperial Germany, defeated and prostrate in the First World War, was subjected to a vindictive treaty by the victorious Allies. There followed a catastrophic inflation ruining the middle classes and then the Great Depression throwing millions out of work. Suffering, despairing, people sought a saviour. Such were the traumatic conditions evoking passionate emotions – hatred of supposed enemies, adoration of the Leader – which form the setting of Jünger’s dreadful fable, related in this chapter: a peaceful, orderly existence that is caught up in a world of rumour, suspicion, fear, murder and revenge. From the violence of war to the ambivalence of ‘law’ (Chapter 6). The law in Kafka’s famous Trial is subordinated to hierarchical authority; but in The Castle the relationship is rather that of ‘grace’ and power. From the mysterious, unattainable Castle there emanates grace: yet there is an unbridgeable divide between even the lowest servants of the Castle and the people in the village ‘below’. The powerful officials of the Castle (the political elite) are inaccessible when needed, they act in an entirely arbitrary fashion and at times they may be vindictive and unjust. In Kafka’s strange allegory, the human condition is one of striving vainly for grace – the utopian perfection of the ‘good society’ – but never giving up the struggle. Society: vision and division. Was Jerusalem (the sacred vision) founded ‘among these dark satanic mills?’, queries Blake, who will not cease to fight until it is built in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. For the romantic movement, praising the sublime in nature, spread throughout Europe precisely at the time of the Industrial Revolution. More than two hundred years later the threat to the natural environment from industrial pollution and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is greater than ever and may soon reach the point of no return (Chapter 7). As for women (Chapter 8), the French Revolution’s stirring vision of freedom and equality was not for them. Women, children and foreigners, according to the initiator of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, ‘contribute nothing to sustain the public establishment’ and so have no right (by voting) to influence political decisions. A century later, British

20


women demanding universal suffrage were roughly handled by the police while their leaders were arrested and force-fed. Obsessively, August Strindberg in his plays reflects the fears among men of women’s sexuality and fecundity: accordingly they must be dominated, repressed. But in the West women gradually achieved financial independence through work; they benefited from universal education and (through contraception) gained control of their bodies. In many regions of the world none of these ways of emancipation is possible: women are victimised, enslaved. The horrifying fate of those who transgress the patriarchal order is unforgettably revealed by the Indian writer, Arundhati Roy. Science and society (Chapter 9). Science may be neutral, but it is not innocent. The vision of science is its immense potential for the good of humanity. But the discoveries of science are appropriated and manipulated in societies that are divided between dominant and dominated (as above) and between enemy and friend. It is in war that Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers illustrates the extreme abuse of science – the invention of modern weapons of destruction, with its ‘collateral’, the death of innocent people – and the lonely voice of conscience that protests. The fundamental question, to conclude, is whether emotionallycharged drives for possession, power and knowledge – in economy, politics and society – take a positive form (that is, for equitable distribution of wealth, genuine participation in public decisions, and self-knowledge) or are instead ‘possessed’ by greed, anger and illusion.

Note: on the sociology of emotions The sociology of emotions is an important new sub-discipline. It has three main characteristics: 1. It is omni-present. It includes ‘all aspects of emotions as they relate to social behavior and social organization’. Emotions can be interpreted in the broadest sense, from episodic bodily expressions to enduring sentiments (Cecilia Ridgeway, Stanford University). According to Jonathan Turner and Jan Stets (2005), all social relations involve emotional responses, from the simplest face-to-face encounters through the mobilisation of social movements developed by individuals for cultural and social purposes. Conflict and change in societies are ultimately driven by emotional arousal. Thus, it is important to understand how human emotions influence, and are influenced by, the social world. 2. It is eclectic: ‘The sociology of emotions . . . [comprises] a variety of competing perspectives and multiple research agendas’; for debates continue to rage ‘as to what precisely emotions are and how they should


21

be studied’: Simon Williams (2001: 1). The field of research includes empirical work – emotional involvement in consumption and leisure, part-time employment, conditions of stress and anxiety, household division of labour, male ‘crisis’, feminist movements, and so on – and theoretical studies. Turner and Stets (2005) list ways of conceptualising emotions: ‘dramaturgical’ theories, regulating our feelings to fit in with the norms of the situation (Peter Freund, 1998); cultural constructionism, that is, categories of thought, our experiences, feelings and actions, which are primarily determined by the culture in which we live (Clifford Geertz, 1973); symbolic interactionism with psychoanalytic elements; exchange theories (each has something of value for the other, emphasising interdependence); and evolutionary theories – biologically determined – in contrast to culturalist theories (Margot Lyon, 1998). 3. It is individualistic (micro-level) for the most part; but there are efforts to relate individual behaviour to social structure (macro-level theorising). There is a need to link theorising about emotions in and about work organisation to a theory of society, thus relating macro concern with the vicissitudes of the capitalist economy to micro concern with the emotions of people who have to cope with career pursuits, lay-offs and occupational discontinuity, according to Helena Flam, University of Leipzig. Emotion may indeed be culturally mediated, Jack Barbalet acknowledges, but it is also a socially structured and structuring force in its own right (Barbalet, 1998, quoted by Williams, 2001: 49–50). For emotion inheres simultaneously in individual experience and the social structures within which individuals are embedded, serving to actively reproduce or critically transform these structures over time. Indeed, ‘context is crucial’, as Nick Crossley points out. ‘The nature of an emotion is revealed in the relation of an action to a particular set of circumstances, not in the act in isolation’ (Crossley, 1998: 21–3). Finally, in one of the most audacious, intriguing and ambitious attempts to link micro and macro levels – as in Blake’s poetic vision: ‘To see a world in a grain of sand’ – consider the ‘part/whole morphology’ of Thomas Scheff (1997). His ‘theory of integration in social relationships, the balance between alienation and solidarity [and] its relationship to actual data’ introduce ‘a crucial connection between the state of the [social] bond and emotions, how shame signals the state of the bond, and how unacknowledged shame explosively disrupts the bond’. Shame, he adds, is a normal part of the process of social control; ‘it becomes disruptive only when it is hidden or denied’ (72, 74). (Scheff goes on to apply his ideas ‘on an extremely large scale’ – to the causation of the First World War (115–45). His arguments are

22


stimulating, but I have some serious reservations, which are too lengthy to expound here. Briefly, my structural analysis can be contrasted with Scheff’s ‘family systems theory’, whereby conflicts within the family have similar causes to conflicts among nations.) Emotion, fiction, society My own approach links micro and macro levels: namely, understanding society through social change, in which emotions (notably revealed in fictions – see below) play an important part. For as Williams states: ‘emotions are central to sociality and selfhood, conceived in intersubjective, intercorporeal, communicative terms including techniques of the body forged within a social habitus. This in turn provides a crucial means of linking these embodied emotional issues to broader dimensions of power and status which straddle the micro and macro-analytic domains’ (Williams, 2001: 73). These key features of social structure, he adds engender ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions (133). Such emotions, which inhere ‘simultaneously in individual experience and the social structures within which individuals are embedded, [serve] to actively reproduce or critically transform these structures over time’ (Williams, 2001: 50; and see Crossley, 1998: 21–3). It follows from this micro–macro level approach that it is not only a particular theory of emotions that matters but also its relation to context: that is, the role of emotions in social change – as revealed in history or literature. This is entirely in accordance with Jon Elster’s reflection – to reiterate – that certain novelists and playwrights ‘display a superb understanding of the human emotions’, that ‘writers – playwrights and novelists, moralists and philosophers – remain the most important sources for the study of human emotions . . . Because social life is embedded in an extraordinarily dense network of beliefs, emotions are central to all human activities’ (Elster, 2000: 14–15, 205). Elster’s work, in my view, is complementary to my own, not competitive (in the sense of one approach driving out another). Elster focuses on culture and choice as determinants of emotional (and addictive) behaviour. He emphasises, and I agree: ‘we can ask whether emotions and cravings might sometimes be so strong as to short-circuit rational choice, or even choice altogether. At their strongest, these urges seem to have an overpowering quality that leaves little room for comparison and choice’ (12). Seduced by ‘rational choice’, however, Elster is more concerned with means than with ends – certainly the means must be appropriate to achieve the end – but his emphasis is on the choice facing the individual in a given situation. The ‘dynamics of revolution’ (Elster, 1993) is a good


23

example of the problem this raises. His notion that the ‘rational interest’ of revolutionary leaders (18) is not to reward supporters or punish opponents is unconvincing to say the least. Moreover, a ‘norm of fairness’ (20) seems to be a weak form of motivation compared with passionate indignation against injustice, which is more likely under the circumstances. It is by riding on the current of ‘strong feelings’ that revolutionaries, such as Lenin, Mao and Ho, succeeded. Consider Lenin’s famous formula: on the one side, the ‘oppressed masses’ must be aware of their misery and must have the desire and the determination to change their situation; on the other side, the ‘ruling classes’ must be shaken by internal contradictions, often aggravated by externally-derived crisis (Lenin, 1950: 114–15, emphasis added). In other words, successful revolutionaries analyse the structural conditions – and contradictions – of society and then decide how leadership combined with mass support will act most effectively. Nevertheless, methodological individualism (central to Elster’s work) did not prevent Weber from undertaking brilliant investigations of individuals acting collectively to develop the capitalist system, religious institutions, bureaucracy, political parties, cultural norms, and so on. These are my concerns too. How can we understand the way in which capitalism structures our everyday life, resulting in the extraordinary transformation from status-oriented behaviour (honour, loyalty, esteem and so on) to one dominated by market values? How is it possible for a society characterised by its high culture and lofty feelings to degenerate into barbarism? How is it that democratic governments fail to act decisively to prevent the degradation and ultimate destruction of our environment? How is it possible for women – half the world’s population – to be treated so unjustly? These are crucial questions that need to be answered. One powerful reason for an end-oriented approach is previous experience in ‘area studies’, which bring to bear a variety of disciplines – from history to economics and anthropology – for the purpose of ‘understanding’ a particular society. The emphasis is not on the disciplines as such, but on the way in which they illuminate a particular aspect of the society under investigation. This is the approach I take – on a larger scale – in the present text.


Part I Possession


2 Democracy or Authoritarianism: the Economy and Politics of Modernisation in Japan

As repeated throughout Japanese history, whenever the authority of an existing regime becomes weak, the mythic image of the emperor resurfaced to head the state . . . These conflicting emotional and rational conceptions of the imperial institution constitute one of the most significant problems still lingering from the era of the Meiji Restoration. (Yoshimitsu Khan, 1998) It is a matter of re-examining the nature of society as understood by Japanese in the postwar years . . . and going back in time and questioning the last two hundred years, which have written the history of the modernisation of Japan. (Kenzaburo Oe, 2005)

Enduring the unendurable The Emperor Meiji was ‘restored’ to power in 1867–68 following the collapse of the ‘existing regime’ of the Shogunate, which had been unable to cope with the forcible entry of the Western powers into a Japan isolated for more than two centuries. Yet the Emperor, ‘modernising’ Japan by gaining access to Western science and technology while retaining Japanese values, was later obliged to yield, after a victorious war in China, to the superior power of Russia, France and Germany. Survival meant ‘enduring the unendurable’, according to the Emperor – the same bitter phrase being used by his descendant (Hirohito) to justify the surrender of a defeated and devastated Japan in 1945 (Storry, 1965: 127, 234–5). The ‘unendurable’ – ‘unimaginable’ to the hitherto victorious army and patriotic people – is conveyed in an extraordinary and brilliant fashion 27

28


by the novelist Kenzaburo Oe. ‘His poetic force creates an imagined world’, affirmed the Nobel prize committee, ‘where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament’. In his novel, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, Oe starts with the disconcerting image of a 35-year-old man (Oe was born in 1935) in a hospital bed, convinced he is dying of liver cancer. He is dictating his wartime memories as a child (‘Happy Days are Here Again’) to his nursesecretary (his wife?). He is wearing – as he ‘almost constantly’ does – discoloured brass underwater goggles, whose lenses have been covered over with dark green cellophane, so that ‘he must have looked to the intruder like an alien from outer space’. The giant fountain pen with which he writes, and the goggles, are mementoes of someone long dead (his ultrapatriotic father), ‘about whom he and his mother disagreed violently’. This grotesque description of the hospital scene – so far removed from that of ordinary life – projects us emotionally into the world of the extraordinary: namely, the frenzy of the war years in which he was caught up as a child, worshipping his extravagantly behaving (and attired) father. The patient tells his story urgently, because the disease he suffers from, liver cancer, will soon cause the death of a once well-functioning organism. But is it cancer? No, it is cirrhosis of the liver, says his wife, ‘acting executor of the will’. Sensibly, she opposes his fantasies. ‘Must I put down even that kind of silliness?’, she insists, in reply to her husband’s report of a Buddha-like figure appearing to him ‘deep one night’. As for the ‘history of the age’ he intends to relate, which some ‘insinuate’ would be a waste, it is a story which should be of great concern, he believes, not only to the United Nations, but in particular to the administration of his own country, ‘controlled by men who were clearly war criminals who had survived’. A first reading shows the child – ten years old in 1945 – adoring the father’s extravagant loyalty to imperial Japan. But the traumatic event that changed his life for ever was the terrible revelation that his older brother was a deserter from the war in China. His mother, who tried to save the deserter by urging him to escape to the ‘other side’, quarrelled bitterly with his father. The latter demanded that his own son be killed immediately to make it look as if he had died in action. The child, echoing his father’s fury, shouted to his mother that he, at least, had ‘no traitor’s blood in my veins’. His mother should take the ashes of that ‘coward’ and throw them to the animals! Since that day, the child followed his father to the storehouse where the father had decided to live apart from his wife. It was then that his father started wearing the underwater goggles, with cellophane-covered lenses, ‘to prevent anyone from reading his expression ever’. ‘He sounds like an imaginary figure in a myth or in history’, scoffs his wife-secretary. ‘To make someone sound like an imaginary figure can be

Democracy or Authoritarianism

29

a way of debasing him’, retorts the 35-year-old cancer-sufferer, ‘but it can also be a way of exalting him into a kind of idol.’ One way of serving this idol was to buy oxtail and pigs’ feet (which only Korean forced-labourers would eat), which his father made into a repulsive stew. The child listened to the sizzling joints of oxtail jump and bump in the frypan: he ‘smelled, with revulsion, the indescribably cruel, animal odor of the meat’. Then the goggle-wearing father, who had become immensely fat, asked the boy if he could support his weight, as he turned back to the storehouse. Unable to lift his foot to enter the building, the father fell on his back ‘with a thud that shook the ground’. He frantically urinated, spraying the child with a sticky mess – blood! His father was in an advanced stage of bladder cancer. ‘My life has a splendid continuity, don’t you agree?’, observed the hospitalised narrator to his wife. As the month of August approaches, he repeatedly cries out to his wife as if in great anger. For it was in that fateful August 25 years ago that ten officers and soldiers who had deserted from the army appealed to his father to save Japan. His mother, contrarily, ‘attacked precisely that ecstatically happy boy’ with such persistence as to drive him ‘to the edge of extinction’. It was as if destroying him was her sole objective: ‘she went about it with a fury worse than the cancer gnawing at my liver!’. ‘Mother! Mother!’, implored the child, ‘the situation has become critical so they’re going to revolt and a certain party [his father] is going to lead them, just like I thought’. His father’s bizarre plan to save Japan from the disgrace of surrender was to steal ten fighter planes, disguise them to look like American ones, and bomb the imperial palace. Inevitably the Emperor would die in the bombing, but ‘truly he would revive as the national essence itself, and more certainly than before, more divinely . . . As a golden chrysanthemum [the imperial symbol] illuminated from behind by a vast purple light . . . his Majesty would manifest himself.’ Who is to say, argues the son, that the many gods of Japan’s history did not require of the Emperor, who in surrendering had renounced his divinity, to restore the ‘dignity of our national essence’ through the ‘ritual purification of death by bombing’? Truly, the objective of suicide in the Emperor’s name – death as allegiance – motivated the small band of deserters in August 1945 as they wheeled out in a wooden cart their monstrously fat leader. ‘A certain party will lead our army in an uprising and we will all die.’ The soldiers are all singing that they want to die as quickly as possible: but in their song they confuse the imperial myth with the ‘Saviour’ of a Bach Cantata. They are waiting for the Emperor to ‘wipe their tears away with his own hand’. As for the child, ‘the hot thorns in the words pierced his small heart, lodged there and continued to burn’. He lifted his head, ‘gazing at the

30


soldiers with love and pity’. He, too, was about to die as a member of their band. Only in this way could he overcome the years of shame when he hesitated to answer the daily classroom question: Will you die happily for the Emperor? Yes, I’ll die happily. The palace was not bombed. But a certain party, recalled the sick man 25 years later, did lead a small select unit into battle, confronted the enemy head on, military sword held high, and was shot down. At the very instant of his death, according to the son, his father rendered manifest a gold chrysanthemum flower, surrounded by a purple aurora great enough to cover entirely the islands of Japan. The entire band of patriots was massacred, the son alone survived. A ‘certain party’ had requested this of the gods on high, for it was crucial that someone, someone chosen, should witness the marvel of the gold chrysanthemum. And so the son’s ‘Happy Days’ were transformed into an eternal construction of light! Rather than being overwhelmed by this dominant narrative of the ecstatic child, a critical second reading of Oe’s novel subverts the patriotic illusion. Recalling the crucial period of his older brother’s desertion, when his mother desperately tried to save him (while his father denounced him as a traitor), the narrator realises 25 years later that a child brought up during the war may have known what ‘enemy’ meant, but he simply did not have the imagination to resolve an image of real people and a real society on ‘the other side’, which the deserter was trying to reach. All he could picture to himself was a cliff rising straight up on the horizon of a vast plain. The lone young soldier is running as hard as he can towards that cliff. ‘If he can reach it, not only will all values be reversed and everything instantly allowed, the soldier will be extravagantly praised and find salvation’: such was the scenario he had in his mind. But in the Japan of the war years, his mother was the ‘outsider’. Her story can only be retrieved, piecemeal, from the first-order narrative, which is dominated by the hostility towards her of her husband and younger son. Eventually, the pieces come together like a jigsaw puzzle. For her own father took part in a plot against the imperial regime, was imprisoned and executed. With such a ‘treacherous’ background, she could no longer live in Japan and was sent to China. She barely managed to survive in Japaneseoccupied China by becoming the foster daughter of an ‘agitator who was a socialist and an ultra-nationalist at the same time’. It was in China that the man who was to be her husband (‘a certain party’) fell in love with her; they returned to Japan to his isolated village in the forest. Her own son, imbued with patriotic pride, ‘sensed’ from certain ‘hatefilled exchanges’ between his parents that his maternal grandfather had been involved in a plot which, during the war, could not be mentioned.


31

His mother never volunteered any details. By the end of the war, however, everything was going badly and village life began to come apart. His mother told him that in this valley, when times are bad, people pay attention to madmen and cripples and children who look as if they don’t have a chance to survive. It is not that they believe such persons are endowed with superhuman spiritual powers, she explained, but because they know perfectly well, cruel as it is, that omens of misfortune for the valley – read Japan – will appear earliest in the weakest people in the forest, such as madmen and cripples and children who look about to die. But ‘a certain party’, the son retorted, was not a madman or a cripple or a child about to die! ‘A man who shuts himself up in a storehouse day and night is a madman’, his mother insisted. ‘A man who’s bleeding from his sick bladder but can’t urinate by himself he’s so fat he can’t move is a cripple.’ And a man who set out on a wooden cart with some deserters when he had no possible chance of returning alive is even worse luck than a dying child. His mother pitilessly exposes her husband’s crazy plan to bomb the imperial palace and die in the process. As for her son being ‘chosen’ by the gods to survive the massacre, so as to be a witness of the vision of the imperial chrysanthemum, she claims to the contrary that the child was so ‘scared to death’ that he ran away before the battle even began. He felt that the ‘blood of a traitor’ flowing in his veins ‘led to the kind of action that turned the country’s history upside down’ and that’s what made him run and run as far away as he could, even from his own body, she says. ‘He deceived everyone that day’, she goes on, ‘and he’s been deceiving without a minute’s rest ever since.’ For the son realises with anguish that if he were to accept what his mother and his wife are saying it would ‘pulverize the very bedrock of his identity’. Now the child can hardly wait to die of cancer, his mother continues relentlessly. He can’t help singing a happy song, and do you know why? ‘Because he reckons he’s finally going to be able to run away and not be responsible . . . ’ ‘You’re right! You’re absolutely right!’, interjects the ‘acting executor of the will’, who is promptly relieved of her position. ‘Listen to him carrying on, mean and low’, insists his mother’s calm voice. ‘This time I’ll make right sure to tell the child about his great grandfather.’ And she concludes: ‘sooner or later the Japanese are going to change their attitude about what happened, and I intend to live to see it’. Oe’s weirdly allegorical story brings out in its violence and passion both the fervour of patriotic Japanese – emotionally driven beyond rational bounds, as were almost all belligerents in that terrible war – and the inner voice of conscience of the ‘outsider’, watching helplessly as the nation

32


plunged into disaster. Indeed, the unbelievably grotesque figure, spurting blood and urine, symbolises the unimaginable deformation of a once legitimate system. The wife, in turn, symbolises the Japan that could have developed peacefully and constitutionally. Oe’s ‘magic realism’, like the koan of Zen Buddhism – that is, insoluble or even nonsense problems – is designed to jar the meditator/reader into sudden intuitive enlightenment. (See Reischauer and Craig, 1978: 53; also Sansom, 1952: certain religious truths cannot be rationally defined ‘but are to be grasped only by intuition’, 339, 350. On ‘Oe Kenzaburo and the Search for the Sublime’, see Susan J. Napier: 1999.)

Rich country, strong army The course of events that actually happened – militarism and aggression – and the constructive alternative (adopted after the war) were both inherent in the situation of Meiji Japan. The slogan of the imperial ‘Restoration’ was: ‘Rich Country, Strong Army’. For the political leaders, drawn from the Samurai class, were determined to modernise the country in order to avoid the fate of other backward Asian nations, humiliated and exploited by dominant Western powers. Above all, they were aware of China, for centuries the source of cultural supremacy and political order, now so weak and degraded, victim to the insatiable ambitions of the new barbarians. To be the equal of Western countries, economic development was essential for late nineteenth-century Japan; but so was political modernisation, designed to establish a representative ‘constitutional’ system on Western lines; and so was the creation of a strong, professional army and navy. All these requirements – complementary at first, but ultimately conflicting – were urgently needed in the current world context of ruthless power politics, as the Japanese leaders found out in their search for ‘knowledge’ of the outside world. ‘One basic theme’ pervades the outlook of one of the most important of these missions, led by Foreign Minister Iwakura, in the early 1870s: ‘What is the nature of the West, and how are its wealth, power and enlightenment to be accounted for?’ All the nations of the West, according to the Iwakura mission, are engaged in a struggle for wealth and power. Whatever the variations in approach, the end is always the same: to get ahead in the world. Any country that refuses to compete, or is too late in starting, will in the end be overwhelmed by its most powerful opponents (Soviak, 1971: 7, 14; see also Jansen, 2000: 355–61). In its search for the keys to Western dynamism, the mission emphasised the importance of basic values and ‘racial temperament’. For the distinctive world view deriving from these basic values is unmistakably


33

reflected in government, law, education, religion and international relations. Indeed, the difference between Eastern and Western world views contributes significantly to their disparate levels of wealth and power. People in the West are acquisitive and assertive in contrast to the selfdenial and passivity of those in the East. By extension, Western competitiveness develops into the philosophy of nationalism and the unending struggle to attain national independence. Such a strong competitive spirit is one of the prime reasons, according to the mission, for the rise of nations to power (Soviak: 27–8). The West is essentially an armed camp. It is the scene of incessant struggle between weak and strong nations for independence, wealth and power. ‘All the countries of Europe’, the mission reported, ‘deal with a powerful enemy on every side, and the competition in military preparedness increases . . . ’ (31). In such a context of ‘the survival of the fittest’ it was only natural for Japan’s leaders, while steeped in Samurai traditions of honour, loyalty and moral obligation, to build urgently the economic foundations for a modern state that could alone defend the country against its enemies. Paradoxically, the basic conditions for economic growth existed under the Shogunate, displaced by the Meiji Restoration in the mid-nineteenth century. The spread of irrigation, use of fertilisers, better seeds and expanded acreage had made the Japanese peasant the most technicallyadvanced in Asia. Most townsmen of any standing were literate, as were the richer peasants. Virtually all the Samurai were educated. In addition, the great merchant houses developed family codes similar to those of the Samurai, inculcating a sense of honour, discipline and obligation (Reischauer and Craig, 1978: 98–9, 104). Moreover, the Japanese social organisation, rooted in a special kind of family system, and the long centuries of feudal discipline, helped to produce a capacity for self-abnegation and corporate effort, which served well in a time of rapid social and economic change (Allen, 1962: 13). The result was impressive. In the decade of the 1880s alone, yields in agriculture increased by 21 per cent. Total agricultural production doubled in the next twenty-five years. Overall economic growth was spectacular after 1900: by the late 1930s, the output of manufactured goods increased over twelve times, and exports more than twenty times (Reischauer and Craig: 146, 193). Men of Samurai background played a large role in initiating economic development. They were men of exceptional talent, flexibility and daring. Like the political leaders of the Meiji Restoration, they were often motivated as much by patriotism as by personal ambition (Reischauer and

34


Craig: 152). Indeed, industrial development and financial services were closely controlled by the state in order to build up national power. Heavy industry, in particular, was characterised by concentration of control in a few capital groups and was shaped by state policy (Allen: 55–7, 79, 84). Initially, the process of industrialisation faced problems of shortage of capital and unprofitability; as a result, non-strategic government industries were sold off, cheaply, to ‘insiders’, that is, businessmen or government officials already closely associated with political leaders. As Japan’s industrialisation overcame its early handicaps and returned large profits, so the few who purchased these enterprises grew wealthy and came to control a large share of the modern economy. The giant corporations that eventuated were known as Zaibatsu, ‘financial cliques’. Two of these – Mitsui and Mitsubishi – in the 1920s and 1930s were probably the largest private economic empires in the world (Reischauer and Craig: 151, 197–9). Concentration of economic power (closely linked with the political system) on the one hand; consolidation and control of political power, on the other. Such were the twin characteristics of ‘modernisation’ in Japan. Establishing a constitution seemed to mark a halfway stage between the absolute authority of the Emperor and a fully representative democracy. But it was the imperial German, rather than the parliamentary French or English, model of the constitution that prevailed. There can be little argument, Storry observes (1965: 115–16), that German experience confirmed the convictions of the Japanese ‘oligarchs’: ‘in the Constitution the powers of an elected assembly should be tightly controlled and restricted by an executive responsible, not to the assembly, but to the Sovereign Ruler of the country’. In the 1889 Constitution, the person of the Emperor was ‘sacred and inviolable’, exercising legislative power, but with the consent of the Diet (parliament). As for the latter, the House of Peers (former nobility) had equal powers with the elected lower house: the electorate was then about 1 per cent of the population. Moreover, Cabinet Ministers were responsible, not to the elected house, but to the Emperor; the latter could dissolve the house at any time, on the advice of the Cabinet. Admittedly, the annual budget had to have the approval of the Diet, which in theory gave parliament important leverage over the executive; but these powers were largely nullified by the provision that if the budget was rejected, that of the previous year (as in the German system) simply took its place (Storry: 115–17; but see Jansen: 390–5, 418, 422, emphasising the very real change brought about by the Constitution compared with the previous Tokugawa regime.).


35

Most significantly, the Army Minister Yamagata, one of the most formidable of the oligarchs, established the rule, by imperial ordinance, that the ministers of the army and the navy must be serving generals or admirals, not civilians (Storry: 119; Jansen: 396–401). In practice, such a minister would resign in protest against government policy (such as a reduction in the military budget), and the general staff would refuse to appoint another, thus bringing down the government: again, like the situation in imperial Germany, with similar fateful consequences. In Storry’s view (118) the Constitution, at a time when opposition was equated with treason, marked a real if modest advance towards parliamentary participation in government. To Reischauer and Craig, on the other hand (173), the imperial prerogatives emphasised in the Constitution were probably ‘the best bulwarks behind which the oligarchs could take refuge from the rising popular demands for a share in political power’. Yamagata, in particular, considered the modernisation of the armed forces to be essential to the security of executive power. In 1878 he had adopted the German general staff system, insisting that in matters of military command the chief of staff acted independently of the government and was responsible only to the Emperor (175). It was Yamagata, Home Minister throughout much of the 1880s, who became an implacable opponent of the political parties and regarded democracy as ‘an evil poison’ (Storry: 129). It was at this time that education was put under strict centralised controls and the imitation of Western social customs abandoned. The Restoration ‘oath’ of the Meiji Emperor propounded the basic philosophy: ‘Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundations of imperial rule’ (Reischauer and Craig: 135–6). Thus, the imperial rescript on education in 1890 emphasised Confucian concepts of harmony and loyalty to the throne, but also introduced new ideas of mass indoctrination through formal compulsory education (Storry: 164–5; Jansen: 402–11). Meanwhile, Yamagata reorganised the police and placed them under more centralised control, reformed and directed local government, and issued the ‘Peace Preservation’ law of 1887, foreshadowing the later, drastic, suppression of ‘dangerous thoughts’. It was Yamagata, too, who argued vehemently that Japan’s national advantage should be defended far beyond its own boundaries. An obvious source for his reasoning (Reischauer and Craig: 184–5) was the example of Western imperialism: ‘Imperialist expansion and domination seemed an inherent part of the Western-dominated world Japan had joined.’ Already Japan had been drawn into war with China – and later Russia – over Korea, which was annexed by Japan in 1910. In 1915, Japan produced

36


its notorious ‘21 Demands’ on China, including the installation of Japanese political, financial and military advisers, which aroused nationalistic fury among the Chinese. In 1929 the Japanese ‘Kwantung Army’ in Manchuria was covertly involved in the assassination of its former client, the warlord Chang Tso-lin. Despite the opposition of the civilian government in Japan, the Chief of General Staff successfully rejected the trial of accused Japanese officers, because it would harm the prestige of the army (Storry: 151–2, 175–6; and see Jansen: on Korea, 426–7, 430–7, and on China, 438, 515–18, 577–89).

The turning point The end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s mark a turning point in Japan’s history. The first two decades of the century had seen the consolidation of party government (within the constraints of the Constitution) amid impressive economic transformation. Then came the Great Depression of 1929–31, which severely affected the economy, causing enormous distress, especially among the heavily indebted peasantry. Above all, the way in which the military was able to act with impunity in Manchuria and later in China demonstrated the weakness of parliamentary controls. The climax, as Allen points out (1962: 104–6), was the orthodox deflationary policies of the government in 1931, which proposed cuts in state expenditure, including the military budget, thus not only provoking popular discontent but also arousing bitter opposition from the armed forces. From that moment, in Allen’s words, the government was doomed. An authoritarian Constitution, with a lack of effective countervailing institutions, on the one hand; an aggressive military doctrine, backed by an inflamed public opinion, in a culture of violence, on the other: such were the dominant conditions that led to the abandonment of the way of reason – towards peace and democracy – and the pursuit instead of ultra-nationalist goals by the use of force. Obsessed by the rise of the Kuomintang in China, and the fear that it would block the Japanese forward movement in Asia, Japanese strategists insisted on ‘direct action’. In 1931, younger officers provoked the ‘Mukden incident’ in Manchuria, providing a pretext for the Kwantung Army to occupy the whole of Manchuria – despite the protests of the then government in Tokyo. The next prime minister accepted the conquest of Manchuria, but opposed any further advance: he was assassinated by ultra-nationalists. The rationale for military defiance of the civilian government was the fiction that the army acted on the direct orders of


37

the Emperor. In reality, as an army minister had written in 1925: ‘The right of autonomous command over the Emperor’s army is, in a time of emergency, not limited to the control of troops, but contains the authority to control the people.’ Not only was this so, but extremist young army and navy officers, sympathising with the poverty-stricken rural population, believed their action was ‘morally pure’ if it led to the overthrow of a ‘corrupt’ government (Reischauer and Craig: 242, 249–52). Thus, while tension with China was already erupting in violence, there occurred in 1932 two sinister events: the former minister of finance (responsible for the budget cuts) and the chief director of Mitsui (closely associated with one of the major parties) were murdered by members of a secret association of extremists, the ‘League of Blood’. Shortly afterwards, a gang of navy officers and army cadets shot down in cold blood Prime Minister Inukai – the last party head of government before the war. At the trial there was much public sympathy with the murderers, for their motives were regarded as unselfish (Storry: 191–2). The ‘Culture of the Blood’ was an appropriate ideology for extremism. Such was indeed the concept – explicitly identified with Nazi doctrines – propagated by Tokyo University professor Takakusu. ‘Imperial Japan’, he concluded, ‘has its own land, state structure and people who are conscious of the Culture of the Blood’, which takes priority over the culture of the intellect. ‘The Culture of the Blood is crystalized in the Japanese spirit’ (quoted by Moore, 1973: 312–3, n.42). Such was the nature of emotional fervour – Emperor worship, patriotic frenzy, the ‘purity’ of violence, hatred of ‘traitors’ – triumphing over moderation and reason.

Madness to materialism Oe’s novel, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, which began this chapter, is one of four stories in a collection entitled Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness (1989). In the title story, a quite different son recalls the last years of his father, sitting in a storehouse with his eyes and ears covered, because he wanted to deny the reality of a world in which Japan was making war on the China he revered. It was ‘his protest against the times’. Similar themes are taken up in Oe’s bleak and powerful The Silent Cry (1981). The narrator returns to the remote village where he was born, surrounded by a deep forest of enormous trees darkening the sky: symbol of the ‘other world’ of unconscious forces, overshadowing the ‘present world’ of the narrow cultivated valley. The intellectual narrator has ‘lost all identity’, while his younger brother, a person of conviction and a ‘man of violence’ instigates a rebellion among the youth of the village. He is

38


seeking the ‘absolute truth’ which, ‘if a man tells it, leaves him no alternative but to be killed by others, or kill himself, or go mad and turn himself into a monster . . . ’ Yet, after a time of violence and destruction, life returns to normal in the village and there are signs of material improvement. Here, the novel reflects the postwar Japan of ‘economic recovery and expansion’: indeed, fifteen years after the end of the war, ‘the country was independent, prosperous and progressive’ (Allen: 171). Aided by the Korean war and the increased demand for Japanese goods, economic expansion resumed. By 1957 most industries had been re-equipped and reorganised. ‘Industrial production was probably over two and a half times the pre-war volume, gross national product in real terms about 50 per cent higher and national income per head perhaps 10 per cent higher’ (173–4). Japan’s success depended on the achievement of massive structural changes, such as the substitution of synthetic fibres for natural fibres in the textile industry, and the ‘outstanding development’ of the metal, chemical and engineering groups. By the late 1950s Japan had become the world’s leading ship-builder, a very large supplier of electrical apparatus and electronic equipment and an important manufacturer of motor vehicles. The Zaibatsu empires, at first threatened with extinction by the occupation authorities, were once more required to boost production with the onset of the cold war: ‘by the late nineteen-fifties the three major zaibatsu, Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, were again in control of a mass of industrial and financial undertakings . . . ’ The Zaibatsu banks became the pivot of each empire (180). In social terms, on the other hand, workers were given the right to organise, to bargain collectively and to take strike action. Mechanisms were established for conciliation and arbitration in industrial disputes. Welfare provisions, such as industrial health insurance and workers’ compensation for accidents, were introduced. Above all, land reform transformed rural conditions. It was based on the view of the occupation authorities that rural landlords constituted the backbone of Japan’s militant nationalism. As a result of the reform, all land in excess of a smallholding was sold by the government to former tenant farmers. The money compensation due to landlords became almost worthless because of high inflation, which also wiped out other forms of rural indebtedness. Thus, landlords were in fact expropriated and rural Japan became predominantly a land of peasant proprietors (185–7). More generally, as Allen notes (190), the causes of Japan’s economic recovery, as of progress during the Meiji era, can be explained by certain features of social and political organisation, the comprehensive educational system and the ‘admirable methods of technical training’. Japan’s


39

economic power is not immune to crises, Jansen concludes (756), but ‘no student of the Japanese past could doubt that a nation so gifted, resourceful, and courageous was destined to play a major role in the millennium now begun’.

Development and democracy Economic and political development in postwar Japan is exemplary for many countries. In East Asia, Japan is seen as the ‘economic leader and most established democracy’, while the ‘newly industrialising economies’, such as ‘democratising’ South Korea and Taiwan, are at the next level down, followed by ‘quasi-democratic’ countries like Thailand, and ‘lessdeveloped, more authoritarian regimes’ are at the end of the line. Yet each country experiences pressures ‘to push it up to the echelon ahead’ (Harold Crouch and James W. Morley, ‘The Dynamics of Political Change’ in Morley, 1993: 278). Japan is the role model: for Japan’s history indicates the course that other countries in the region are taking. In the first half of the twentieth century, Japan started at the lowest level (as Vietnam is now). It was an exporter of simple, cheaply-made consumer goods, especially textiles. It had a large, oppressed and poor rural population. Finally, the country was ruled by a powerful, authoritarian state, where civil society, with its democratising potential, was ruthlessly suppressed. Now, Japan is a world economic power, second only to the United States. The military is constitutionally subordinate to the democratically elected government and, while the influence of bureaucrats remains substantial, there is a consensus with big business and ruling politicians to stimulate economic growth. At the second level, South Korea and Taiwan are no longer low-wage economies, but are urbanised and ‘newly-industrialised’. Authoritarian regimes have been overcome and an influential civil society provides the impetus for more effective measures of democratisation: putting an end to martial law, legalising the political process, establishing a free press. At the third level are countries like Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, where capitalism is well-established and where the structure of the state reflects the impact of economic and social change (resulting, ambiguously, in both the contestation and the assertion of state power). Moreover, civil society is increasingly vocal. At the fourth level are low-wage countries like Indonesia and Vietnam, under semi-democratic or authoritarian regimes, but which face challenges from members of civil society advocating human rights, press freedom, environmental concerns, and economic, political and social reforms.

40


Viewed from this evolutionary perspective, the transformation of a country like Thailand is instructive. Thailand represents an intermediate stage in the process: it is no longer a ‘bureaucratic polity’ (the hegemony of military and administrative leaders in an informal partnership with big business) but it is not yet a ‘bourgeois polity’ – capitalism with democracy – as in Japan. Nevertheless, both countries have a common experience of two crucial changes: from militarism to constitutionalism; and from traditional culture to market values. The Thai bureaucratic polity was led by the military, which in turn dominated Thai society for half a century – until the 1970s. The most direct form of intervention by the military was the coup d’état. Key positions in the government were filled by leading members of the coup group. Rivals and potential rivals were suppressed or intimidated; potential supporters were co-opted. Non-military members of Thai society were too weak, disunited and ‘clientelised’ to withstand military intervention. Instead they sought in various ways to accommodate to the fait accompli. Facilitating the penetration of bureaucratic power to all levels of society, Thai ‘traditional’ values – reflecting the hierarchical system – sustained the polity. Training in ‘proper’ behaviour – respect for elders, the educated, and persons of status and power – started at an early age within the family, continued throughout the educational process and was confirmed by the adult’s contacts with officialdom. In an ‘authority culture’, the assumption of superiority underlying the confidence of the ruling elite had its necessary counterpart in the acceptance of inferiority by those of lower status and those who lacked organised power. Such was the institutional structure of Thai politics. The dynamic of the system, however, was driven by the incessant rivalry within the elite – the struggle for power and wealth by ambitious leaders and their followers – in the context of rapid socioeconomic change. Now, the process of industrialisation and urbanisation, the massive expansion of university education, and the training of managers and technocrats created substantial and growing new social forces. Thus emerged an urban middle class and the beginning of an organised working class alongside large numbers of internal migrants in the informal sector, creating new social values. As a result, the old attitudes of inferiority and subordination, inculcated by a hierarchical society, were no longer considered to be just, reasonable, or even economically effective, from the viewpoint of the young and enterprising, the socially aware and the poor and dispossessed. Meanwhile power struggles within the military increasingly discredited its self-serving and repressive leadership, which was evidently incapable


41

of reform. In contrast, urban opinion developed new conceptions of society, counterposing to the old order the legitimacy of a democratic constitution that would serve the interests, not of a particular clique, but those of people in general. The clash of old and new forces culminated in the crisis of October 1973, when students urging a democratic constitution bravely defied the military. Their success not only undermined the selfconfidence of the military leaders – their consciousness of power – but at the same time overcame what had hitherto crippled the new forces: their consciousness of lack of power. Thus, despite later attempts by the military to reassert their ‘right to rule’, there could be no going back to the bureaucratic polity. The military leaders retained the power to intervene, but that power was no longer unchallenged: indeed, it would be contested. After a decade of uneasy coexistence between the military and the civilian (business-oriented) parliament, a newly-appointed army commander overthrew a corrupt, unpopular government in an uncanny throwback to the era of dictatorship. Reneging on an earlier promise that he would not enter politics, the general had himself appointed prime minister with the aid of military-backed parties. In angry reaction, non-military parties, strongly supported by the public – notably young middle-class professionals and business executives – staged massive demonstrations for a return to the constitution. The general was determined to suppress the opposition – in the old style. Troops fired on peaceful protesters, causing such carnage and public outrage that the Thai king was compelled to intervene. Amid growing signs of business unease (the stock exchange, sensitive as always to ‘disturbance’, had sunk to a new low), the army commander was obliged to resign and new elections were held – narrowly won by the democratic parties. Paradoxically, the undoing of the bureaucratic polity was the work of a supreme military dictator, Marshal Sarit, who in the early 1960s repudiated the existing policy of economic nationalism and excessive reliance on the public sector. Instead, on the advice of technocrats, he mobilised state resources, for the development of infrastructure and to encourage foreign investment, to serve the private sector. The resulting economic boom, despite periods of crisis, has radically transformed Thai society. More than three decades of economic growth have important political and social implications. First, the sheer growth of business – tripling in one decade the average per capita income and sustaining the rise of the middle class – and second, changing the social evaluation of business from ethnic-Chinese ‘pariah’ to respected generator of wealth and power. Indeed, wealth has replaced status (in the civil service) as the most desired social goal. Finally, close relations have developed between business

42


associations and governmental technocrats in pursuit of market-oriented reforms. Nevertheless, the downside of dynamic business – vanguard of the new middle class – is its vested interest in ‘money politics’. For a more open parliamentary system enables business-oriented political parties to have a direct input into policy decisions. Indeed, major sources of funds for politicians – at the legal level – come from business people who directly finance political parties and who may themselves become party leaders. As for illegal inputs, they are the result of funding by ‘dark influences’, especially in the provinces. Money gained by illegal gambling, prostitution, protection rackets, exploitation of forest resources, land-grabbing and so on can be conveniently ‘laundered’ by way of ambitious or aspiring politicians who need ever larger sums of money to influence opinion and to buy votes. Once elected, the politician is then in a position to pay back his ‘financier’ by finding new ways for both parties to use public projects for private gain. Such a problematic status of development and democracy reflects the inadequacy of a purely political concept of democracy – where political equality conceals economic inequality – and the inadequacy of a purely economic concept of development, where even the material benefits provided by an authoritarian or a corrupt regime are no substitute for the degradation or loss of civil and political rights. Consider in this light the transition from dictatorship to democracy and development. There has been a redistribution of political power (from authoritarian regimes) especially to the growing middle class; yet there has been no similar redistribution of economic control or wealth, but rather the reverse, the enlargement and concentration of economic power. A no less important feature of the ‘transition’ is the emergence or revival of a ‘political class’, composed of leading and usually conservative members of civil society; for these are best able to ‘manage’ the political accommodation with capitalism required by the process of ‘development’ (Girling: 1981, 1996). Naomi: the great transformation Such a transition is no less characteristic of Japan. The ‘madness’ of militarism has long yielded to material inducements – and their cultural consequences. Indeed, central to imperial Japan’s contacts with the West was the distinction between Western scientific and technical knowledge – generating wealth and power – and its decadent or provocative ‘culture’: the former was to be embraced, the latter rejected. Naomi, a parable of modernisation and changing identity by the brilliant and disturbing


43

Junichiro Tanizaki, is an ironic commentary on the cultural transformation which in fact has taken place – undesired by the elite but idolised by the masses. A 28-year-old electrical engineer meets a 15-year-old hostess at the Café Diamond. He is immediately attracted to Naomi. ‘Once I knew that she had such a sophisticated name’ – Western, but written with Chinese characters – she began to take on an intelligent look. The narrator’s original, Pygmalian-like plan, was to take charge of the child and look after her, to bring her into his home and patiently watch her grow: Naomi, a Japanese woman with a Western flavour. Naomi, according to the plan, goes out to study English and music; but she also goes to the beach to enjoy herself. She meets a bunch of students and becomes a ‘wanton’ girl, deceiving her ‘Papa’ (as she calls him) and becoming more and more depraved. Caught out at last, with the ‘face of a whore’, she confesses. But, little by little, the narrator recalls, the loathsomeness changed into an unfathomable beauty . . . ‘Her face was evil incarnate, without any question, and at the same time it was all the beauty of her body and spirit elevated to the highest level.’ Longing for Naomi, the narrator will accept any conditions at all, if she would just come back to him. She does come back, with the ‘red lips and white skin’ of a Westerner – a new Naomi to whom one can kneel and offer worship. Papa agrees to let her do whatever she wants. He will give her as much money as she needs. She can live in a Western house, on a street where Westerners live. ‘The more I think of her as fickle and selfish, the more adorable she becomes . . . ’

3 Global Capitalism

The (feudal) guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class . . . Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising . . . Thereupon steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production . . . The bourgeoisie . . . has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superior’, and has left remaining no other nexus than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation . . . (Marx and Engels, 1848)

Dominant economy Marx and Engels correctly foretold the capitalist revolution, which was to bring dramatic changes in economic conditions, social relations and politics, in one country after another. But they were wrong about the communist revolution, which they expected at any moment to result from the overthrow of capitalism, undermined by its own intolerable contradictions. Instead, capitalism survived economic crises, wars and revolutions. One hundred and fifty years after the Communist Manifesto, capitalism has become the one truly global system. Now, Balzac was writing his extraordinary series of novels, La Comédie humaine, at the same time as Marx and Engels were preparing their own radical analysis of the capitalist system. It is ascendant capitalism that forms the context of one of Balzac’s best-known novels, La Cousine Bette, as indeed of the series as a whole. Here Balzac emphasises four main themes: first, the contrast between the heroic status of Napoleonic times 44

Global Capitalism

45

and the sordid desire for wealth of the current bourgeois era; second, the way in which money falsifies life: everything and everybody can be bought and sold; it follows, third, that venality replaces probity and dignity in society; finally, ‘passion’ is the driving force of behaviour: in Balzac’s words, it is the ‘diabolical force or the black magic of Will’, which represents, in more prosaic terms, the mobilisation of psychic energy needed to promote or sustain economic, political and social interests. Wealth replaces status: yet the memory of the heroic age is kept alive, for Balzac, by the Napoleonic veterans, such as the seventy-year old field marshal, Prince de Wissembourg, Minister of War. It is he who condemns his old comrade-in-arms, Baron Hulot, for dealing corruptly – although by way of an intermediary – in the pursuit of wealth: ‘You have defrauded the state, you are about to be put on trial . . . and you speak about it so light-heartedly?’ ‘What is the difference, sir’, retorted his friend: ‘Have I plunged my hands into funds that were entrusted to me?’ ‘When one commits such infamous behaviour’, said the prince, ‘one is doubly guilty, in your position as an official, for acting so clumsily. You have ignobly compromised our high administration, which up to now is the purest in Europe! And you have done all that, sir, for 200,000 francs and for your mistress’, declared the field marshal in a terrible voice. ‘You are a Councillor of State and yet an ordinary soldier could be sentenced to death for selling off regimental stores . . . As for you, try to die of an apoplexy and help us save your honour.’ Learning of the baron’s disgrace, his older brother (also a field marshal) denounces him to his face before his wife: ‘He has dishonoured all of us . . . He has besmirched the state. He has made my name hateful; he makes me wish to die.’ Help me, begs the baroness, to reconcile my husband and bring him to repent. ‘He’, retorts the old marshal, ‘if he still lives, he will not be at the end of his crimes! Such a man . . . who has extinguished all sense of a true Republican, that love of Country, Family and the Poor that I tried to inculcate in him, that man is a monster . . .’ The baron’s scam involved commissioning his uncle as supplier of provisions to the French army in Algeria where, according to the baron, he could obtain such supplies, by force or trickery, at 70 per cent below the price he charged the administration, pocketing the difference. But the scheme was discovered. Ashamed to be brought to trial, the uncle committed suicide. In this he was unlike Baron Hulot, who as a gallant officer in Napoleon’s army had changed into a cowardly lecher, brutally neglecting his wife, and avid for money to fund his pleasures.

46


In ascribing such importance to wealth, the baron represented, with few exceptions, his generation. The ‘great men of the Empire’ as well as the nobility, concerned with economic matters, ‘had become wise, acting with foresight, finally bourgeois without grandeur’. In doing so they were not unlike the parvenus – simple clerks and shopkeepers who, by courage, skill and ambition had become ‘the equal of great personages’, deputies in parliament and even ministers. As one of them (now related by marriage to the baron) put it: ‘I am a worldly person, I fear God, but I am still more afraid of the hell of poverty. To be without a sou is the last degree of misfortune in our present social order. I am of my time: I honour money!’ Even the baroness, a very ‘angel’ of Virtue, who had finally discovered the hiding-place of her disgraced husband, after years of unhappiness, cried out: ‘My friend’, she exclaimed, forgetting everything in an excess of joy at recovering him, ‘you can return to the heart of your family, we are rich! . . . You can come back to the world, for you will find your son has made a fortune. Come, our happiness will be complete.’ That money falsifies life – the second Balzacien theme – is symbolised by a penniless Polish refugee (mothered by ‘la cousine Bette’) who, as an artist, produces a counterfeit classic work in order to succeed. Bette is the poor country cousin of the baroness, now an old maid in her forties, who desperately seeks revenge (but keeps the desire hidden) on the socially superior Hulot family. Unfortunately for Bette, the Pole (who is also a count), falls in love with Hortense, the baroness’s beautiful daughter, thus depriving Bette of her love. Fortunately for Bette, she meets the depraved young woman, Valérie, who becomes the mistress of Baron Hulot, and whose need – and greed – for money is to be the major cause of his downfall. Bette (who is no doubt in love with Valérie) concocts a plot against the Hulots, of which the ramifications – passion, wealth and treachery – are the subject-matter of the novel. That venality replaces probity is the third Balzacien theme: that is, the uses of money according to the law of supply and demand. Crevel, the upstart shopkeeper, now immensely rich, whose well-endowed daughter is married to the baron’s politically ambitious son, is the source of supply. The baron, whose affections for Valérie are shared (surreptitiously) by Crevel, and whose growing financial needs cannot be met from his official salary, is the source of demand. In a comic opening to the book, Balzac portrays the nouveau-riche Crevel, posturing as an officer and gentleman, attempting to seduce the baron’s virtuous (but long-suffering) wife. The baron needs a large amount of money in order to marry off – at market values – his beautiful daughter. But the baron, because of his expensive tastes, is heavily in debt.

Global Capitalism

47

Crevel realises that this is a splendid opportunity for him: moreover, he wishes to revenge himself on the baron for taking over Crevel’s earlier mistress, now a famous opera singer. The former shopkeeper therefore offers the baroness, in confidence, the money for the dowry (the enormous sum, at that time, of 200,000 francs) if she will make love to him. The baroness, torn between her desire to launch her daughter into high society (by an appropriate marriage) and her disgust at the crass behaviour of Crevel, finally accepts the latter’s generous offer of money – when Crevel, affected by her plight, agrees that it would be without conditions. The situation repeats itself towards the end of the story. It occurs just before the baron’s disgrace over the Algerian affair. His uncle, who actually did the dirty work, tells the baron that he must have 200,000 francs to buy up supplies which should have been delivered and for which they had been paid – or else he would be jailed. The baron does not have that amount of money: and no one will lend it to a man of his reputation either. In a state of extreme distress when she hears of her husband’s plight, the baroness is now ready to sacrifice her honour – obtaining money in exchange for sex – with the disreputable Crevel. ‘Oh Hector [the baron]’, she exclaims, ‘it is better that your wife perishes than to allow your uncle (in Algeria) to die and to ruin your brother and the honour of the family! . . . Yes, I can save us all.’ Without telling Hector her plan, ‘she folded her hands, fell on her knees and uttered a prayer. Getting up, she saw a crazy expression of joy on her husband’s face . . .’ Go to the Ministry of War, she tells him, and when you return, in the evening, you will find 200,000 francs: ‘Your family, your honour as a man, as Councillor of State, as administrator, your probity, your son, all will be saved.’ The baroness makes an appointment with Crevel to discuss ‘an affair of the greatest importance’. ‘I guess what it is’, replies her host, ‘but you are asking the impossible’. Listen, fine lady, he explains: ‘if my children faced ruin I would help them; but to guarantee money for your husband, madame?’ In marked contrast to the baron’s ‘incorrigible’ behaviour, he tells her that a former shopkeeper is and should be a ‘grand seigneur’ with method and economy and all his ideas in order. ‘One opens an account for frivolities, one consecrates certain funds, but never at the expense of one’s capital! That would be madness . . . Instead, I fulfil all the duties that the law, sentiment and family impose, just as I scrupulously pay my bills when they are due . . . But your children cannot say the same about their father, whose life of pleasure is ruining his son and my daughter . . .’ The baroness, in agony to save her husband’s honour, falls on her knees and begs Crevel to save ‘a whole family from ruin, shame and despair’

48


by giving 200,000 francs. On hearing these words, Crevel understood everything. Master of the situation, the former shopkeeper tells her that nobody in Paris, ‘except her Highness the divine Bank’, can produce such an amount. ‘Everyone values his money and manages it as best he can.’ Even King Louis-Philippe, who reigns over us, knows that above the constitutional charter there is ‘the saintly, worshipped, solid, amiable, gracious, beautiful, noble, young and all-powerful piece of 100 sous!’ For money has its interests and is always occupied in seeking them out. That would make you doubt the virtue of God, replies the baroness with indignation. Surely, divine justice must prevail. ‘You don’t know the world’, answers Crevel. ‘The world likes success. Do you think it will seek your sublime virtue at the rate of 200,000 francs?’ The baroness shudders at these words. ‘Money . . . always money’, she utters at last. And yet ‘the majesty of her virtue, that celestial light’ moves the heart of her suitor who, in a fit of generosity, agrees to find the money – without conditions. ‘My God! What a miracle!’, says the baroness, falling to her knees. (But, as we know, the miracle did not save the baron, nor – in the final pages of the book – did it save her.) Passion is the fourth theme: the driving force behind the pursuit of wealth, power, prestige and revenge . . . Bette’s desire for revenge was prompted by her discovery that her beloved Polish count had fallen for Hortense. ‘Oh! Adeline [her cousin, the baroness] you will pay for this’, swears Bette. ‘This is the last blow’, she tells her confidante Valérie: ‘You don’t know how I have suffered at her hands. I was ill-clad and she was dressed like a lady. I dug the garden and peeled the vegetables and she never lifted a finger . . . She married the baron and shone at the court of the Emperor Napoleon, while I stayed behind in my village. And when they did take me with them, it was to work on embroidery . . . As in the Old Testament, when the poor have only one lamb, which gives such pleasure, then the rich, who possess whole flocks, envy that lamb and steal it.’ The first part of Bette’s revenge – the second flowed from the baron’s infatuation with Valérie – was to lure her ‘lamb’ (the Pole) to the seductive Valérie and so break up his marriage to Hortense. These contradictions, this ferocious jealousy, this happiness to possess a man for herself, moved the heart of this woman beyond all bounds . . . The struggle between instincts and reason made her unjust and tyrannical. She revenged herself against the young man for the

Global Capitalism

49

fact that she was neither young nor rich nor beautiful. But after each act of vengeance she recognised that she had done wrong and, with humility, became infinitely tender . . . But ultimately it was through ‘hatred and vengeance’ that she steeled herself with ‘the diabolical force or the black magic of Will’. As for the passion for wealth, it is diagnosed by a famous doctor, emphasising the contrast between the old days and the present: ‘At other times, money was not everything and other things were superior. Thus, there was nobility, talent, services rendered to the state. But now the law makes money the general standard (of society) and sets it as the basis of political capacity!’ Indeed, money permeates existence, in these ways: the need for money, the uses of money, and how to acquire money. Balzac, as he stated in his preface of 1843 to the aptly-named Illusions perdues, considered the writer to be ‘the voice of his century’, just as Voltaire and Rousseau were in the eighteenth century. Indeed, Illusions perdues – ‘the capital work’ of the series, according to Balzac – provides meaning to the turbulent times in which he wrote. As the critic Maurice Bardèche points out (1964: 140–2), there is a masculine aspect and a feminine aspect to the attitudes expressed in this period: ‘the cult of energy, of revolt, the hatred of lies and the memory of the behaviour of men’, on the one hand, and ‘poetry, romanticism, vanity and the readiness to accommodate to anything provided it assures a position in society’, on the other. But Balzac’s real subject is the ‘monstrous apparatus’ implanted in the social organism to manage, feed and fertilise the mass of thoughts, currently in suspension, which forms a ‘new force’, revealed especially in the connection between money and thought, that is, ‘the various forms of speculation founded on the manipulation of thought’. The result is the corruption of the ‘elite of the nation’, whose mission should be to guide the country and explain the circumstances of the time: ‘the elite is no longer capable of rendering the service that corresponds to its function . . . of enabling the country to acquire consciousness of itself’. After a century and a half since Balzac’s work, argues Bardèche, we have not gone beyond Illusions perdues; we have not even succeeded in re-creating his masterpiece. Society no longer worships the true God, exclaims the false priest of Balzac’s novel – a real ‘deus ex machina’ of magic realism – who saves the disillusioned hero from suicide: but society worships the Golden Calf. ‘This is the religion of your Charter, which only takes account, in politics, of property. Is not this the same as telling everyone: Strive to be rich?’ – an allusion to the famous declaration of the political leader Guizot,

50


before the parliament, in 1843: ‘Strengthen your institutions, enlighten yourselves, enrich yourselves, improve the moral and material condition of France.’ As the historians of the ‘bourgeois monarchy’, André Jardin and A.-J. Tudesq, point out in La France des notables (1973: 204) the beginning of the industrial revolution in France can be discerned during the reign of Louis-Philippe, even though agriculture was still the major employer of French people for many years after. But it was economic growth, with its very unequal distribution of benefits between the holders of capital and workers, that occupied people’s minds. For concentration of capital was already evident at that time (212): This concentration resulted in the formation of important groups, bringing together financiers or bankers, industrialists, engineers, politicians and newspaper owners. Above all, the construction of railways at the end of the reign [of Louis-Philippe, abdicating in 1848] provoked and impressed the collusive character of relations between the world of business and politics; not that this was a novelty, but the parliamentary regime with its limited electorate was predisposed towards collusion. Another head of government of the ‘bourgeois monarchy’, Adolphe Thiers (later an important figure in the early Third Republic), a journalist from Marseilles, symbolised the rise of the parvenus in French society. Thiers had no well-defined political programme; his government seemed, on the contrary, more favourable to economic dynamism, by passing laws in the interests of ‘grand capitalism’, to which Thiers himself was closely connected. As Jardin and Tudesq note, ‘conservative sentiments’ dominate politics, which is more and more identified with the bourgeoisie. ‘There is no more place for feelings and illusions; political life is a matter of rationality and interest’ (135, 152, 155). These, then, can be interpreted as Balzac’s great themes: first, money is all-powerful, for the economy dominates people’s lives, and even the political system must accommodate itself to the means of its subsistence; second, the capitalist economy is driven, not so much by rational calculation, as by ‘passion’, namely, the psychological drives of ‘profit motivation’, which are ‘greed’ (the incentive to produce) and ‘panic’ (the herd instinct of flight from danger); yet third, there is a countervailing force, checking the advance of material interest, which Balzac depicts in Illusions perdues, that is, the ‘cenacle’ or sacred place, the club of poor and youthful idealists – poet, writer, philosopher, scientist and

Global Capitalism

51

democratic activist – who are divided in their political opinions, but united in the disinterested pursuit of truth and justice. The ‘cenacle’ can be taken to represent what today we call ‘civil society’. The economy dominates people’s lives. The following thematic sections of this chapter comprise: 1. the organisational characteristics of the capitalist system; 2. its extension worldwide (globalisation); 3. motivational factors – profit, risk, speculation, enterprise – conforming to Balzac’s ‘struggle between instincts and reason’, which aggravate the existing imbalance between . . . 4. dominant and dominated (third world) countries, also illustrating one of the novelist’s major themes . . . 5. the contrast between non-economic virtues and the weight of material interests, affecting powerful and powerless alike: ‘The stock exchange’, in Schumpeter’s mordant phrase (1947: 137), ‘is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.’

Material foundation What is the relationship between these different elements? They can be considered first of all in organisational terms, notably the performance of the capitalist system over the long term, creating the wealth of nations. Secondly, there are the underlying motivational factors, positive and negative, emotional and rational: the ethic of enterprise. And finally there are the social implications of ascendant capitalism: notably the way in which the commercialisation of values pervades non-economic institutions, political and social. Effectively, the priority given to market forces undermines the legitimacy of the democratic trade-off between economic imperatives and social concerns. This is the dilemma: the ‘good society’ is to be achieved by political means, but it confronts an economic system that may well contribute materially but does not contribute morally (in the sense of valuing public participation and consent) to that desired social end: an economic system, moreover, that substantially escapes democratic control. Accordingly, I start with the material foundations, bringing together capitalism in its national context, its extension worldwide, and the evidence of material improvement in the lives of those whose countries are integrated into the capitalist system. The second group includes motivational factors. These may be positive: for the profit motive is an incentive to produce goods and services that are in demand. Negative emotional

52


behaviour, criticised by Alan Greenspan as ‘irrational exuberance’, includes greed and panic (the herd instinct), as well as unpredictable or incalculable qualities (such as the elusive but important ‘confidence’ of investors, the stock exchange, finance ministers and so on) and the gambling mentality involved in ‘taking risks’, in effect balancing the immense potential for loss with the prospect of enormous gain. Negative and positive emotions combine to form Schumpeter’s vision of capitalism: enthusiastically destroying the old to bring about the new. New heroes are created – ‘Titans’ of industry or finance – displaying their bravery in battle (takeover bids) and achieving their reward in victory (stock options): the spirit of enterprise. The final section considers the social implication of ascendant capitalism – both in rich countries and in poor – when market forces displace non-economic values that are vital in maintaining the equilibrium between political and economic systems. The capitalist organisation of production, emerging in mid-nineteenthcentury France, but already developed in Britain, cannot be separated from the social and political environment, which gave rise to that new economic system and which continues to influence its formation. Hence the different forms of capitalism evident today: the technologically-inspired, highly market-oriented capitalism of the United States, the more statist or welfare-concerned ‘social market’ capitalism of Western Europe, and the specific character of ‘company loyalty’ and lifetime employment underpinned by a cohesive network of politicians, banks, business and bureaucrats, that contributed so much to Japan’s remarkable economic success, but which is now substantially discredited as a result of excessive corruption and greed. There is thus a general or abstract model of capitalism, on the one hand, and specific forms of capitalism, according to their different social environments, on the other. That is to say, developed capitalist systems all share the basic components of the ‘model’ – large-scale organisation, private ownership, profit motivation, market mechanism, ‘free’ contract labour and so on – but the way in which these elements are combined differs from case to case. Such is the result of environmental factors, among which economic–political relationships and (increasingly) the relationship with civil society are of major importance. On the other hand, with the worldwide expansion of modern technology, it is no longer possible to think of capitalist societies as separate ‘national’ entities, considered to be subject solely (or largely) to their own domestic interests. It is the interaction of the universal – capitalism – and the specific – political and social factors – that creates globalisation. Increasingly, moreover, intellectual property rights – ‘control of the idea rather than production’,

Global Capitalism

53

as Will Hutton points out (Hutton and Giddens, 2001: 25) are ‘what makes capitalism tick’. See also Jessua (2001: 52), emphasising competition, flexibility and openness; and Schumpeter’s famous ‘creative destruction’ character of capitalism (1947: 73, 83): ‘The promises of wealth and the threats of destitution it holds out, it redeems with ruthless promptitude.’ Free trade, market forces and material improvement are both causes and consequences of the growth of capital which, according to Adam Smith, ‘has been silently and gradually accumulated by the private frugality and good conduct of individuals, by their universal, continual and uninterrupted effort to better their conditions’. It is this effort ‘protected by law and allowed by liberty’ that has maintained progress towards ‘opulence and improvement’ (Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, ed. Skinner, 1973: 446). The ‘bourgeois ethic’ expounded by the classical economists had four characteristic features. First, it signified a distinctive code of middle class ‘honour’ – integrity, seriousness, hard work, thrift – in contrast to the (displaced) aristocratic code of pride, luxury, amateurishness and frivolity. Second, it reflected a boundless drive for economic growth, in contrast to the restricted and finite world of feudalism and mercantilism. In the third place, it was an avowal of freedom in defiance of state power and economic regulation. And finally it denoted the moral ascendancy – foreshadowing political domination – of the bourgeoisie over an unproductive aristocracy. Motivated by these values and stimulated by the potential for gain, capitalism was already a global force by the nineteenth century. As the economic historian Wolfram Fischer points out, ‘new transport technologies like railways and the steam ship opened up new territories to trade and reduced transport costs, which led to an unprecedented growth of international and intercontinental trade. The telegraph and later the telephone led to a revolution in communication.’ Whereas previously weeks, or even months, were needed to come into contact, now a few minutes sufficed. Capital markets spread over several continents, while mobility of labour, through large-scale immigration, grew remarkably. As a result, transport costs for the Atlantic route fell between 70 and 80 per cent between 1840 and 1913. International trade per capita, according to some estimates, grew at an average of 33 per cent a decade during the nineteenth century. A global currency system – the gold standard – was adopted by most countries. Bilateral or multilateral trade treaties were signed, as well as patent and trademark laws, standardisation of technical products, postal and telegraph agreements, international shipping codes and arbitration courts and rules.

54


But the rapid pace of globalisation came to a virtual standstill as a result of successive crises, notably the outbreak of World War I and the Great Depression of 1929–32. Instead, protective tariffs, breakdown of the gold standard, disturbance of international capital markets through war debts and reparations and reduction of labour mobility by immigration laws reduced international trade, capital and labour movements. Only in the decades after World War II did globalisation resume with important international currency agreements and the gradual removal of restrictions on trade under strong American leadership. Technology was again the driving force: the computer, with applications such as the world wide web and the spread of information by fax and mobile telephone are examples (Fischer, 2000: 1–6). The extraordinary growth of capitalism throughout the world has had three major consequences (intuitively foreseen by Balzac). First, the remarkable evidence of material improvement, including the penetration of market values into other spheres. Yet, second, the self-destructive capacity inherent in the psychological underpinning of capitalism (the impulses of ‘greed’ and ‘panic’: Balzac’s ‘passions’). This is in addition to the potential for disruption of the economy by political activities, especially through war but also by ‘negative’ or short-sighted policies. And finally the creation – as a direct result of economic growth – of ‘civil society’, which has the potential to act as a countervailing force. It is this triad of forces that I shall briefly analyse. The example of Britain, the ‘first industrial nation’ (Matthias, 1969: 250, 252), is instructive. Britain in the 1850s was by far the richest country in the world. Internally, as Perkin points out (1969: 134–5, 144–8), real national income per head increased four times during the nineteenth century; despite persistent poverty, sickness and squalor affecting up to two-fifths of the working class, incomes continued to rise for the working class generally from the 1840s onward. In the twentieth century America took the lead. Indeed, the earlier transformation of the country illustrates Joseph Schumpeter’s thesis of ‘creative destruction’. ‘The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organisational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation . . . that incessantly revolutionises the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one’ (1947: 83). The dynamism of industrial, transportation and scientific enterprise brought about great material improvements in the lives of the American people. Mass production, such as Ford’s famous ‘Model T’ built on the

Global Capitalism

55

assembly line, was predicated on mass consumption. The price of the Model T was cut by almost half in the five years to 1913, and sales went up more than 15 times. In 1914, Ford made a profit of more than $30 million; at the same time he increased the minimum daily wage (to $5) and reduced the hours of work from 9 to 8 a day (Cochran and Miller, 1947: 187; Faulkner, 1960: 404). A new phase of development followed the crisis of the Great Depression and the wartime economy of the 1940s. During the postwar years, the rapid economic expansion was characterised by increasing concentration of capital. Already by 1947, the 113 largest manufacturing corporations owned nearly half of the property, plants and equipment employed in manufacturing. In the production of motor vehicles, agricultural machinery, cigarettes, aluminium, meat products, copper and office machinery, the three largest firms did two-thirds or more of all business. In steel, glass, industrial chemicals and dairy products, the largest six firms accounted for two-thirds (Galbraith, 1952: 34–6). By 1975 the sales of the largest 500 industrial enterprises amounted to about two-thirds of all industrial sales in the United States. (Ten of the top 500 accounted for almost one-quarter of these sales.) With the postwar development of multinational enterprises, under a liberal trading regime, by the late 1960s 187 giant firms owned about 80 per cent of direct private American investment abroad, controlling over 10,000 subsidiaries. By 1984, the value of American direct investment abroad, especially in the automobile, chemical and electronic industries, had risen to more than $230 billion – about two-thirds of the world’s total foreign direct investment. (Galbraith, 1974: 21–2; Sunkel, 1973). American mass consumption grew in proportion, but especially benefiting the rich and the middle class (Katona, 1964: 10–14). Moreover, as with the great empires of the past, America attracts the intelligent and the enterprising throughout the world. As one recent report points out, the ‘brain drain’ to America results, not only from more liberal immigration laws, but also because ‘the importance of public and private investment in research and development offers opportunities that are far superior to what can be found elsewhere’. In regard to the ‘formation of world elites’, US superiority is particularly striking. Each year America receives almost half a million foreign students, that is, more than Britain, France and Germany combined. Inevitably, a good part of these students remain in America once they have graduated. The high-technology sector especially benefits: for example, one quarter of the Silicon valley companies are headed by Indians or Chinese (A. Reverchon and S. Kauffmann, Le Monde Economie, 6 March 2001).

56


Economic growth depends substantially on technological innovation. Here, too, American leadership is evident. In comparison with France, for example, US public and private expenditure on research and development is one-and-a-half times as large (2.08 per cent of gross domestic product compared with 1.37 per cent). During the 1980s, as a result, the number of patents doubled in the US, while increasing only by 22 per cent in France. To create a new enterprise, moreover, takes far less time in America: 7 days for the administrative procedure compared with 66 days in France and 77 in Germany! (P. Aghion and C. Garcia-Penalosa, ‘Growth and Institutions’, Le Monde des Débats, February 2001). Whatever the differential rate of progress, West European countries have undoubtedly benefited – as did Japan – from remarkable economic growth in the postwar period. Thus, the standard of living of the French people, according to the historian J.-J. Becker (1998: 731–2), increased four times between 1949 and 1981. Household equipment was totally transformed: only 9 per cent of families had a telephone in 1963 compared with 92 per cent in 1988; similarly, those with a refrigerator increased from 43 to 98 per cent, those owning a washing machine from 32 to 87 per cent, and families with televisions from 28 to 94 per cent. By 1988 almost every family owned a car. ‘The immense majority of French people lived in conditions of comfort unknown to their grandparents or even their parents.’ Nor were developing countries absent from this process. A country like Thailand (discussed in the previous chapter) is not untypical: in the early postwar years, Thailand’s exports were limited almost entirely to primary products: rice, rubber, timber and tin. But with the economic boom induced by favourable economic policies (notably the changeover from nationalising important industries to facilitating the private sector) and the ‘achievement ethic’ of an enterprising business class, Thailand moved up into the production of textiles, electronic equipment and automobile assembly. In the countryside, too, the construction of roads and improvement in communications enabled farmers in remote areas to bring their produce to markets and to receive in return consumer goods from the capital and provincial towns. Village houses could now be equipped with ugly – but lasting – tin roofs instead of picturesque palm leafs, electricity became available, and clean water supplies were extended. Farmers were able to ride around on bicycles – and later motorbikes and cars – and were in touch with the wider world through transistor radios, and later mobile phones and televisions. Such phenomenal economic growth rates, as a specialist on Southeast Asia points out (Neher, 1991: 17–18), have fundamentally changed the social landscape. Most obvious has been the rapid increase in average

Global Capitalism

57

per capita gross national product, which more than tripled in just one decade, from $300 in 1977 to $1200 in 1990. Life expectancy, too, has improved by some ten years since the mid-1960s and literacy rates are officially more than 90 per cent. Meanwhile rapid urbanisation and the growth of a middle class are accompanied by ‘higher rates of crime, alienation, and corruption – social ills that are characteristic of urban centers’. No less characteristic of modern economic growth is the concentration of capital in large firms with a corporate business structure, fuelled by the expansion of banking and finance capital. Almost all the large industrial concerns, as Hewison shows (1989: 160–3, 181–2, 192), have a high degree of interlocking shareholding. The top 220 of the largest 1300 companies were occupied in banking, finance and insurance and had total assets amounting to 70 per cent of gross domestic product. Overall, banking capital is controlled by sixteen corporate and family groups, with widely varied interests in more than 550 enterprises. Of the six largest banks, the Bangkok Bank, with more than one-third of total deposits, is the largest in Southeast Asia. With such ‘developed’ capitalist characteristics Thailand was judged by the most reputable economists to have advanced to the stage of a ‘dragon’ economy – following in the wake of the great dragon, Japan, and the lesser dragons of South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. But just as the Japanese ‘bubble economy’ burst at the beginning of the 1990s, so did the Thai economy in 1997, bringing down in crisis its neighbours, Malaysia and the Philippines, and especially Indonesia. That crisis, too, resulted from the ever-increasing gap between irrational expectations of irreversible growth and the reality of severe economic and political vulnerabilities – a gap that could eventually no longer be hidden from overseas investors, whose brutal volte-face from overweening ‘confidence’ to ‘panic’ flight brought down the whole dream-like structure.

Emotional motivation It is tragic, in real life, that so many millions of people should, as a result of the Asian crisis in the 1990s, have been thrown out of work and reduced to poverty, regardless of their efforts; and it is bizarre, in terms of economic theory, that so much rational business calculation should be at the mercy of what the US Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan has himself criticised as ‘irrational exuberance’. Yet the neo-liberal phase of modern capitalism exacerbates the problem: deregulation, privatisation and cuts in public expenditure (such as subsidised household necessities) do away with certain essential safeguards, especially in countries where

58


‘social security’ barely exists. Moreover, neo-liberal policies – notably the deregulation of financial markets – have not only facilitated the extraordinary speed of capital transfers, motivated in extremis by greed or panic flight, but have encouraged short-termism: profits for shareholders at the expense of improving the productive capacity of an enterprise, insisting on a high rate of return on investment, and so on. In other words immediate gratification. For ‘excess is in the nature of capitalism’ as a well-known economist ( Jean-Paul Fitoussi) points out. The result is stock exchange booms, flourishing hedge funds and euphoria over the ‘new’ economy. Consider the extraordinary growth of tradable financial value, following the deregulation of capital and securities markets, which is made possible by the use of advanced mathematical models operated by powerful computer systems. As a specialist in information technology puts it, ‘Network-oriented information and communication technologies allow for unprecedented speed and complexity in the management of the economy.’ Speculative investors looking for high financial rewards move quickly from one market to another, trying to anticipate price movements of different products in different currencies. As Manuel Castells (2001: 52–7) concludes: ‘largely uncontrolled information turbulences are as important as supply and demand in setting prices and trends in global financial markets’. Such financial transactions are induced by a ‘mixture of market rules, business and political strategies, crowd psychology, rational expectations, irrational behaviour, speculative manoeuvres and information turbulences of all kinds’. The speed and volatility of capital flows exacerbate existing or potential irrational features – ‘confidence’, market choice, stock exchange booms and slumps, and business manipulation – in the system. The problem, according to Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, is indeed systemic, in that it arises not from some deus ex machina, but from the ordinary workings of the international financial system itself. For flows of funds and their valuation in free financial markets are influenced as much by perceptions as by objective reality: perhaps the perception is the reality. The herd instinct is strong. The resulting volatility can ordinarily be accepted as a small price to pay for the immense benefits that broad and active financial markets can bring, in Volcker’s judgement. This is true for large and well-diversified economies, with strong financial structures, which are resilient enough to ride out a crisis with limited and temporary damage. But the situation is more difficult for emerging economies. By definition, they and their financial institutions are tiny in relation to the size of international markets. The entire banking systems of Indonesia or Thailand or Malaysia, for example, are comparable

Global Capitalism

59

to one good-sized regional bank in the USA. Their entire GNPs are smaller than the funds controlled by the largest US financial institutions, competing against their rivals (Volcker, in Hutton and Giddens, 2001: 76–8). Moreover, these countries are vulnerable to perceived structural defects: weak banking systems, lack of adequate and timely information, governmental favouritism, crony capitalism and widespread corruption. As for the stock exchange boom, it fits the American view that ‘capitalism is opportunity for all and risk for all’ (Hutton, in Hutton and Giddens: 12–13). This is not surprising given that the Dow Jones share index had multiplied fifteen times between its low point in 1982 and its climax in January 2000. As a result, Americans saved less and consumed more, often on credit, feeding rising prices on the stock exchange . . . until the boom collapsed. In the twelve months to March 2001 more than $4600 billion in share prices were wiped out; and the Nasdaq, emblem of the so-called new economy, lost more than 60 per cent of its value. ‘Foreign exchange markets in particular are subject to panics and manias’, in the experience of Fred Argy, a former secretary of the Australian Committee of Inquiry into the Financial System. ‘They do not promote gradual and smooth adjustment and have little regard for economic fundamentals or comparative advantage. The so-called “discipline” imposed by financial markets is often wilful and perverse.’ Moreover, financial globalisation has strengthened the role of fund managers, rating agencies and multinationals. ‘These players have a strong interest in “small government” policies [that is, less regulation]. And they have formidable powers of persuasion – sending signals to governments through the markets and creating doubts and fears in politicians’ minds . . .’ And for good measure he adds: ‘The world system of governance rightly protects intellectual property and investors’ rights; why not also protect core social and labour standards?’ (The Australian, 8 December 2003). In the volatile situation of an ‘unstable and perilous world’, hedge funds, characterised by very short-term management, are back in favour. ‘In effect, the international economic conjuncture is in continuous turmoil (rising interest rates, rapid increase in petrol prices, fear of terrorist attacks and of a return to inflation, the booming Chinese and Indian economies . . .) all add to a highly volatile environment in which hedge funds flourish’ (Marc Roche, Le Monde, 19 June 2004). Such is the economic context of euphoria but also of awakening to reality – Balzac’s struggle between ‘instinct and reason’ – that explains the astonishing saga of the takeover by the American internet server AOL of the established media giant Time Warner. ‘This amazing merger heralds the arrival of the future’, headlined the Independent, 11 January

60


2000. America Online, barely ten years old, with almost no physical assets and an annual profit equivalent to a regional supermarket, was valued on the eve of the takeover at more than $136 billion. Time Warner, the world’s largest media organisation, with revenues ten times those of AOL, was valued at $76 billion; ‘The logic is the logic of a market that, in the last year, has seen Internet companies valued at far above anything they earn, or can hope to earn within this decade, because they are seen as the gateways to the future. There is a goldrush going on, with investors gambling wildly in the hope of holding an ace . . .’ As a result of the internet ‘revolution’, claimed a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountancy firm, ‘The years 2000–2002 will represent the single most profound period of economic and business change that the world has ever seen, not unlike the industrial revolution but much faster – at e-speed’ ( Jamie Doward, ‘Hi-tech Boom that Turned to Bust’, Guardian Weekly, 13–19 September 2001). Six months later, in April 2002, AOL Time Warner announced a net loss of $54.2 billion for the first four months of the year. In January 2003, the debt, unprecedented in American history, amounted to nearly $99 billion (Le Monde, 20 May 2003). The group, which was valued at $290 billion in January 2000 was worth no more than $85 billion in March 2002 (Frédéric Lemaitre, Le Monde, 20 July 2002). Even Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve, and widely credited for his policies sustaining the boom years, felt obliged to make his apologia. ‘Bubbles are often amplified’, he declared in August 2002, ‘by the perception of real improvement in productivity and profitability of firms.’ Human psychology being what it is, such bubbles have a tendency to feed themselves. ‘Unrealistic expectations of benefits end up by revealing that they are false . . . and such reality forces investors and directors of firms to be disciplined. Are there ways of preventing bubbles, without too much damage, from growing disproportionately? Today we are unable to find such ways. Perhaps in the future, we, or others, will succeed’ (reported by Eric Leser, Le Monde, 4 September 2002). Excess is in the nature of capitalism, recalls the influential French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, for dreams form part of human activity, including the economic. The dream-function is particularly important in valuing firms on the stock exchange, because value depends on what will happen tomorrow, notably the probability that a new idea will find a market. ‘And no scientific model really allows us to foresee the future: instead, intuition, intelligence and chance are combined in deciding the fate of investors engaged in the field of innovation.’ Such is the ‘unavoidable part of irrationality’ that determines the taste of risk. In this respect, in particular, the over-expansion of ambitious entrepreneurs, buying up

Global Capitalism

61

other firms to enlarge their market share, may well result in the ‘process of manipulation of dreams’ – that is, to prevent shareholders from realising the true state of affairs – by all means possible, including trickery (‘capitalism(s)’, Le Monde, 13 September 2002). Such a manipulation of dreams resulted in the scandal of Enron – the most important bankruptcy in American history. In December 2000 Enron shares traded at $85; a year later at 26 cents. Enron announced debts of more than $31 billion as a result of doubtful financial operations. The collapse of Enron was far more than the bankruptcy of a major enterprise. In Leser’s words (Le Monde, 3 December 2002) ‘it reveals the bending of rules, practices, personnel and institutions that assure the credibility and functioning of American capitalism’. He quotes Robert Litan, head of economic studies at the prestigious Brookings Institution: ‘If employees and shareholders of a firm are not reasonably sure that the benefits announced are real and that the directors are not profiting from their position to enrich themselves at their expense, capitalism is simply not possible.’

Social implications The interests of shareholders (if not of employees) are sacrosanct according to neo-liberal policies, which basically seek to protect the economic system, and its beneficiaries, from external obligations or restraints that might reduce profitability. Capitalism is deemed to operate most efficiently when it is independent of the social structure. This explains the insistence of prime minister Thatcher, ardent advocate of neo-liberalism, that there is ‘no such thing as society’, meaning no such thing as social responsibility. She and like-minded politicians argue that redistributive political plans to divert economic resources to social welfare (or foreign aid) undermine profits, productivity and competitiveness and should be resisted. Neo-liberalism does not, however, signify the absence of economic–political interaction. Business leaders are quite prepared to cooperate with governments and political parties if it facilitates economic growth. But it is a one-way partnership: it does not operate the other way round. This is because politicians would have a problem to impose political objectives on the economic system that sustains them. Such, then, is the economic context defining the way in which governments of developed countries operate when they confront social concerns – notably those of other, ‘less-developed’ countries, which are far more serious than in their own, developed homelands: in other words, the global condition of rich and poor.

62


For the developing countries, as Castells points out, represented in 1998 only about 7 per cent of global value in market capitalisation, but comprised about 85 per cent of humankind. Granted that some 20 per cent of these people directly benefit from economic growth, this still leaves over two-thirds of humankind living under the influence of global capitalism, but largely excluded from most of its benefits. The very notion of a rich world, ‘driven by technological ingenuity, financial adventurism and cultural individualism’, surrounded by areas of poverty and subsistence around most of the planet, Castells concludes (2001: 66–7), is not only ethically questionable, but also politically and socially unsustainable. For the rise of fundamentalism, the spread of epidemics, the expansion of the global criminal economy, the threat of terrorism, the destruction of the environment and the loss of our own sense of humanity are all potential or ongoing consequences of this dynamic, yet exclusionary, model of global capitalism. Such a bleak perception gives weight to Zygmunt Bauman’s critique, The Human Cost of Globalism. The supposed independence of ‘sovereign states’, he points out (Bauman, 1999: 9, 20–1), is not in the least opposed to the deepest tendencies of globalisation: to the contrary. The developing countries are pressured to open their economies to market forces and the free circulation of capital. In addition, they take on the role – indispensable for effective globalisation – of providing the minimum degree of order needed to facilitate business. Thus, ‘political fragmentation and economic globalisation are close allies conspiring together’ to bring about a ‘restratification’ under a new socio-cultural hierarchy on a world scale (104–8, 181). As a direct result, the neo-liberal policies required for effective globalisation produce a division of world society into the wealthy few and the poor many – with the domination of the former over the latter (see 157–60, 185–7). Nevertheless, neo-liberalism is not alone to blame for the poverty and lack of social assets in many third world countries. There is also the responsibility – or rather irresponsibility – of weak or ‘failed’ states, where ruling elites are often corrupt, divisive, ineffective and repressive – a situation ignored by Bauman. Under such conditions, poor countries regress to a state of bare economic subsistence, and they are of no interest to the global economy – unless they have natural resources in great demand: diamonds and minerals in central Africa, and oil and natural gas in Nigeria, Algeria and Angola, for example. Such a narrow form of global integration provides no benefit to ordinary people – rather the reverse. It fuels corruption, power rivalry, ethnic conflict, class struggle and even religious hatreds: a recipe for disaster!

Global Capitalism

63

Moreover, despite Bauman’s critical onslaught, there are winners as well as losers in the global process. The benefits of globalisation should not be underestimated, Jessua insists. It results in better allocation of financial resources, the rational diversification of investments and the ‘enormous gain’ of foreign trade (2001: 107–8). Indeed, the Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen, known for his studies of famine, claims that the situation of the most precarious and poverty-stricken can only be overcome by taking part in the ‘considerable benefits of contemporary technology, the solid effectiveness of trade and international exchanges, and finally the social as well as economic advantages of living in an open rather than closed society’. The essential question is not whether or not to have a market economy, since a ‘prosperous economy is impossible without the large-scale application of the market’. But this does not conclude the argument, Sen goes on. A more equitable distribution of the fruits of globalisation is essential. To achieve this, both the state and society need to ensure elementary education for all, health care, credit facilities, legal protection, emancipation of women and others, as well as bringing about international reforms, including trade agreements, patent legislation, transfer of technology, environmental safeguards and so on. If there is good reason to support globalisation for the improvements it has to offer, Sen concludes, it cannot be achieved without taking into account these ‘extremely important’ political and institutional questions (Amartya Sen, ‘Ten Truths about Globalisation’, Le Monde, 19 July 2001). To repeat: the benefits of economic integration for certain third world countries are evident. Thus, in one category of some 24 countries, including China, India and Mexico, and comprising some three billion people, as the economist Serge Marti points out, the annual rate of growth rose from an average of 1 per cent in the 1960s to 5 per cent in the 1990s, with an increase in wages and life expectancy and reduction in poverty. Inversely, in the second category of less-integrated countries, incomes per head of population have gone down and poverty has spread. This is the case in various African countries, as well as in Egypt, Algeria, Iran and Pakistan, comprising altogether some 2 billion people (‘Poverty and Globalisation’, Le Monde, 18 December 2001). Moreover, the unequal division of resources within countries must also be taken into account. Economic growth in China, for example, absorbing a quarter of world consumption of steel and aluminium, and a third of coal and iron ore, has resulted in a widening gap between urban areas and countryside, between coastal regions and the interior and even more between the professionally qualified and the unskilled.

64


Economic development largely benefits the well-off classes. During the 1990s, the income of the wealthiest 1 per cent of Chinese grew on average by 11 per cent a year compared with 4.9 per cent for almost half the population and scarcely 3 per cent for the very poor. The average income in 2005 of some 750 million peasants was the equivalent of 300 euros a year, compared to 850 euros for a town-dweller and between 4000 and 6000 euros for a white-collar worker in a large city (Brice Pedroletti, Shanghai, Le Monde, 4 January 2005). (The Chinese government admitted in 2004 the first rise in poverty since the start of market-oriented reforms.) As for India, along with several hundred million poor people, only 10 per cent have a ‘middle class’ standard of living, while another 10 per cent (amounting to some 200 million in all) can afford durable goods such as televisions. In Brazil, too, the richest one-third of the population continue to own two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, (Laurence Caramel, ‘Who Profits from Globalisation?’, Le Monde, 9–10 November 2003). While the situation of the poor in Latin America has not improved, in Africa it is worse. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the UN project for a ‘green revolution’, sums it up in three sets of figures: the amount of food produced in Africa in 2000 was 7 per cent less than twenty years before: in comparison food production increased over this period by 28 per cent in India and 82 per cent in China; finally, use of fertiliser in 2002 averaged 23 kg per hectare in Africa, 100 kg in India and 278 in China ( Jeffrey Sachs and Pedro Sanchez, Le Monde, 11 August 2004). Moreover, a recent report by the UN Trade and Development Conference notes that while per capita income in the 45 (of a total of 51) poorest countries in the world had increased by 2.6 per cent in 2003, nevertheless, given the demographic trends – the present population of 718 millions will rise to more than one billion by 2020 – there needs to be a 7 per cent increase to reverse the trend to impoverishment (Babette Stern, Le Monde, 29 May 2004). The UN annual human development report for 2003 confirms the growing gap not only between countries in these two categories (integration or otherwise in the global economy) but above all between rich countries and poor. The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population now receive as much income as the poorest 57 per cent, while the income of the richest 25 million Americans is the equivalent of that of almost two billion of the world’s poorest people (Larry Elliott, Guardian Weekly, 17–23 July 2003). For nearly 4 billion people survive on less than one or two dollars a day, according to the UN Global Environment Outlook3 in May 2002. By contrast, one-fifth of the world’s population accounts for almost 90 per cent of total consumption. It is hardly surprising, then, to learn that the United States is the most obese country in the world, with nearly one quarter of

Global Capitalism

65

adults classified as obese and 55 per cent overweight, while at the same time 790 million people in the third world are chronically hungry, including 150 million children who are underweight ( John Vidal, Guardian Weekly, 9–15 March, 2000). In addition, according to Unicef, 250 million children, aged between 5 and 14, work in conditions that resemble slavery (Florence Beaugé, Le Monde, 18 April 2001). As many as one billion people – or one in six of the world’s population – live in slums, and the number is set to increase as urbanisation grows rapidly (Le Monde, 6 June 2001). Two and a half billion people do not have access to basic health infrastructure, according to the UN Development programme and nearly one billion adults are illiterate (Libération, 17 July 2001). As always, the resources are available to solve such major problems, but the political will is lacking. As James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, explains, there is a ‘disconnection’ between the problems of poverty and peace. Military spending worldwide, he points out, is now probably $1000 billion, while current spending on subsidies or tariffs to protect developed world farmers is about $300 billion. Meanwhile, the rich countries offer no more than $50 to $60 billion in aid to developing countries while blocking most of their agricultural exports – one of the few ways these countries could pull themselves out of poverty. These three things are linked. More than one billion people earn less than a dollar a day (and three billion less than $2 dollars): ‘If you can’t give them hope’ of better prospects ‘these people become the basis on which terrorists or renegades or advocacy groups can flourish. It’s an essentially unstable situation’ (interview with Roy Eccleston, The Australian, 4 February 2004). In an ironic commentary on the behaviour of rich and poor, World Bank figures show that in 2002 more money flowed from relatively poor migrant workers in rich countries to their third world homelands than the combined total of government aid, private bank lending and IMF/World Bank aid and assistance (Faisal Islam, Guardian Weekly, 22–28 May 2003). While, in principle, wealthy countries support plans to reduce poverty worldwide, in practice they put pressure on third world countries to open up their markets to Western products. At the same time they protect their own economies from third world exports, especially food, textiles and clothing, which would compete with their own industries. Worse, agricultural subsidies and export bounties in the United States and the European Union enable those countries to dump their agricultural exports in the third world, undercutting and ruining local farmers

66


(Nicholas Stern, chief economist of the World Bank: Le Monde Economie, 22 May 2002). Developed countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development provide about $1 billion a day in domestic agricultural subsidies – more than six times what they spend on official development assistance for third world countries (UN Human Development Report, 2002: Larry Elliott, Guardian Weekly, 1–7 August 2002). The compromise decision by members of the World Trade Organisation in mid-2004 to limit Western subsidies and export credits to their own farmers in return for developing countries opening their markets to industrial products has yet to be put into practice. The UN objective is to reduce by half the number of people living in poverty by 2015. The chief obstacle is lack of resources. Currently official development aid is about $56 billion. There is a general consensus that double that amount is needed to end, in a decade, extreme poverty and hunger, promote equality of the sexes, emancipate women, reduce infant mortality and campaign against Aids, tuberculosis and malaria (Babette Sterne, Le Monde, 9 April 2004). One encouraging move, however, was the agreement by the group of rich nations in June 2005 to cancel the public debt of 18 very poor countries – even though the more important problems of trade protection and subsidising agriculture by the wealthy have yet to be tackled seriously. In practice, ‘putting wealth before health’ was the neo-liberal reaction. It was yet another ‘outrageous scandal’, according to the Guardian Weekly editorial (22–28 February 2001), referring to the lawsuit brought by major pharmaceutical companies against the South African government to prevent it importing cheap generic medicines against Aids – South Africa has by far the largest number of Aids sufferers in the world. The US government supported the pharmaceutical companies; in the previous two years, members of the US pharmaceutical association spent $236 million on lobbying and a further $14 million went to American political parties. Similarly, the Blair government aligned itself with its US ally in the battle over cheap drugs, insisting that patents on medicines must be upheld, even in poor countries where millions of people are dying of diseases such as Aids and tuberculosis. The official British document makes clear that the government wants to do all it can to help the pharmaceutical industry, which is hugely profitable for Britain. ‘The UK must continue to offer a supportive and competitive business environment compared to other viable locations’, it announced (Sarah Bosely, Guardian Weekly, 5–11 April 2001). President Bush did, however, make amends

Global Capitalism

67

two years later by urging Congress to fund an ‘urgent programme’ of $15 billion over five years to counter Aids in Africa and the Caribbean. Yet doubts remain as to the allocation of these funds and the limits imposed by the president’s moral requirements (for example, favouring abstinence over contraception). Yet, ‘in the absence of massive prevention and treatment operations’, declared the UN report on Aids published on 2 July 2002, ‘68 million people will die of Aids in the 45 most affected countries between 2000 and 2020’, that is, five times the number of deaths from Aids during its first two decades. As Peter Piot, director of the UN Aids programme, put it in an interview with Le Monde (29 November 2000), ‘the rules of liberal economics have become incompatible with the global Aids epidemic. A new pact is required between industry and society . . .’ The challenge is critical, Dr Piot stated in November 2004, given that 60 million people are now infected by HIV/Aids in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. In addition, ‘the situation we face in China, India and Russia bears alarming similarities to the situation we faced 20 years ago in Africa’. For Aids ‘wipes out decades of growth, destroys the economy, threatens security and destabilises entire societies’, as the International Labour Organisation points out. ‘It is not only a crisis for public health but a menace for sustainable economic and social development’ (Le Monde, 13 July 2004). Faced with the disastrous publicity arising from the lawsuit, the pharmaceutical companies did finally agree in August 2003 to authorise countries producing generic medicines – India and Brazil – to do so; but as a condition for joining the World Trade Organisation, the Indian government passed a new patent law in 2005, which will increase the price of all newlyinvented medicines. It is important to realise, moreover, that the effort of years of blockage by the pharmaceutical companies, and the enormous costs involved (including human lives) were the product of an industry that devotes barely 8 per cent of its total expenditure to the needs of developing countries, which have three-quarters of the world’s population (Report by Médecins sans frontières: Véronique Lorelle, Le Monde, 27 May 2003). But let Keynes have the last word: ‘For my part, I think that Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable. Our problem is to work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life’ (Lecture at Oxford, 1924, quoted by Harrod, 1972: 417).


Part II Power


4 Imperialism: the Perils of Globalism

Before the white man came, he had the Bible and we had the land. After the white man came, we had the Bible and he had the land. Kenyatta, anthropologist, first President of Kenya [H]ow can we treat the cultural, historical phenomenon of Orientalism as a kind of willed human work . . . in all its historical complexity, detail and worth without at the same time losing sight of the alliance between cultural work, political tendencies, the state, and the specific realities of domination? Edward Said, Orientalism

Things fall apart With epic simplicity, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart depicts traditional Nigerian customs and values – both peaceful and warlike – yielding to the superior ‘fetish’ of Western religion and brute power. A chain of violent events leads inexorably to white domination. It starts with the proud warrior Okonkwo – a wealthy farmer with three wives – awakening in the night to the sound of the town-crier calling for a meeting next day. The night was very quiet . . . Darkness held a vague terror for these people, even the bravest among them. Children were warned not to whistle at night for fear of evil spirits. Dangerous animals became even more sinister and uncanny in the dark . . . In the morning the market place was full. The elder, chosen for his oratory, denounced the people of a nearby village for murdering one of their young women. The crowd shouted with anger and thirst for blood. An ultimatum 71

72


was sent asking the people of that village to choose between war or the offer of a young man and a virgin as compensation. For the orator’s town was ‘powerful in war and in magic, and its priests and medicine-men were feared in all the surrounding country’. So when Okonkwo went to the offending village as an emissary he was treated with great honour and respect, and he returned home with the ‘compensation’ – a lad of fifteen and a virgin. The boy’s sad story is still told to this day. He was placed in Okonkwo’s home. Despite his yearning to go home and his fear of his master’s harsh temper, he was gradually accepted and even became popular, especially with the children. Even Okonkwo became very fond of the boy – but inwardly. He never showed any emotion, except anger. To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength. Okonkwo encouraged his son and the fatherless boy to sit with him and he told them stories of the land: ‘masculine stories of violence and bloodshed’. One day he was visited by an old man, a great and fearless warrior in his time. He drew Okonkwo aside and told him that the boy taken from the far village now thought of him as a father: ‘Do not bear a hand in his death.’ He went on: ‘The Oracle of the Hills and Caves’ has pronounced the death sentence on the lad. The people will take him outside and kill him – but do not take any part in it: ‘He calls you his father.’ Next day Okonkwo told the boy he was to be taken home. He went off with a group of men each armed with a matchet (or machete, a broad, heavy knife) but he was not afraid. For Okonkwo walked behind him. Then one of the men struck the boy with his matchet, Okonkwo heard him cry: ‘My father, they have killed me!’ Dazed with fear of being thought weak, Okonkwo also drew his matchet and cut the boy down. One night, not long afterwards, the crier’s message could be heard, calling on ‘the land of the brave’. In the distance the ‘wailing of women settled like a sediment of sorrow on the earth’. The elder who had warned Okonkwo had died. ‘The ancient drums of death beat, guns and cannons were fired and men dashed about in frenzy.’ It was a warrior’s funeral, and warriors came and went in different age-groups, their bodies painted. Now and again an ancestral spirit appeared as if from the underworld, speaking in a tremulous, unearthly voice. Some were very violent. But the most dreaded was yet to come. He was always alone and was shaped like a coffin. A sickly odour hung in the air wherever he went. Even the greatest medicine-men took shelter when he was near. It was a great funeral, befitting a noble warrior. ‘As the evening drew near, the shouting and firing of guns, the beating of drums and the brandishing and clanging of matchets increased.’ Before the final rite,

Imperialism: the Perils of Globalism

73

the tumult increased. Guns were fired on all sides and sparks flew as matchets clashed in warriors’ salutes. The air was full of dust and the smell of gunpowder. The drums and the dancing reached fever-heat. Guns fired the last salute and the cannon rent the sky. And then from the centre of the delirious fury came a cry of agony and shouts of horror. It was as if a spell had been cast. All was silent. In the centre of the crowd a boy lay in a pool of blood. It was the dead man’s sixteenyear-old son . . . Okonkwo’s gun had exploded and a piece of iron had pierced the boy’s heart. To kill a clansman was a crime against the earth goddess. The man who committed it must flee from the land. But as the killing was inadvertent he could return after seven years. Before dawn, Okonkwo and his household were fleeing to the village where he was born. As soon as day broke, a large crowd stormed into Okonkwo’s compound, setting fire to the houses, killing his animals and destroying his barn. ‘It was the justice of the earth goddess, and they were merely her messengers.’ They were cleansing the land which Okonkwo had polluted with the blood of a clansman. For if the clan did not exact punishment for an offence against the great goddess, her wrath would be let loose on all the land. Okonkwo’s life had been ruled by a great passion – to become one of the lords of the clan. He had all but achieved it. Then everything had been broken. A man could not rise beyond the destiny of his chi, his personal god. Okonkwo yielded to despair and he was greatly troubled. It was in the second year of Okonkwo’s exile that one of his oldest friends came to visit him. He told them of a strange and terrible event. One of the nearby villages had been wiped out. If he had not seen the few survivors, he would not have believed it. During the last planting season, the fugitives related, a white man had appeared, riding an iron horse. He stood beckoning to them. The elders consulted their Oracle and it told them that the strange man would break their clan and spread destruction among them. ‘And so they killed the white man and tied his iron horse to their sacred tree.’ For a long time nothing happened. Then three white men came with a ‘band of ordinary people like us’ to see the iron horse and went away. Again many weeks went by. Then when the whole clan was gathered together on a market day, the three white men with a very large number of other men surrounded the market. ‘They must have used a powerful medicine to make themselves invisible until the market was full. And they began to shoot. Everybody was killed except the old and the sick who were at home . . . A great evil has come upon their land as the Oracle has warned.’

74


‘They were fools’, said Okonkwo to his friend. ‘They had been warned that danger was ahead. They should have armed themselves with their guns and their matchets even when they went to market.’ ‘They have paid for their foolishness’, his friend replied. ‘But I am greatly afraid. We have heard stories about the white men who made the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves across the seas, but no one thought the stories were true.’ ‘There is no story that is not true’, answered another. ‘The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination among others.’ Nearly two years later, his friend paid another visit to Okonkwo. He said missionaries had arrived at their town. They had built a church, won a handful of converts and were already sending evangelists to the surrounding towns and villages. ‘That was a source of great sorrow to the leaders of the clan; but many of them believed that the strange faith and the white man’s god would not last. None of his converts was a man whose word was heeded in the assembly of the people.’ They were mostly worthless men. But among them was Okonkwo’s eldest son, the friend of the fatherless boy. After the harvesting, when men were free to listen, the white man spoke to them through an interpreter: The white man was also their brother because they were all sons of God. And he told them about this new God, the Creator of all the world and all the men and women. He told them that they worshipped false gods, gods of wood and stone . . . But good men who worshipped the true God lived for ever in his happy kingdom. ‘We have been sent by this great God to ask you to leave your wicked ways and false gods and turn to Him so that you may be saved when you die.’ Okonkwo was convinced that the white man and his interpreter were mad. But his eldest son was captivated. It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that enthralled him (how could there be one God without a wife who had a son who was also God?) It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague question that haunted his young soul – the fate of his friend, the exiled boy, who had been killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The missionaries asked the men of title and the chief priests and elders for a plot of land to build their church. So the rulers of the village gave them the ‘evil forest’ – the place in every village where those who had died of evil diseases were buried and the dumping ground for potent


75

fetishes of great medicine-men who had died. Such an ‘evil forest’ was alive with sinister forces and powers of darkness. The rulers did not want the missionaries and so they made them an offer which no one in his right mind would accept. ‘They boast about victory over death’, said one of the elders, ‘Let us give them a real battlefield in which to show their victory.’ Next morning the missionaries began to clear part of the forest and to build their church. The villagers expected them all to be dead within four days. The first day passed and the second third and fourth, and none of them had died. Everyone was puzzled. But they realised that the white man’s fetish had unbelievable power. Then one of the converts, in his religious zeal, killed the sacred python, the emanation of the god of water. It was in the village where Okonkwo was exiled. The rulers and elders met to decide on their action. Many spoke at great length and with fury. The spirit of war was upon them. But others saw things differently. ‘It is not our custom to fight for our gods’, one of them replied. ‘If a man kills the sacred python in the secrecy of his hut, the matter lies between him and the god. We did not see it.’ ‘Let us not reason like cowards’, retorted Okonkwo. These people are daily pouring filth over us. How can we pretend not to see? By now it was Okonkwo’s seventh year in exile. He prepared to return home. At his farewell feast, one of the elders praised Okonkwo for doing things in the ‘grand, old way’, not like the younger generation who consider themselves wiser than their fathers. He waved his arm where most of the young men sat. ‘I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you.’ ‘We must fight these men and drive them from the land’, Okonkwo insisted, on his return. But it is already too late, replied his old friend sadly: ‘Our own men and our sons have joined the ranks of the stranger. They have joined his religion and they help to uphold his government.’ Our own brothers, he continued, say that our customs are bad. ‘How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us?’ Indeed, many of the villagers did not agree with Okonkwo. The white man brought a lunatic religion, they agreed, but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price. And much money flowed into the village. And yet the conflict between church and clan was not resolved. It came to a dramatic climax during the annual ceremony in honour of the earth deity. At such a time the ancestors of the clan who had been committed to the earth at their death emerged as masked spirits. One of the

76


greatest crimes was to unmask such a spirit-person or to say or do anything which might reduce its immortal prestige in the eyes of the public. Yet this is what a young religious zealot did. He boasted that none of the masked spirits would dare to touch a Christian. When one of them struck the young man with his cane, the latter fell on him and tore off his mask, to the horror of the celebrants. He had killed an ancestral spirit and the village was thrown into confusion: That night the Mother of the Spirits walked the length and breadth of the clan, weeping for her murdered son. It was a terrible night . . . It seemed as if the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evil that was coming – its own death. Next day the masked spirit-persons assembled in the marketplace. From there the furious band made for the compound of the young convert. With matchet and fire they reduced it to a desolate heap. Then they made for the church. ‘Tell the white man that we will not do him any harm’, their leader said to the interpreter. ‘But this shrine which he built must be destroyed’. He angrily declared: ‘It has bred untold abominations and we have come to put an end to it.’ The white man stood his ground, but he could not save his church. The District Commissioner came. He sent for the village leaders. ‘We shall not do you any harm’, he said, ‘if only you agree to cooperate with us.’ ‘I have brought you here’, he went on, ‘because you joined together to molest others, to burn people’s houses and their place of worship. That must not happen in the dominion of our queen, the most powerful ruler in the world.’ The leaders would not be released until they paid a fine – otherwise they would be hanged. The prisoners paid the fine and were set free. But Okonkwo swore to be avenged. The villagers assembled at the marketplace. ‘All our gods are weeping’, spoke one of the great men of the village to the crowd. ‘We must root out this evil. And if our brothers take the side of evil we must root them out too.’ At this point there was a sudden stir in the crowd. They had seen the arrival of the messengers of the British court of justice. Okonkwo sprang to his feet, confronting the head messenger, trembling with hate. ‘Let me pass’, ordered the messenger. ‘The white man whose power you know too well has ordered this meeting to stop.’ In a flash Okonkwo drew his matchet. The messenger tried to avoid the blow, but in vain. He lay lifeless on the ground. Okonkwo wiped his matchet on the sand and went away. When the District Commissioner arrived at Okonkwo’s compound, he was not there. ‘We can take you where he is, and perhaps your men will


77

help us’, said one of the village leaders. He took the District Commissioner and his men behind Okonkwo’s compound. They came to a tree from which Okonkwo’s body was hanging. The villagers asked for help to take down the body. ‘Why don’t you take him down’, said the Commissioner. ‘It is against our custom’, one of them replied. ‘It is an abomination for a man to take his own life. It is an offence against the Earth. His body is evil, and only strangers may touch it.’ The Commissioner went off. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilisation to different parts of Africa he had learnt a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting down a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor impression of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. Violence, corruption and repression aggravated by ethnic and regional rivalries were no less evident in Nigeria more than half a century later. So, far from independence (in 1960) resulting in unity and progress, as ardent nationalists had proclaimed, the country was torn apart by power struggles in the south between Igbos (Ibos) and Yorubas as well as between the largely Christian population of the south and the Muslim-dominated and traditionalist north. Military officers sought to impose unity by force in 1966, leading to the attempted secession of the Igbos and the disaster of the Biafran war. More than one million people died in the region from fighting, famine and disease before Igbo resistance collapsed. Nigeria then experienced an alternation of civilian and military regimes. Meanwhile, the vast increase in oil prices in the 1970s fuelled ever-greater corruption in the struggle to exploit these lucrative resources. Chinua Achebe, himself an Igbo, had previously satirised the greed and naked ambition of Nigeria’s new elites in his 1966 novel, A Man of the People. Another well-known writer, the Yoruba Wole Soyinka, had personally intervened in the Biafran conflict by calling for a ceasefire. For this humanitarian act he was arrested on charges of conspiring with the rebels and held as a political prisoner for almost two years. Awarded the Nobel prize in 1986, Soyinka’s work (discussed below) was praised by the Swedish Academy for its consciousness of good and evil, of destructive and constructive forces. He drew on his own experience of great moral, social and political issues in his allegorical and satirical novels and in his ‘mythical-dramatic creations’. Wole Soyinka’s sophisticated and enigmatic The Interpreters reveals the frustrated reactions of a handful of young intellectuals to the fate of traditional culture under colonial rule, on the one hand, and the tragic deception of the hopes raised by independence, on the other. In a world of

78


shit, these young men and women try to give some meaning to life, culture and politics. ‘Voidancy’ for the journalist Sagoe – ‘the last uncharted mine of creative energies’: that is, the relief felt after defecation – represents his mock-philosophy: ‘in release is birth’. Their story starts with a party in a select club. Sagoe gets more and more drunk as the evening wears on: ‘I should have stuck to beer’, he told his girlfriend. ‘Those whiskies burnt out all my negritude.’ Sagoe recalls how he was appointed. The selection committee included a distinguished judge, knighted by the British, the giant alcoholic Chief Winsala, and the managing director, whose radio with its nine winking lights appeared on the mahogany boardroom table, a product of his eleventh round-the-world mission. There were also the ‘compensation members’ – compensating, Sagoe reflected, for ‘lost elections, missed nominations, thug recruitment, financial backing, Ministerial in-lawfulness, Ministerial poncing, general arse-licking, Ministerial concubinage’. Although the judge ‘felt quite sure that this was the man we wanted’, Sagoe’s refusal to show humility before the committee angered the managing director: ‘You small boy, you come here begging for job.’ ‘I have not come to beg’, answered Sagoe, turning to go. ‘These small fries they all think they are popularly in demand, just because they have a degree.’ Convinced that all was lost, Sagoe went back to his hotel. Next day Chief Winsala called on him, reminding him of the interview: ‘By the way, I take schnapps.’ Sagoe obediently called the waiter. ‘I like to see pushful young men succeeding’ said the Chief, calling for another schnapps. ‘Of course, you annoy the board very much . . . but matters can still be repaired . . . well, it is all in your hands, you get my meaning?’ Sagoe shrugged: ‘How much?’ ‘There are four of us to be seen to . . . As you are new, we will make it something for drinks. Let us say, fifty pounds.’ Soon after the deal, the judge, who was party to it, became sick and died, receiving a magnificent funeral. Forty cars at least followed the handpulled hearse, and all cars were piled high with gory carnations. Sagoe heard snatches of the funeral oration: ‘his life our inspiration, his idealism our hopes, the survival of his spirit in our midst the hope for a future Nigeria . . . ’ As an enterprising journalist, Sagoe wanted to write up the experience of his friend Sekoni, a qualified engineer. Sekoni had built a small experimental power station. But when the time came to put it into operation, the supervising chairman notified him that an expatriate evaluation was needed. ‘Is it unsafe for operation?’ asked the expert, with a wink. ‘That’s the safest idea’, said the chairman. ‘You put it in technical language.’ And so the project was written off. The chairman – for his subsidiary company


79

registered in the name of his two-month-old niece had been sole contractor for the project – received a few thousands in immediate compensation and filed claims for a few thousand more. But when Sagoe took the story to his editor – ‘the facts were well tabled, nothing could be disputed’ – the editor was surprisingly reluctant. He said he must ring to get advice. Putting down the phone he turned to Sagoe: ‘Well, that is it. Now you know.’ Now I know what? ‘Shut your mouth, I shut mine.’ It goes on all the time, explained the editor. ‘You see, it is part of the mutual protection. Before we publish any revelation like that, it must go to our lawyers. And he in turn consults with the Chairman.’ Go on, I am anxious to learn, prompted Sagoe. ‘Well he lets the other side know what he has got on them . . . ’ If the latter can weather it, they say go ahead. If not, they mention some sensitive evidence they have been collecting, and they do a deal: ‘a swop of silences’. Confronting Sagoe’s opposition, the editor responded: ‘Believe me there was a time when I held these ideals . . . But look man, journalism here is just a business like any other. You do what your employer tells you.’ Another of the friends, Bandele, a university lecturer, is invited to a cocktail party given by a newly-appointed professor. He suggested that Sagoe, though uninvited, should come along. ‘A buzz of wit, genteel laughter and character slaughter welcomed them from the drive’, while ‘a shrill voice, a strange dialect of some British tribe’, came from the direction of the punch bowl. ‘Nephrites simply cannot stand Africans. She’s such a sensitive cat.’ The hostess extended a gloved hand, elbow length, to Sagoe. ‘To what department do you belong sir?’ ‘Architecture’, replied Sagoe, anxious not to be taken for a gate-crasher. There is no such department, she retorted frostily. ‘I am hardly surprised, madam’, Sagoe replied. ‘Just look at the buildings.’ Sagoe saw the professor apologising his course through glass and smoke veering in their direction. He beat a hasty retreat. In juxtaposition to the artifice of the Western cocktail party is a strange popular version of Christianity that the friends encountered. Sagoe had been approached by an albino Nigerian, who was seeking publicity for his church, the reporter suspected. He was named Lazarus, because he had risen from the dead. But although he was black when he died, he turned white when he awoke from the coffin. He invited the friends to his church, a small shack by a brown lagoon. The church was full when they arrived. Lazarus spoke of an extraordinary and terrifying dream: ‘Lazarus, his eyes dilated, was lathered in sweat. He was clutching the rest of the lectern and the sweat ran onto the Bible, the terror of death seized him again and spread, and encircled the congregation.’ An elder

80


then spoke: ‘death is no respecter of persons. The doctor in hospital he die. The rich man, he die. The poor man, he die. God does not take bribe.’ Then Lazarus separated the elaborate silk-ornamented curtain. From between the portraits of two saints emerged a frail young man. Sagoe gasped with astonishment. It was the young thief who had been saved by Lazarus from lynching by an angry mob, not long before. He was baptised Noah, said Lazarus, in case God had forgotten his covenant with earth. ‘Through stamping, leaping feet and a thunderous ferment of handclaps, Noah washing feet that won’t keep still, accompanied all the way by the Apostles who are tossed from each wave of ecstasy to the task of clearing a path for Noah and tossed back again, Lazarus weaving back and forth.’ Meanwhile the congregation heard the agony of a possessed woman, the scream of foreign tongues and her fight for breath: ‘forty demons strove within her and her inner sights misruled her body’. ‘What are you getting out of this?’ mocked Bandele. ‘Knowledge of the new generation of interpreters’, was his solution. Sagoe was sceptical of Lazarus and his ‘resurrection’. He founds a church, turns thieves into apostles and calmly awaits the second coming. All the same, ‘the man is intriguing’. To Bandele it did not matter whether Lazarus’ death-experience took place or not. For at least one thing was obvious: he did go through some critical experience: ‘If he has chosen to interpret it in a way that would bring some kind of meaning into people’s lives, who are you to scoff at it . . . ’ And for Egbo, whose father was a missionary and mother the daughter of a king and aware of the reality of power: ‘If you seek to transform (like Lazarus) you must not be afraid of power.’ Indeed, as Lazarus explains to the friends, he needed a successor from outside the church. ‘I was looking for a youth, reckless, a youth with an inner fire.’ Contrary to the peaceable man, who makes a good churchgoer but lacks fire and dedication, ‘the more evil a man has known in fact, the more strength I have got from him’. For what ‘you wrestle with, what you fight and defeat, that is true conversion’. Lazarus’ ‘true disciples are the thieves, the rejected of society’. Yet Noah was to die, absurdly, running away from the advances of a homosexual. And Egbo felt he was trapped in ‘the primal slime of all creation’.

‘Orientalism’ Yet another interpretation of ‘Orientalism’: Frantz Fanon, celebrated author of Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), fervent in his support of anti-colonial struggles, was no less scathing of the ‘national middle class’ which takes over power at the end of the colonial regime.


81

In his ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ he argues that instead of embodying the innermost hopes of the whole people, such consciousness is only an empty shell, ‘a crude and fragile travesty’ of what it might have been. (Similar to the experience of Nigeria.) ‘The national bourgeoisie steps into the shoes of the former European settlement: doctors, barristers, traders, commercial travellers, general agents and transport agents. It considers that the dignity of the country and its own welfare require that it should occupy all these posts.’ Its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists of being the transmission line between the nation and a rampant capitalism. Under these typical new leaders there will be no modernisation of agriculture, no planning for development and no initiative. On the other hand, large sums are spent on display: on cars, country houses and all those things characteristic of an underdeveloped bourgeoisie. Such new rulers, ‘in region after region hasten to make their own fortunes and to set up a national system of exploitation’. Instead of embodying the aspirations of the people for independence, political liberty and national dignity – as in the anti-colonial struggle – once in power they reveal their inner purpose: ‘to become the general president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns’. In a certain number of underdeveloped countries, moreover, ‘the parliamentary game is faked from the beginning’, the leaders choosing the easiest solution to maintain power, that is, through the single party. It is the modern form of the bourgeois dictatorship: ‘unmasked, unpainted, unscrupulous and cynical’. Now ‘the army and the police constitute the pillars of the regime’. But such a travesty of the people’s will arouses popular opposition to such ‘scandalous enrichment’ while millions starve. ‘It marks a decisive awakening on the part of the people, and a growing awareness that promises stormy days to come . . . ’ Fanon’s indictment thus shares some of the strictures of Western ‘Orientalists’ – albeit from a very different standpoint. Nevertheless, Fanon’s study is a necessary critique of the rather sweeping claims of Edward Said’s erudite and fascinating work. The importance of Orientalism, however, is that Said correctly diagnoses the power relations underpinning the (negative) cultural and political evaluation of the ‘unchanging Orient’ by Western travellers, writers, officials and politicians. As he puts it (Said, 1979: 3, 27), from its starting point in the late eighteenth century, ‘Orientalism can be discussed and analysed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.’ One cannot imagine, he goes on, the ‘enormously systematic

82


discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively’. From Said’s specific experience, he notes ‘the web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanising ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim [which] is very strong indeed’. But, for all his insights, and notably the stereotypes of Asian or African behaviour and mentality (‘Oriental’), Said overstates his case. One example: he criticises Marx, along with Disraeli, for indulging in Orientalist caricatures of despotism and fatalism (102). He then quotes Marx’s view of England’s double mission in India: ‘one destructive, the other regenerating – the annihilation of the Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society’ (154) as an example of Orientalist assumptions. ‘The idea of regenerating a fundamentally lifeless Asia is a piece of pure Romantic Orientalism, of course’, according to Said. Yet Marx had precisely the same notion of capitalism’s ‘double mission’ in England, that is, overthrowing a backward and outmoded feudal economy and social values in order to make way for the superior structure of capitalism (which in turn would also be overthrown). This was a universal phenomenon for Marx, not an ‘Orientalist’ one. Second, and related to the above, there is a considerable element of truth behind the Orientalist constructs. There clearly was a turning point about a century after the European Renaissance when ‘Orientalist’ civilisation – and power – began to decline in the Arabo-Muslim realms, while Western Europe advanced towards world supremacy. Moreover, by the end of the eighteenth century, which Said considers to be the starting point of ‘Orientalism’, even the once-great dynasties of India and China were disintegrating. It is not surprising that Western politicians and business leaders should reflect their virtually unchallenged superiority in the (admittedly gross) form of Orientalism. This leads to the third qualification of Said’s influential thesis. He tends to gloss over the despotic tendencies, the economic backwardness and the corrupt administrations of many ‘Oriental’ (third world) countries, which now reject the popular aspirations and nationalist rhetoric of the freedom struggle. This is what Fanon, from his own bitter experience, recognises. Contrary to Said’s over-simple dichotomy between domineering West and oppressed East there now exists a far more complex relationship between Eastern elites and Western power structures. In effect, many third world elites accept the role of client-state precisely because Western nations provide protection (by arms, if necessary) against the popular uprisings that Fanon foresaw, which would endanger elitist


83

power and privileges. Of course, the Western countries had and have important strategic, political and economic interests at stake in the third world, which makes the overall relationship so profitable to both sides. Patron–client relations became all the more important during the cold war rivalry with the Soviet Union, which was seen as a zero-sum game: that is, any influence gained in a particular country by one of the superpowers was seen as a loss by the other. Compounding these globalist fears was the nightmarish vision that a ‘domino-type’ chain of reaction would follow, ultimately destabilising the entire balance of power. Thus, in reflecting on Fanon’s preoccupation with the anti-colonial struggle – and the international consequences of its deformed succession – consider again the two stories from Nigeria at the beginning of this chapter. They reveal (1) the failure of old warrior values to withstand the insidious challenge of the white man’s new ‘fetish’, followed by (2) the substitution for colonial rule of that of an indigenous elite which, in the absence of countervailing forces, becomes increasingly repressive and corrupt. Where mass opposition did develop – examined in the next two ‘stories’ – it took the form of a nationalist revolution in Egypt – from Arabi to Nasser – and a social revolution in Vietnam. Both movements created a critical situation for the dominant powers: Britain in late nineteenthcentury Egypt, America in twentieth-century Vietnam. Both great powers, steeped in ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes, reacted to crisis by moving from ‘partnership’ in the affairs of the existing regimes to outright military intervention. Paradoxically, British officials in Egypt recognised the need for social reform of a corrupt, repressive and inefficient system of rule, but failed to come to terms with the nationalist movement of young officers and officials, led by Colonel Arabi, that had arisen precisely in opposition to that system. For successive British governments reacted in panic against what they regarded as a threat to Britain’s ‘global’ stake in Egypt, considered as the crucial lifeline to India and the East. Conversely, American politicians and officials lauded the nationalist credentials of the newly independent government of South Vietnam (legitimised in their eyes by replacing the French colonial order), but failed to come to terms with the social movement of impoverished and dispossessed rural Vietnamese, opposed to an arbitrary and unpopular regime. For, according to Washington, peasant revolutionaries were identified with the global communist menace, activated (it was believed) by a unified command structure controlled by Moscow and Beijing. Such a menace must be overcome, by force if necessary, before it endangered the security of the Western world.

84


Considered in more general terms of great power involvement with client states, the compulsive ‘push factor’ of the strategic fears and rivalries of the former is combined with the ‘pull factor’ of changes in the domestic situation of the latter. If such internal changes become critical they threaten the very survival of elites, who are also the ‘friends and allies’ of one or the other great power. In other words, internal and external factors are combined – not so much globally, as in ‘Orientalist’ or domino-type fantasies, but as a matter of specific situations. Indeed, specificity is the key to the emergence of crises, the success or failure of insurgencies, on the one hand, and the success or failure of great power intervention, on the other: consider Suez (1956), Vietnam (1960–75) and Iraq (2003–?). To repeat: global networks of alliances and ‘interests’, binding the imperial ‘patron’ and its ‘clients’ in a hierarchy of political, military and economic power, are subject to change and to challenge. Challenges result either from internal causes, affecting the stability or status of clients, or from the actions of rival powers, or from both combined. In normal times great powers prefer indirect ‘involvement’ to direct intervention in the management of client states. The exchange of goods and services – military, political or economic – along established lines is more conducive to the mutual (if unequal) benefit of patron and client. Power is economised, because it remains latent. Only a challenge to the system – as noted above – brings out the threat or use of force. Critical changes create a situation when seemingly there is no other choice but to intervene (Girling, 1980: esp. 147–51). Here are two, structurally related, examples: British intervention in Egypt, treated very briefly; and American intervention in Vietnam. Note that the psychological – and emotional – ground for intervention has been prepared in both cases by a form of ‘cultural imperialism’, which Said calls ‘Orientalism’. Observe, however, that the Oriental stereotypes, which predominate in the early phase of intervention, are increasingly overshadowed by global-strategic stereotypes in later stages: this is particularly the case with US intervention in Vietnam.

From involvement to intervention In the nineteenth-century era of the Pax Britannica, as in the present era of Pax Americana, laissez-faire government and free trade were the ruling ideas of business and politics. Political freedom and economic freedom were seen as the basis of prosperity, which led to moral and intellectual improvement, both at home and abroad. ‘It is the business of government’, as one notable British prime minister put it, ‘to open and secure the road


85

for the merchant’ (Lord Palmerston in 1841, quoted by Robinson and Gallagher, 1961: 2,5). When the Emperor Napoleon III later suggested that Britain could take possession of Egypt if France were allowed Morocco, that same statesman replied: ‘We want to trade with Egypt, and to travel through Egypt, but we do not want the burthen of governing Egypt.’ His attitude was: ‘Let us try to improve all these countries by the general influence of our commerce’ (quoted by Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt, 1908: vol. 1, 92). Such was the ‘imperialism of free trade’ that created an ‘informal empire’ bound by ties of trade and investment, coexisting with Britain’s colonial realm. But when informal means failed to provide security for British enterprise then it was necessary to resort to direct rule. ‘Stable governments’ were encouraged as ‘good investment risks’, but weaker or unsatisfactory states were liable to be coerced into a more cooperative behaviour (Robinson and Gallagher, 1953). Precisely the same justification was advanced by US administrations during the cold war and currently in the ‘war against terror’. Thus, Britain’s stake in a stable, cooperative Egypt was considered to be so important to its security – for Egypt and the Suez Canal were the gateway to the East – that even the ‘pacific’ government of Gladstone felt obliged to intervene (Issawi, 1947: 5). ‘England did not want to possess Egypt’, asserted the British pro-consul in Egypt, Sir Evelyn Baring (later Earl of Cromer), ‘but it was essential to British interests that the country should not fall into the hands of any other European Power’ (Cromer, 1908: 91). Gladstone, originally opposed to intervention, produced an eloquent justification for it once the deed was done. Since it is the kind of argument that is often employed on such occasions, it is worth quoting at some length: Every legitimate authority [in Egypt] . . . had been put down, and a situation of force had been created, which could only be met by force. This being so . . . if force were employed against the violence of Arabi, it should be force armed with the highest sanction of the law . . . the force of the sovereign, authorised and restrained by the united Powers of Europe, who in such case represent the civilised world . . . The British fleet . . . had the right and duty of self-defence . . . Met by fraud and falsehood in its demand [to dismantle the fortifications] it required surrender . . . and this being refused, it proceeded to destroy . . . As to its effect, it has taught many lessons, struck a heavy, perhaps a deadly blow at the reign of violence . . . shown the fanaticism of the East that massacre of Europeans is not likely to be perpetrated with

86


impunity, and greatly advanced the Egyptian question towards a permanent and peaceful solution. I feel that in being party to this work I have been a labourer in the service of peace . . . (Gladstone to John Bright, who had resigned from the Cabinet over the issue: quoted in Morley, 1903: vol. 3, 84–5). That the British government’s intentions were nothing if not honourable can be shown by its policy objective in occupying Egypt. In Baring’s words, this was ‘to restore order, to introduce some elementary reforms, and then to withdraw the British troops’ (Cromer, 1908: 349). There were two major problems with this optimistic scenario: one domestic, the other external. The rehabilitation of Egypt and the maintenance of the ruler’s authority, as Baring pointed out, were incompatible with a speedy British withdrawal. (In 1882 nearly 44 per cent of Egypt’s revenue went to pay Egypt’s creditors: Robinson and Gallagher, 1953: 129. It was not until 1888 that the ‘race against bankruptcy’ was won.) There was no way to ensure that the necessary administrative and fiscal reforms could be carried out, except under British guidance. What Egypt most required, advised Baring, was order and good government. Perhaps, after a long interval, liberty would follow (Cromer, 1908: 341, 343, 444). The second problem was that if Britain did withdraw prematurely, Egypt would either relapse into misrule or more likely fall into a state of anarchy, and succumb to intervention by a hostile power. ‘Once our troops go’, confirmed Lord Salisbury, then prime minister, in 1889, ‘the Khedive will not last for six months’ (Robinson and Gallagher, 1961: 282; also 162, 254–8, 264–70, 274–303). This being so, Baring recalled, ‘it was impossible for Great Britain to allow the troops of any other European Powers to occupy Egypt . . . A great nation cannot throw off the responsibility which its past history and its position in the world have imposed upon it’ (Cromer, 1908: 330). The unbridgeable gulf between East and West is a major theme of Baring/Cromer’s Modern Egypt, precisely as in Said’s Orientalism. The message clearly is: you can govern the Oriental, give him good administration, improve his welfare, even educate him – but you cannot understand him. On the one hand there is the splendid product of Western civilisation, notably the upright Englishman, and on the other hand the ‘tortuous’ Oriental, slothful and deceitful, with an ‘inveterate’ love of intrigue. It is not surprising that Cromer even in 1907 should decide that the ‘full and immediate execution of a policy of “Egypt for the Egyptians”, as it was conceived by the Arabists in 1882, was, and still is impossible’ (Vol. I, 327).


87

America and Vietnam, Part I: neo-realism and the language of intervention There is a remarkable similarity between the ‘realist’ views of the Earl of Cromer, looking back on his quarter-century stewardship in Egypt, and those of Wesley Fishel, head of the Michigan State University Advisory Group in Vietnam, assessing the early years of the Diem regime. Like Cromer, Fishel’s first task is to correct the all too prevalent misconception that liberal-democratic notions underlying the political consensus at home are applicable to conditions abroad. The ‘heart of our problem’, Fishel explains, is that ‘we see Asian situations through Western eyes and in terms of Western traditions and Western situations. We persist in attempting to apply our standards, 1959-style, to peoples and situations where they have no direct relevance.’ He continues: In Vietnam, as in the other new states of Asia . . . independence could not have been achieved and cannot be maintained, under prevailing world conditions, without strong leadership. And strong leadership implies the possession of great power . . . From the standpoint of the history of thought, the peoples of Southeast Asia are not, generally speaking, sufficiently sophisticated to understand what we mean by democracy and how they can exercise and protect their own political rights . . . their consciousness will be many years in awakening . . . [With low levels of literacy] the peoples of Southeast Asia should not be expected to understand, let alone embrace, the difficult articles of our democratic faith and practice. (Fishel, ‘Vietnam’s Democratic One-Man Rule’ in Gettleman, 1965: 200–1) It is not difficult to see what Fishel seeks to convey to an American audience. The first lesson is that strong leadership is a prerequisite for a newly-independent state, born under such troublesome conditions; that political stability, economic growth and, above all, security from the communist threat, must have priority over such desirable, but impractical matters as liberty and democracy; and that, in any case, a people newly emerging from a century of colonial subjugation can have little or no experience or even understanding of Western institutions and values. It follows, and this is the second lesson, that Americans should not become too impatient with their ward’s slow and perhaps imperfect progress towards constitutional government. Nor should they be too critical if a

88


benevolently authoritarian regime – one that is needed to get things done – somehow ‘neglects’ or even ‘sacrifices’ human rights in the process. The ‘unlettered majority’, Fishel points out, are far more interested in the immediate and tangible issues of security, improved standards of living and development. Dual crisis Such is the language of ‘involvement’. Americans were being prepared to work with a strong regime – not to take it over. But instead of the regime getting stronger and conditions improving, the reverse occurred. Only one year later, the rebellious Viet Cong – whose capacity had been reduced, in Fishel’s words, to one of ‘sheer nuisance activity’ – was estimated by the US ambassador to Saigon to pose a ‘serious danger’ of ‘gradual Viet Cong extension of control over countryside which, if current Communist progress continues, would mean loss of free Vietnam to Communists’ (Ambassador Durbrow to Secretary of State Herter, 16 September 1960, Pentagon Papers, 1971: Vol. II, 633). So, far from President Diem’s regime being ‘assuredly one of the most stable and honest on the periphery of Asia’, as Fishel would have it in 1959, only four years later it was overthrown by its own military commanders amid a storm of public criticism uniting Buddhists, students, professionals, workers and officials against the repression, manipulation and incompetence of the ruling family. Just as the British envoys to the Khedive’s Egypt urged the need for reforms – to restrain the abuses of arbitrary authority and to ‘rejuvenate’ the country – and found that the more they insisted on reforms the more they shook the ‘props’ that underpinned the system, so the same experience befell America’s political and military ‘advisers’ in Vietnam. Their language correspondingly changed from that of ‘association’ with the regime to one of ‘action’ in place of the regime – a change that was so significant that it required justification on globalist grounds. By 1964, with one coup rapidly following another, the entire government’s structure was falling apart. ‘The political situation remains critical and extremely fragile’, according to a top-level intelligence assessment in November 1964. ‘The security situation in the countryside has continued to deteriorate’ (draft by William Bundy and John McNaughton, 21 November 1964, Pentagon Papers, 1971: Vol. III, 656). US ambassador Maxwell Taylor, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, concluded this report: As our programs plod along or mark time, we sense the mounting feeling of war weariness and hopelessness which pervade South


89

Vietnam, particularly in the urban areas. Although the provinces for the most part appear steadfast, undoubtedly there is chronic discouragement there as well . . . [Many of the Vietnamese military leaders] are convinced that some new and drastic action must be taken to reverse the present trends . . . If, as the evidence shows, we are playing a losing game in South Vietnam, it is high time we change and find a better way . . . we need to do three things: first, establish an adequate government in SVN [South Vietnam]; second, improve the conduct of the counter insurgency campaign; and finally, persuade or force the DRV [Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam] to stop its aid to the Viet Cong . . . (Taylor’s briefing, 27 November 1964: Vol. III, 667–8). On 5 October 1961, however, a special National Intelligence Estimate had stated that 80 to 90 per cent of the estimated 17,000 Viet Cong had been locally recruited, and there was little evidence that the VC relied on external supplies (Vol. II, 75). Later, in reaction to US military intervention, North Vietnamese supplies and troops did play a vital role. America had come to the end of the road with a policy of advice and assistance. The drastic change for the worse in South Vietnam, both militarily and politically, forced an equally drastic change in American policy. As assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, William Bundy, recalled in May 1966, if the United States had not massively intervened in 1965, ‘the vicious arithmetic of guerrilla warfare would have brought victory to the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese masters’ (Department of State Bulletin, 20 June 1966). The US administration had been convinced, ever since the proclamation of President Eisenhower’s domino theory, that the ‘loss of South Viet Nam to Communism’ would mean America having to face the ‘near certainty that the remainder of Southeast Asia and Indonesia would move to a complete accommodation with Communism’ (report by Secretary of State Rusk and Defense Secretary McNamara to President Kennedy, 11 November 1961, Pentagon Papers: Vol. II, 111). The consequences of US defeat in Vietnam, Taylor warned in mid-1964, would be ‘disastrous’ in the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America (quoted by George Kahin, 1986: 238; Kahin’s is the most scrupulous and authoritative work on this period). Therefore, it was argued, the ‘security of South Viet Nam remains vital to United States’ security’. Given the ‘overriding objective of denying this country to Communism’ – according to the report of the mission by McNamara and Taylor (Pentagon Papers: Vol. II, 753) – so ‘involvement’ by force of necessity became armed intervention.

90


‘This is a major change in U.S. policy’, as McNamara recognised in July 1965. ‘We have [previously] relied on South Vietnam to carry the brunt. Now we would be responsible for satisfactory military outcome’ (meeting of President Johnson with US military chiefs, 22 July 1965, quoted by Kahin, 1986: 382). Preparation for war The three-point programme foreshadowed by Maxwell Taylor was put into effect: an ‘adequate’ government was established under South Vietnamese military leaders Thieu and Ky, while the US mission in Vietnam warned all potential (South Vietnamese) coup-makers against any attempt to overthrow it; counter-insurgency was ‘improved’ by the intervention of half a million US troops, who took over the war from the demoralised army of the Republic of (South) Vietnam; and ‘military pressure’ was brought to bear on North Vietnam by the escalating air war. But President Johnson did not – and could not – announce the momentous act of intervention in such ‘realist’ terms. Nor could he go through Fishel’s exercise of justifying authoritarian leadership in South Vietnam as being indispensable for security, independence and development. Successive Saigon regimes had utterly failed to provide security; and the search for independence had only resulted in a state of greater dependence on the imperial patron than ever. The president could not, on the other hand, urge his fellow Americans to support a democratically-elected government in Saigon, defending the liberties of its citizens; although he had tried that out as vice-president in 1961, when he lauded Diem as being ‘in the vanguard of those leaders who stand for freedom’ (joint declaration by Johnson and President Diem, 13 May 1961, quoted in Gettleman, 1965: 205). For the fact was that Diem’s elections were blatantly rigged (see US ambassador’s comment on Diem’s ‘successful’ elections, 19 September 1963, Pentagon Papers: Vol. II, 750) – while his successors had usurped power in one coup after another.

America and Vietnam, Part II: the internal context and the linkage of intervention The previous section has drawn attention to the language – expressing the global rationale – of intervention. Now one must go back in time to analyse the antecedents of that momentous decision – namely, the context in which intervention took place. Such an analysis reveals the ‘logic’ of internal deterioration (in South Vietnam) combined with external compulsion: the ‘pull’ and ‘push’ factors of the global condition. It was


91

in response to this linked logic – and not from the fine motives of Johnson’s address – that the president decided to intervene. It was not until the external component of the linkage could be considered dispassionately – as a result a few years later of the NixonKissinger detente with Russia and rapprochement with China, previously considered hell-bent on aggression – that America would be free from the bondage of Vietnam. No doubt the real ‘lesson’ of the compulsion to intervene in Vietnam, however, is that if the first component of linkage – the internal crisis in a client state – had also been realistically analysed, then America’s war in Vietnam, like the French colonial war before that, might have been avoided altogether. Indeed, a major difference between British intervention in Egypt (discussed above) and American intervention in Vietnam is that the British government had been aware of social conditions in Egypt – because of the ruinous debts of an arbitrary ruler whose exactions on the suffering peasantry were imposed by ruthless and corrupt landowners and officials – but it was under a ‘delusion’ about the strength and appeal of nationalism. Just the opposite was the case with the Americans in Vietnam. US administrations, from Truman to Nixon, recognised the force of nationalism; but during the important initial period of American commitment they were deluded about social conditions. South Vietnam’s first prime minister and president, Ngo Dinh Diem, had impeccable credentials. A fervent nationalist, he had rejected the French-controlled ‘independence’ granted the previous puppet regime of the emperor Bao Dai, preferring to live in exile in the United States. He was untainted by collaboration with French colonialism during the first Indochina war; and he was an intensely moral man, being a devout Catholic. Such was the ideal ‘new leader for a new nation’ – born in 1954 – conforming to all the tenets of social science. (There is an ample literature on ‘nation-building’ – famously rejected many years later by President George W. Bush, but then re-adopted in extremis – such as Max F. Millikan and Donald L.M. Blackmer, 1961). But Diem’s American sponsors were deluded about social conditions. Diem was indeed a nationalist, but he represented the conservative ‘nation’ of the owners of property, the possessors of power and privilege. Diem’s immediate base of support was even more restricted: refugees from the North, the Catholic minority and clients in the existing bureaucracy. Opposed to Diem’s nation was the nation of the poor and dispossessed, especially in the countryside. (Northern Vietnam was a land of subsistence smallholders, living on the margin of survival; in the South, by contrast, half the rural population did not own the land they tilled, but paid rent

92


in kind: perhaps another quarter were landless labourers. A few large landowners owned nearly half the cultivated area: Le Thanh Khoi, 1955, quoted in Girling, 1969: 119–20; Marr, 1981: 28.) Peasant support had been the key to victory by Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh movement in the struggle for independence from France, resulting in the de facto separation of North and South Vietnam. Under prevailing Western social science doctrines, however, Vietnam’s social conditions under French colonial rule could readily be dismissed as a kind of prehistory; South Vietnam ‘began’ in 1954. The fact of independence wiped the slate clean: a ‘new nation’ was starting afresh. One element, at least, in the French war in Indochina should have aroused concern. For as a former Vietnam specialist in the State Department has pointed out, total Soviet and Chinese economic and military aid to Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam amounted, from 1945 to 1954, to only about $400 million (Kattenburg, 1980: 19). US economic and military aid to the French in Indochina from 1950 to 1954 totalled some $3.5 billion (Montgomery, 1962, quoted by Kattenburg, 1980: 23). The enormous disproportion between these amounts was evident at the time. The implication is that economic and military aid, even in vast quantities, could not have been a decisive factor: for despite such aid and overwhelming military superiority, the French were losing the war. So what was decisive? Better generalship? The Viet Minh indeed had a commander of genius, General Vo Nguyen Giap. But the French, too, had enlisted their finest soldier, General de Lattre de Tassigny. If sheer military proficiency was not crucial, then what was? This line of questioning was not pursued. If it had, the answer could only have been the spirit of nationalism combined with the social motivation to create, not a ‘new nation’, but a new society. The question was not asked, because it had been pre-empted by another answer: French colonialism could not win because it failed to mobilise the forces of nationalism to its side. America would not make that mistake. The combined result of these pressures amid the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam was Kennedy’s decision to break with the provision of the 1954 Geneva accords (ending French involvement in Vietnam) that limited the number of foreign military advisers. Before 1961, as Kattenburg points out, the United States had been careful to observe these limitations. Even the relatively minor move to double the size of the US Vietnam Military Assistance Advisory Group from some 400 men to about 800 in late 1956 had been preceded by most careful diplomatic negotiations. The ‘extraordinarily fateful decision’ to increase American military strength to 12,000 men (attained in mid-1962) ‘signalled to the [US] foreign affairs and national security bureaucracies the end of Geneva and of


93

restraint’ and the beginning of the counter-insurgency drive to defeat the menace of communism (Kattenburg, 1980: 108–9; by the end of 1963, there were more than 16,000 military advisers: Kahin, 1986: 129). Global focus It is essential to understand the environment in which this crucial decision, so fateful for American intervention in Vietnam, was undertaken. From the record of American decision-making in the Pentagon Papers we can see the convergence – and thus the linkage – of two fundamental elements: the globalist assumptions of the communist danger to American security; and the specific US reaction to the crisis developing in South Vietnam. The report of the Staley mission to South Vietnam in August 1961 shows the linkage in operation: [South] Vietnam is today under attack in a bitter, total struggle which involves its survival as a free nation. Its enemy, the Viet Cong, is ruthless, resourceful and elusive. The enemy is supplied, reinforced and centrally directed by the international communist apparatus operating through Hanoi . . . (Pentagon Papers: Vol. II, 63) This globalist assumption, as the analysts compiling the Pentagon Papers (instructed by McNamara as a record of US policy) point out, is typical of official reporting on Vietnam. (Only one staff paper can be found in the available record, they note, which treats communist reactions in terms of the separate national interests of Hanoi, Moscow and Peking: 107.) Characteristically, communist insurgency in South Vietnam is considered to be but one instance of a worldwide communist strategy employing ‘methods of subversion and guerrilla warfare which by-pass conventional U.S. and indigenous strength on the ground’, according to the mission led by President Kennedy’s military adviser, General Maxwell Taylor. Moreover, any attempt to neutralise Southeast Asia would be merely an ‘interim goal’ on the way to ‘total takeover’. The Taylor mission’s ‘fundamental conclusion’ is that the ‘United States must decide how it will cope with Khrushchev’s [sic] “wars of liberation” which are really para-wars of guerrilla aggression’ (‘Eyes Only’ for the president, recommending introduction of a US military force into South Vietnam, 3 November 1961, Pentagon Papers: Vol. II, 88, 98). Neutralism for South Vietnam, which might have proved viable in the early 1960s, was thus rejected as a political solution, because it was seen merely as a halfway stage to communism. Indeed, national security adviser

94


McGeorge Bundy insisted (in January 1964) that any movement towards neutralism would mean ‘a rapid collapse of anti-communist forces in South Vietnam, and a unification of the whole country on communist terms’ (quoted by Kahin, 1986: 191, 250). Taylor explicitly combined the international with the ‘indigenous’ threat to America’s military security in his secret cable to the president: In Vietnam (and in Southeast Asia) there is a double crisis in confidence: doubt that U.S. is determined to save Southeast Asia; doubt that Diem’s methods can frustrate and defeat Communist purposes and methods . . . What the U.S. does or fails to do will be decisive to this end result. It was, of course, taken for granted, first, that one country after another would ‘accommodate’ to communism if the United States did not intervene; and second, that this ‘crumbling’ process would upset the entire global balance of power, thus endangering America’s own security. Given these assumptions, General Taylor’s specific recommendations follow logically. ‘From all quarters of Southeast Asia’, according to the Taylor report, ‘the message on Vietnam is the same’: vigorous American action is needed to ‘buy time’ for Vietnam to mobilise and organise its real assets; but time for such a turnaround has nearly run out. And if Vietnam (read: South Vietnam) goes, it will be exceedingly difficult if not impossible to hold Southeast Asia. What will be lost, the general argued, is not merely ‘a crucial piece of real estate’, but the faith that America has the ‘will and the capacity’ to deal with the communist offensive (Pentagon Papers: Vol. II, 93). Taylor therefore urged ‘a quick U.S. response to the present crisis’ which would demonstrate by deeds the American commitment to ‘save Vietnam’. To be persuasive ‘this commitment must include the sending to Vietnam of some U.S. military forces’. Further action, advised Taylor, should include ‘a shift in the American relationship to the Vietnamese effort from advice to limited partnership’. Taylor also hinted at the ‘need to strike the source of aggression’ – North Vietnam – once the ‘fact of external aggression is clearly established’. He referred to the ‘extreme vulnerability of North Vietnam to conventional bombing’ (90, 93, 95–7). These crucial decisions were not taken – at the time. President Kennedy in effect deferred action on Taylor’s major proposals by adopting a more limited – and therefore more politic – US response, on the assumption that an increase in US ‘advice and assistance’ would be sufficient to stave off an imminent collapse of the Diem regime (117–18; see also Kahin, 1986: 136–8).


95

The crisis was deferred. But not for long. The political and military deterioration of the Saigon regime, which had so alarmed Taylor in 1961, became impossible to hold in check by US advice and assistance alone. Thus the ‘hope’ expressed by Kennedy that limited US measures ‘will galvanize and supplement GVN [government of (South) Vietnam] effort, making decision on the use of U.S. combat forces unnecessary . . . ’ (Pentagon Papers: Vol. II, 118–19) proved to be in vain. Already in 1961, as a member of Taylor’s mission reported: One after another, Vietnamese officials, military men and ordinary citizens spoke to me of the situation in their country as ‘grave’ and ‘deteriorating’ . . . They have lost confidence in President Diem and in his leadership . . . [They] now explode in angry denunciation of the man, his family, and his methods . . . Intrigue, nepotism and even corruption might be accepted, for a time, if combined with efficiency and visible progress. When they accompany administrative paralysis and steady deterioration, they become intolerable. (William Jordan of the State Department: 95) By June 1962 the US had abandoned hopes of Diem making any significant effort at reforms. The US mission in Saigon was instructed to get along with Diem and ‘forget about political reforms’ (Kahin, 1986: 139).

America and Vietnam, Part III: intervention explained The fateful shift from American involvement via ‘limited partnership’ to a takeover of the war in South Vietnam was set in motion – with such tragic consequences. Even today we ask ourselves how and why should so momentous an act of intervention, so far from America’s shores, have been undertaken? Aside from the bogey theories of radical right and left – the need to prevent communist world domination and to protect the global system of economic exploitation – we find two major attempts at explanation: the ‘quagmire’ theory advanced notably by Arthur M. Schlesinger (1968), historian of the Kennedy years, and by David Halberstam, author of The Making of a Quagmire; and the ‘stalemate machine’ proposed by Daniel Ellsberg (1971), the Defense Department researcher who revealed the Pentagon Papers, and Leslie Gelb’s (1971) variant, ‘the system worked’. Gelb was director of the Pentagon Papers project. (See also Kattenburg’s discussion, 248–50, and Girling, ‘Pentagon Papers’, The World Today, February 1972.)

96


Moderate critics of the Vietnam war tend to adopt the quagmire thesis, summed up in Schlesinger’s phrase ‘the politics of inadvertence’. Successive US administrations, sustained by unwarranted optimism but blinkered by ignorance, fear and prejudice, simply blundered into a quagmire. The deeper they sank, the more they believed that one more step in the process of escalation would ‘turn the corner’. Radical critics like Ellsberg reject the ‘quagmire myth’ as an attempt at whitewashing by members of the same liberal establishment that waged the war. The ‘stalemate thesis’ holds that (apart from untypical moments of euphoria) leaders of successive US administrations realised that they were in an ‘unwinnable’ situation; but that they could not afford to fail, or appear to fail. Therefore they took the minimum actions necessary (maximum actions would have been too risky internationally) to hold the line in South Vietnam. They hoped, but in vain, that these would be sufficient. Walt Rostow (quoted by Gelb, 1979: 77) considered that Kennedy in 1961 ‘took the minimum steps he judged necessary to stabilize the situation . . . but conscious that harder decisions might lie ahead’. The result of successive ‘minimum’ actions, each of which was inadequate to ‘turn the tide’ was, of course, escalation, especially the employment of US combat troops. This was an outcome which three presidents had sought to avoid. The reason for their ‘desperate’ situation is simple. The traumatic ‘loss of China’ – because of Mao’s victory in 1949 over America’s ally, Chiang Kai-shek – had been so shattering to the Democrats in the 1950s, Ellsberg argues, that on their return to power under Kennedy and Johnson in the 1960s they could not face being burdened with the humiliation of ‘defeat’ in Vietnam. Like Kattenburg, I agree that the evidence of the Pentagon Papers supports the ‘stalemate’ interpretation. By 1961 the Kennedy administration was aware – as we have seen – that the position in South Vietnam was critical. Thus it could not carry on with the existing level of assistance, or the Saigon regime would sooner or later collapse. ‘Loss of Vietnam’ would then prove fatal to the president’s electoral prospects. But the president could not take ‘decisive’ action to win the war either, because this would inevitably provoke counteraction by the Russians and the Chinese. (Johnson himself was seriously concerned not to provoke China by invading North Vietnam because of the ‘quite palpable evidence’ that the Chinese would react, as they had in Korea, to any threat to their security: Kahin, 1986: 338–41, 365–401.) In domestic terms, moreover, the jump from limited assistance to immediate and massive engagement in war could not have been understood, and therefore accepted, by American public opinion and by


97

Congress. Johnson at the height of intervention, as is well known, neither mobilised the reserves nor sacrificed his ‘Great Society’ programme, for this reason. The ‘maximum’ efforts to win the war were therefore deferred in the hope that the ‘minimum’ would be sufficient to keep the stalemate going – until the next presidential election was over. But in a deteriorating situation the minimum was never enough: thus assistance in South Vietnam became ‘partnership’, which in turn became intervention.

Credibility A final point at issue is the question of credibility; this, too, is claimed by Ellsberg to be merely a ‘rationale’ for actions basically determined by electoral considerations. Yet in a confidential (although later much quoted) memorandum in 1965 by Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton to McNamara, the credibility of American commitments to its allies (that is, its ‘reputation as a guarantor’) is stated to be far and away the most important US objective (24 March 1965, Pentagon Papers: Vol. III, 634–5). It is equally significant that the McNaughton memorandum confirms the stalemate thesis. The author begins: ‘The situation in Vietnam is bad and deteriorating . . . the decline probably will not “bottom out” unless major actions are taken’ (meaning ‘extreme measures’ against North Vietnam and deployment of US combat troops: 696). But the United States is in a ‘trilemma’: This is because, while there is near-consensus that efforts inside SVN [South Vietnam] will probably fail to prevent collapse, all 3 of the possible remedial courses of action have been rejected for one reason or another [they were all, of course, attempted later]: (a) will-breaking strikes on DRV [North Vietnam]; (b) large [US] troop deployments; (c) exit by negotiations. McNaughton then defines US aims in terms of priorities: 70% – To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor). 20% – To keep SVN (and then adjacent territory) from Chinese hands. 10% – To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life. Note that the public presentation by the Johnson administration reversed these priorities.

98


The evidence suggests strongly that there was a triple ‘global-ideological’ conditioning of America’s leaders in the 1950s and 1960s: (1) to prevent the ‘spread of communism’ by the US policy of ‘containment’, established by President Truman at the onset of the cold war; (2) in the event of crisis, to take a military approach to political problems; and (3) to guarantee US reliability to protect its allies and friends by demonstrating firmness and resolve. This threefold objective predisposed the US administration to intervene, in a deteriorating situation, in an area deemed vital to its security; and was combined with the electoral necessity, even under ‘unwinnable’ conditions, not to withdraw from the quagmire. (Forty years later, the Bush doctrine follows the same pattern: to prevent the spread of terrorism by a policy of containment; in the event of a crisis – for example, Iraq – to take a military/security approach to socio-political problems; and to emphasise US reliability by demonstrating firmness and resolve. Involvement leads to intervention.)

5 Violence

But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of . . . all the appearances of success and power. ( Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) Proportion and rule [characteristic of civilised life] are irretrievably embedded in chance and disorder. (Ernst Jünger, writer, war-hero, nationalist)

Will to power The great achievement of Ernst Jünger’s Auf den Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs), first published in 1939, is to make the reader feel the danger confronting a peaceful and prosperous community: a menace set in motion by the violence of a leader, spreading disorder in the land. A timeless story: elements of the archaic and the modern; and extending in space, from the lonely hermitage at the foot of forested mountains, whose ‘marble cliffs’ shine like fire from the rays of the setting sun, to the recollected journeys throughout Europe of two brothers, now living in their mountain retreat, and dedicated to scholarly pursuits. Jünger’s parable is steeped in Gothic romanticism, with the appearance of spectres, the vertiginous mountains, the beauty of nature – for the brothers collect and classify rare flowers, like Linnaeus. It is an atmosphere detached from everyday life, giving a sense of unreality, a feeling of mysticism and magic. Such a charmed existence is brutally exposed to the reality of violence, murder, destruction, and ghoulish rites. The atavism of powerful 99

100


emotions – loyalty, kinship bonds, hatred, revenge – felt by the rough and honest mountain folk is in contrast to the cultivated enjoyment of good fellowship in the peaceful cities in the valley below. There is a marked distinction, however, between the free spirit and warm hospitality of the original forest folk and the cynicism and will to power of newcomers to the forest, unbound by settled customs and loyalties, whose murderous expansion spreads terror far and wide. Such violence is a form of madness, driving people to extremes, with overwhelming fear on one side facing despotism on the other. The brothers recall with melancholy the happy ‘moon and sun’ years which have so horribly come to an end. They think of their friendly life, ‘under a peaceful roof, inspired by good conversation and greetings filled with love from morning to night’, possessing its own magic. Such was their earthly paradise, for the country was ‘rich and beautiful’. During festivals the women wore clothes of ancient style, there was dancing and feasting, wantonness and abundance: ‘a feeling of freedom’. It was the spirit of a land long before church bells sounded, before the plough turned the earth. They saw the sun rise over the Alta Plana, shining all the way to the borders of Burgundy. The brothers remembered how Erio, the young grandson of the household cook, had struck his little kettle with a strange sound, whereupon the snakes inhabiting the clefts of the Marble Cliffs slithered forth to surround him. As if in a dream the brothers heard Erio laugh, while the deadly poisonous serpents weaved among themselves and poised their triangular heads. The brothers ‘felt a masterful feeling of safety in the midst of blazing danger’. They were delighted with the way in which the young child kept the snakes in order. (Later, Erio and the snakes were to save the brothers from being killed.) The library of the hermitage was filled with volumes, old and new. In the herbarium were flowers loved and collected in many years of wandering. ‘We felt as if, in our studies, the strength grew in us to tame the lifepower.’ The philosophy of Otho, the elder brother, was to treat people as if they were a rare discovery, found on their wanderings. The younger brother, the narrator, felt a new direction in life, but in words that were hard to express. ‘The word is king and magician alike.’ Both had the notion that order ruled the elements of this world and felt the urge to create. Although they came to realise instead that chance and confusion are integral to civilised life, that the higher one climbs the more the horizon of chance dwindles and when we are high enough the ‘pure ring of eternity’ surrounds us. In this way the brothers had lost a little of the fear that, like fog rising from a swamp, confuses the senses.

Violence

101

Their new-found serenity was not to last. Looking back, they reproached themselves: ‘how did it happen that we did not abandon our work when the chief forester, known to us as the old master of Mauretania, brought his power into our region and spread terror all around?’ His realm, which he called Teutoburger Wald (named after the forest in which the Germanic hero Arminius inflicted a major defeat on the Roman army: a powerful symbol of German nationalism) was vast and provided him with wealth. At his house, according to old custom, one ate and drank to excess. The brothers, who knew him well, had the opportunity to observe him closely and felt the breath of ancient power drawn from his forests. He had the appearance of ‘frightening joviality’ when he laughed; also the impression of cunning and unshakeable force. At that time it was agreeable to meet him, for they lived a hedonistic life and sat at the table of the mighty of this world. But this was an epoch of decline, the brothers reflected, in which the form is dissipated that is inscribed in inner life. Then we become disoriented, as if our nature lacks balance. We fall from hollow joy to gloom and grief. We are conscious of the loss that animates us in an alluring past and future. We move in distant times or far-off utopias in which the immediate moment flies away. Seeking to escape, we turn towards power. Then we dream of omnipotence and of the forms which are ranged in the deadly struggle of life, whether leading to downfall or triumph. In such a mood it was unavoidable that the Mauretanian chief – the ‘Capitano’ – should approach us. We were initiated into the circle of the man who had suppressed the great rebellion of the Iberian provinces. The Mauretanians demanded that might should be exerted, godlike, without passion. When they were victorious their Order did not value its members, but its Head, its Doctrine. Yet it was not enjoyment of tranquillity that lingered. For whenever people lose control then fear begins to govern them, and they are driven blindly in its turbulence. But with the Mauretanians there is unmoved stillness, as in the centre of a cyclone. Once, as the brothers were drinking with the Capitano, he glanced into his wine-cup, as if into a mirror, and spoke as in a dream: ‘no glass of champagne was ever more precious than the time when we burned the Spanish city of Sagunto’. And we then thought: ‘Better to die with the Master than live with those whose fear makes them crawl in the dust.’ When the brothers came to themselves, they realised that the Mauretanians were experts in power and were biding their time to erect a new tyranny, which from the beginning was their desire. From that time on the brothers avoided the dark borders of the forest of the Capitano’s realm. Soon the brothers heard rumours, like a plague raging in its fastness.

102


Then from mouth to mouth came news of attacks and violence, which finally were no longer concealed. The Capitano went about as if enveloped in a cloud of fear. It was this quality, the brothers felt, more than the man himself on which his power was based. It was projected from his realm around the Marble Cliffs to the south in the area of Marina and further towards the free mountain country of Alta Plana. In Marina there was neither frost nor snow, even in the coldest winter. Figs and oranges grew profusely and roses bloomed all year. During feast days in Marina one realised what was meant by life. Along its borders were cities with Roman walls and towers and there were castles from Merovingian times. Towards the north was the Campagna, which was separated from Marina by the Marble Cliffs, as if by a wall. In the forests around the Marble Cliffs roamed wild shepherds, following their flocks. Among these untamed people there was a crude sense of justice, based entirely on reprisal. After each untimely death a blood feud erupted, involving family and kin. At the same time their hospitality towards guests was proverbial. From the earliest age, moreover, secretive networks had evolved. But as rumours of violent outrages came from the Campagna, it seemed as if the old blood feuds became intensified. The raw feeling for honour, which kept the use of power in check, lost its strength. Crime took its place. Spies and agents went forth from the kinship groups in the forest down to the more settled regions. If a dead man was found at a crossroads, struck with a dagger, it was a sign that he was a traitor, killed in revenge. Robber gangs demanded tribute and their exactions increased unbearably. Mobs from the forest, known as ‘fireworms’, appeared before farmhouses and if their entry was refused they broke their way in. The bodies of victims were loaded into boxes and sent off to the families they belonged to. People no longer dared to talk openly about these things, because law had been subordinated to anarchy. Such a state of confusion developed that a number of young people, even sons of notables, joined these bands, believing they had found a new freedom. They despised the old occupations of cultivating corn or grapes. Who could believe, the brothers asked incredulously, that old gods now reappeared to be worshipped in Marina? Indeed, popular mentality was now subject to the magic of barbaric idols. Poets were no longer asked to give funeral orations. Instead, hatred spread like a plague. There were manhunts and people died without reason. The Capitano played on these feelings like a master. He doled out fear in small doses, gradually increasing its strength, until resistance gave way. In the confusion of events adepts of the new ways were to be found in offices and courtrooms, even in the churches. The magistrates themselves realised

Violence

103

what was going on but were powerless to stop the violence. Adding to the disorder were the exactions of mercenaries, who had long been employed in Marina, and under settled conditions did good service. Now with the outbreak of disputes factions formed and each faction sought the help of mercenaries. As a result the use of terror got worse. Controlling their areas by force, the mercenaries themselves wore the mask of order. Isolated houses and farms became the last outpost of freedom But the troops found them out and chased away the inhabitants by Nacht und Nebel (night and fog: the Nazi extermination slogan). None came back. Black magic flourished under these conditions. An ancient document, the manuscript of Rabbi Nilufer, contained the key to many of these dark activities. It was in secluded forests, too, the Rabbi wrote, that the Pied Piper of Hamelin had vanished along with the children of the town. At this time the brothers, who had previously put away their own weapons, and yearned for a life without violence, found solace in the friendship of old Belovar, a prosperous pastoral farmer. It was this old warrior who incarnated the best that pastureland could offer. His eyes sparkled when he talked of the bloodfeud, and the brothers realised that the heart of the enemy acted like a powerful magnet on him. To the brothers he was like a faithful hound, ‘although the wolf-nature still glowed in him’. But there was nothing shameful in his behaviour. Indeed, he hated the ‘dark power’ of the gangs originating in the Campagna forests. Above all, friendship had a real meaning for Belovar: ‘it flamed no less unconsciously and as untamed as hatred’. Only with such friendship did the brothers feel protected against the dangers surrounding them. Many a night as they sat at work in the library and the herbarium they saw the ‘murder-fire’ burning on the Marble Cliffs. (Old Belovar was to die fighting valiantly against these evil hordes.) Despite the ever-growing threat the brothers decided to resist only by pure means. As the crimes spread throughout the land so the brothers withdrew more deeply into the ‘mysterium’ of the flowers they loved. They became more aware of the importance of language, for words possess a magic that weakens even the force of tyranny. They reflected on the threefold unity of Word, Freedom and Spirit. But stranger objects also comforted them. Among these was the Nigromontanus mirror, inherited from an old teacher who had brought it from the Far East. The mirror was like a key to higher realms: ‘in every good weapon is magic strength’. The rays projected by the mirror predicted that ‘we would not completely be defeated and that the best in us was inaccessible to destructive force’. On foggy days the brothers would go off on excursions, when ‘calamity lay thick like a cloak on the land’. On their way to the Marble Cliffs they

104


passed by ruined farmhouses and they saw the bones of cattle whitening in their broken stalls. After one hour’s walk they reached Belovar’s house, which he had preserved from the rabble. Ominously, it appeared like an outpost that remains unscathed for a time although the fortress has fallen. Continuing on past Belovar’s pastureland, the brothers felt the violence stronger and nearer: the fog flowed among the bushes, the reeds stirred in the wind, even the earth they trod on seemed strange and unfamiliar. The land was deceptive: they saw fields as if in a dream. The details of the journey were beyond means of expression: the spell could not be broken. The brothers felt that they were groping for the right way in a labyrinth, seeking a design enclosed in a puzzle. It seemed that in their struggle language could not be satisfied, but that in their dream-depth they must break through in order to endure what was threatening. So, even as the fog thickened, their strength grew and order was restored. So dense was the fog that the brothers soon lost their way. They heard shots and thought they saw shapes. Seized with fear, they saw a scene of horror. At the entrance to an old barn looming out of the fog they could make out a skull fixed to the doorway, while on the roof-gable a pair of hands was nailed. As the fog lifted they saw dead heads, glistening whitely, on the surrounding trees. The shadow of a large bird appeared: a vulture. The brothers could not say how long they stood, transfixed. Then, hand in hand, they rushed away. Back in the hermitage they met two men. They were the last hope of salvation. One was a Mauretanian, named Braquemart, the other the young Prince of Sunmyra. The Mauretanian, as they knew, went into danger as a mountaineer climbed for sport, afraid of no obstacle. As all who are obsessed by power, he had wild utopian dreams. It was his conviction that there are only two races on earth: masters and slaves. The Prince, in contrast, had an air of great suffering and appeared bent under the weight of his problems. Decadence showed in his character, born of the inheritance of dead possessions. Yet, in the last phase of the struggle for Marina, nobility appeared. For it is the hearts of the old nobility that feel the suffering of the people. At such times when there is no longer observance of law and old customs and fear deceives the senses, then the strength of ordinary people is soon overwhelmed. But out of the old stock of the nobility, the brothers had believed, new sprouts of justice would emerge: nobles would once more take up arms as knightly leaders in the struggle for freedom. But this was an illusion. Indeed, they saw in the Prince a prematurely aged person, who himself needed protection.

Violence

105

The brothers weighed the different characters of the rival Mauretanians: Braquemart and the Capitano. For it was an error, they realised, to think that those using the same method would have the same ultimate goals. The latter wanted to occupy the land with cattle, while the former only saw it as a source of slaves. Force and fear were the mainspring of Braquemart’s life. His cold, ruthless intelligence had no place for salvation. Embittered, he sought to revenge himself on the world. There was a barrenness to his plans, although no lack of logic. In this respect the Capitano was superior. He wore his power like an old hunting-coat that fitted him all the more when it was drenched in mire and blood. No doubt Braquemart recognised his weakness in the face of the Capitano and so decided to ally himself with the Prince. But the brothers’ discussion with the two men was fruitless: ‘what is the use of human advice and will when decline is written in the stars?’ All they could do was suggest the help of old Belovar, for the two men, unprepared and without leadership, were in great danger. Braquemart, the pure technician of power, saw only small details, not the root of things. The Prince, a noble spirit, knew the right order, but like a child was entering the forest where wolves were howling. The younger brother went to help the Prince, while old Belovar girded himself for war. His pack of hounds bayed to hunt their prey: among them were dogs of the same race that the Romans bred to fight in the arena against mountain oxen and lions. It was an atmosphere of madness that brought joy to old Belovar. The younger brother, too, felt his heart beating strongly: none of the treasures of the earth could compare with the desire to act bravely and with honour! So the hounds moved to attack. They launched themselves against the Capitano’s bloodhounds and his ‘Cuba dog’, one of the race that the Spanish trained in the old days to tear American Indians apart. Against such a terrifying pack, the brother knew that Belovar’s light hounds were lost, but that they would fight to the end. Intermingled came the howling of the packs and the sound of shots amid the flickering light of torches. Caught up in the tumult, the brother found himself by the same barn where the skulls were displayed on trees. To his horror, he saw two new heads: those of the Prince and Braquemart. That of the Prince bore a smile of sweetness: he had overcome the dragon of fear. Then the brother swore, before this head, that in all the future it was better to die with the free than go in triumph with slaves. He took the head of the Prince from the stake and carried it away. Yet another dreadful discovery followed: old Belovar was dead. When the brothers were reunited, all around them were ruins, churches and houses burning. The old and beautiful cities of Marina lay destroyed. The brothers fled, leaving their life’s work behind.

106


Elemental drives The power of primal emotions drives Jünger’s dreadful allegory of German society. Thus: the experience of fear and hatred in equal measures; the emotional condition of confusion and disorder; the charismatic appeal of a leader; the pervasive effect of violence; and the inability to resist these ‘dark forces’ by the traditional institutions of the state, including the military, as well as by the newly introduced democracy. As a result of the paralysis of the old order, the promoters of violent change were able to canalise popular emotions, especially fear, in support of the new leadership, which could now provide protection ( Jünger’s ‘mask of order’). Beyond the scope of Jünger’s novel, however, was the even more horrifying way in which hatred could be directed against so-called internal enemies (concretely: left-wing movements, ‘anti-social’ elements and, above all, the Jews) as well as against the external threat (Bolshevism and the ‘plutocratic’ democracies encircling the state). The new leaders, having crushed democracy, intimidated the judiciary and co-opted industry, bureaucracy and military, then consolidated its support by unremitting emphasis on power and patriotism: that is, unyielding strength and virulent nationalism. For Jünger’s imagined world reflected the fateful struggle for national unity and the ambition to be a great power, which dominated politics in Germany in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. In this struggle there were two main forces: the ‘classical’ elitist revolution from above, directed by the leaders of an authoritarian state, from the Prussian statesman Hardenberg and Bismarck, the forger of German unity, to Kaiser Wilhelm II; and the ‘romantic’ popular revolution from below, inspired on the one hand by advocates of folkculture, and on the other by political parties of the Left. A third, or middle way modelled on British middle class parliamentary democracy was much admired by liberals and professionals; but they failed to achieve German reunification under their aegis, and they failed to stem the dangerous consequences of authoritarian rule. (Girling, 1993: Introduction, 4 and esp. Chapter 3) All three approaches derived their impetus from the humiliating defeat of militarist Prussia inflicted by Napoleon combined with the intolerable feeling of powerlessness among patriotic Germans, whose land was fragmented into numerous small and medium-sized states. Advocates of the ‘classical’ approach accordingly emphasised the need for renovation

Violence

107

or reform of the state apparatus – for a technically trained military, for an efficient bureaucracy and for an educated elite – to lead the revolution from above. Organisers of the romantic movement, to the contrary, based their appeal on the Volk (the people) rather than the ‘nation’, for moral rather than administrative reform, and for organic ‘Germanness’ rather than ‘artificial’ statehood. Nevertheless, it was the classical approach to German unity and its great-power role that triumphed under Bismarck’s policy of ‘blood and iron’; but under a less able and more impulsive leader that same approach collapsed ignominiously with the defeat of imperial Germany in the First World War. In the postwar years, with all the rancour of a lost war and in the turmoil of social conflict – amid ruinous inflation and then massive unemployment – the ‘rational’ middle way of parliamentary democracy (the Weimar Republic) could not consolidate its authority but yielded to the Nazi fusion of extremes: of calculation and emotion, of leadership and mass following, of the classical and the romantic. (Not until the catastrophic defeat of World War II, purging the country of its virulent nationalism and race hatred, could the democratic middle way prevail.) How can we explain that terrifying fusion of extremes – the seeming madness that overtook a people so gifted in their civilisation? Three sources have often been noted. First of all, nationalism – the passionate urge for national unity and greatness spurred on by the humiliating contrast with the reality both of territorial and social fragmentation and by military defeat. Second, the romantic movement – the emphasis on the Volk, the mystical unity of a people, on feeling and emotion rather than reason, on ceaseless change rather than established order. Finally, racism – an obsessive sense of racial purity allied to heroic mission (again in contrast to the frustrating reality) and yet the feeling that both mission and purity were under threat of ‘contamination’ by those considered to be inferior or degenerate. The potency of these nationalist, mythical-romantic and racial feelings – brought out in myths that fuse intellect and emotion, that express the frustrated yearnings of a people, and create a sense of identity – can hardly be overestimated. It was Nietzsche – fourth ‘source’ of that historic German fusion – who forced attention, with penetrating psychological insights, to such ‘dark’ aspects of human nature. Yet Nietzsche’s own prophetic myths were seized upon and perverted by Nazi ideologists. The irony is that Nietzsche’s myths of the ‘superman’ and ‘will to power’, far from justifying Hitler’s ‘leadership principle’ and national aggrandisement, referred instead to the nobility of the spirit, inspired by classical Greece, to be achieved by self-discipline through suffering and struggle.

108


How could such a metamorphosis – from the ardent admirer of Greek philosophy and culture to the legendary inspirer of Nazism – have occurred? One reason (which cannot be overlooked) is that significant elements of Nietzsche’s thought do directly relate to Nazi ideas – notably Nietzsche’s crucial distinction between the ‘strong’ in the world, whose predatory nature he admires, and the cowardly and unhealthy mass of the ‘weak’. Like Jünger, he despises the latter for attempting by way of conventional morality, religion and politics (especially in the form of democracy and socialism) to get their own ‘rancorous’ revenge on the strong (The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche, 1956: secs. 7, 9, 11, 13; see also Kaufmann, 1950: 32–4, passim). Thus, for many of the German people, brought together relatively recently under the empire, the shattering impact of defeat in the First World War and the ensuing confusion and unrest evoked a no less passionate yearning for the leader-figure – the ‘superman’, superior to ordinary laws and conventional standards – who would enforce the peace, restore authority and revive national greatness. Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ was likewise transformed into the Nietzsche legend of the ‘will to conflict’ and the ‘will to superiority’ over internal ‘enemies’ and external rivals. It followed that the ‘master race’ would be seen as the very embodiment of Nietzsche’s rule by the strong: ‘to sacrifice humanity as mass to the welfare of a single stronger human species would indeed constitute progress’ (Genealogy, secs. 12, 14). Finally, these dark myths were not only believed by large numbers of people, but they also inspired action – with dreadful consequences. Now, in structural terms, the Nazi attainment of power can appropriately be considered in the context of world historical developments, notably the rise of industrial capitalism (with its alienation of newly ‘atomised’ individuals), the disintegration of European empires after the First World War, the costly victories and humiliating defeats of that war, the vindictive treaty of Versailles imposed by the conquerors, the destitution of the old middle class in Germany as a result of the hyperinflation of 1923 and the despair of the millions of unemployed after 1929 – all these massive changes were of the utmost importance in understanding the seizure of power by what had been a relatively insubstantial movement only a few years before. Yet structural changes alone cannot adequately explain the significance of the Nazi movement, its grandiose Weltanschauung (philosophy or ideology) as expressed by Hitler and, above all, the violence of its actions within Germany and against its neighbours. Thus, already in November 1938, the destruction in Germany of almost all synagogues and more

Violence

109

than 7000 Jewish stores during the Kristallnacht was to evoke, only a few days later, the sinister warning in the SS paper Schwarzes Korps of the intended Nazi extermination of Jews ‘by fire and sword’: ‘the actual and final end of Jewry in Germany, its complete annihilation’ (Bracher, 1973: 456). And so the myths of ‘blood’, ‘race’ and ‘land’, which inspired the frenzied loyalty of so many Germans to the leader who would fulfil their racial destiny, also carried the grim potential for violence against those considered to be an obstacle to that destiny. The structural factors noted above are in many ways common to a number of European countries; but the salience of the myths engendered by those conditions – ‘thinking with one’s blood’ – is highly specific. For it was in Germany that a heroic myth of peculiar intensity flourished: a myth of life and death struggle, of deception and danger, of purity and infection, of good and evil. It was these intense feelings (brought out with extraordinary effect in Jünger’s novel) that animated the Nazi ideology and provided its impulse to action. It is not possible to understand the mass appeal of Nazism, on the one hand, and its sheer destructive power, on the other, without taking these highly charged myths into account. The need to supplement exclusively structural explanations is evident from the varying attempts to set the Nazi movement within the general context of either economic determinism (orthodox Marxism), political evolution (the ‘totalitarian’ model as the polar opposite of pluralist democracy), European culture (irrationalist reaction to the calculating sterility or the manipulative instrumentality of the Enlightenment), or human psychology in general: thus, Freud’s – and Nietzsche’s – notion of the ‘price’ that civilisation has to pay for repressing libidinal drives in order to achieve a measure of social conformity. Underlying all these theories is the endeavour to show that the Nazi movement is not something beyond our understanding, and thus inexplicable by rational standards of judgement. On the contrary Nazism – like Freudian neurosis – is to be seen, according to such theories, as an extreme but understandable form of a ‘normal’ state. I shall concentrate on two major interpretations: psychological (as above) and historical (cultural and structural). The noted biographer of Hitler, Alan Bullock, considers that Nazism was an (extreme) outcome of the most powerful political tradition in Germany since unification: ‘This is what nationalism, militarism, authoritarianism, the worship of success and force, the exaltation of the State, and Realpolitik lead to, if they are projected to their logical conclusion’ (Bullock, 1986: 805). A similar conclusion is reached by the celebrated German historian, Friedrich Meinecke, formerly a conservative nationalist, but who moved

110


towards parliamentary liberalism. Meinecke, however, suggests that a cultural explanation is necessary to probe ‘the deeper question of the transformation of the German people that eventually made his [Hitler’s] triumph possible’ (Meinecke, 1950: 33). Emphasising the ‘degeneration in the German character’, he asks how such an ‘astonishing deviation’ from the main lines of European development, which were moving to a synthesis of free individualism and binding collectivism, could have taken place. Meinecke attributes this degeneration to the ‘mass pressures’ of an increasing population, leading to ever greater economic and political demands and reflected in the mass ideology of socialism, which he says had a ‘coarsening and deteriorating effect’ on Germany’s ‘sacred heritage’ (that is, the age of Goethe). He then argues that despite the ‘vital and fruitful’ elements in these mass pressures, pointing to a new liberal synthesis of power and nationalism, such a synthesis was undermined during the nineteenth century by the joint forces of the authoritarian state and Prussian militarism. Thus, in Meinecke’s view, both great historical movements – socialism and nationalism – left a perverted legacy to the twentieth century (1–10, 15–16, 40–3). Meinecke accordingly sees a shift from the cosmopolitan culture of Goethe’s day towards the fatal attraction of national egoism and the ‘power-state’ – with the germs of the latter already apparent in Bismarck’s policy of ‘blood and iron’. Not only did military officers and state bureaucrats play a leading role in imperial Germany, but increasingly the bourgeoisie became involved. Symptomatic of this trend was the formation of the ‘Fatherland Party’ in 1917, embracing a pan-German spirit of conquest, the domination in domestic politics of the representatives of heavy industry and of East German large landowners, and the activation of a power mentality: ‘an exact prelude to Hitler’s rise to power’. Added to the authoritarian pressures from above were the popular demands from below. For socialism, according to Meinecke, was working to collectivise the masses, in effect undermining individual rights and ‘historical authority’ in general. Such a ‘revolutionary spirit’, by trampling upon law and property, was what Hitler’s National Socialism would later inherit (13, 16–17, 20–1, 30). The precipitating causes of Hitler’s accession to power, noted by Meinecke, are common to all major accounts: the defeat of the imperial system in the First World War, the ‘stab in the back’ legend (Germany would have won except for the ‘treacherous’ internal opposition), the hostility and distrust shown by the victor powers, the ruinous inflation and subsequent disastrous unemployment. But Meinecke suggests two additional factors, the first psychological, the other the role of personality. He associates the immediate psychological characteristics – ‘the current of rage

Violence

111

and despair, and often also the wild readiness to action’ welling up among the discontented in the Weimar period – with an underlying ‘irrational impulse of the spirit’, alienated by the excessive rationalisation of modern technical life (36–7, 57–8; but note Bracher’s critique of the anti-Western tradition of cultural pessimism and illiberalism, 1973: 133–7, 143–6). As for the importance of personality at critical times, Meinecke cites the role of the aged field marshal President Hindenburg in appointing Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933. Meinecke argues that there was no compelling reason for the president to have acted in this way. The crucial result, however, was that Hitler attained power legally and was then able to make use of the authoritarian instruments available to destroy or intimidate all forms of opposition. In sum, the events leading to the downfall of the centrist Bruning cabinet a year before (although he also ruled by decree, without requiring parliamentary approval) and the failure of Hindenburg to rally the army against the Nazis – in addition to Hitler’s magnetic appeal – illustrate the ‘singular and incalculable power of personality in public life’ (Meinecke, 1950: 62–5, 95–6). Meinecke’s historical analysis is convincing. But his ‘cultural’ stance provokes questions. Are not his ‘idealist’ presumptions – his disdain for the ‘coarseness’ of the masses and for bourgeois greed, and his yearning for a return to the superior culture of the days of Goethe – are not these ‘spiritual’ longings really a reflection of the impotence of his liberal creed: that is, its inability to overcome the power-state and to check its nationalist drives? Can we, moreover, seriously accept Meinecke’s contention that the Social Democratic Party was ‘trampling’ on the rights of property and undermining legality, when that party in all but rhetoric was working within the parliamentary system (such as it was)? Even if the Social Democrats were subverting the ‘feeling for traditional historical authority’, we already know from Meinecke’s own account how dangerous and reactionary that ‘authority’ was proving to be. Yet in cultural or psychological terms, he does suggest important reasons why the ‘masses’ – but not socialists or communists – rallied to the Nazi cause. Thus, the socialist wave of history can hardly be responsible for the ‘degeneration’ of the German character, which made possible Hitler’s rise to power; but the nationalist wave in its perverted form – the militaristic power-state – certainly can. Indeed, large segments of the middle class, as Bracher points out, ‘manifested an urge for the glorifying myth of the fatherland’ which the Weimar Republic could not satisfy (Bracher, 1973: 227). It is evident that the nightmare quality of the Nazi era made a mockery of all rational social predictions, whether Marxist or liberal democratic – twin inheritors of the Enlightenment in its collectivist or individualist

112


strands. What could advocates of reason say, confronting the ‘monstrous anger of the guns’ of the First World War, which in turn stimulated the sadistic violence and massive enthusiasm of Nazi and fascist movements, culminating in the wartime slaughter of combatants and civilians on an unprecedented scale, and with uniquely horrible means: the extermination camps, the firebombing of cities, the atomic bomb? It is to Freud, then, that we owe the courage and brilliance ‘to think the unthinkable’: the elemental drives of sex, hatred and greed, which civilisation conceals. Freud shows, as did Nietzsche before him, that these drives not only exist, but are the very motive force of human behaviour: ‘instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests’ (Freud, 1961: 59). In his prophetic work, Civilization and its Discontents, Freud argues that the same elemental forces are at work in society, bringing about repression from within the state and aggression outside it. Erich Fromm, in his important work The Fear of Freedom, differentiates himself from Freud in two respects. Fromm sees human nature as essentially historically conditioned, rather than biologically constituted. Second, Fromm asserts that ‘man is primarily a social being, and not, as Freud assumes, primarily self-sufficient’. For Freud, however, the human being’s physiologically conditioned drives form a closed system (Fromm, 1948: 247, author’s emphasis). In his explanation of the Nazi era, Fromm (in contrast to Freud’s universalistic thesis) insists that ‘Nazism is a psychological problem, but the psychological factors themselves have to be understood as being moulded by socio-economic factors; Nazism is an economic and political problem, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds’ (180, 252). Fromm argues that the German lower middle class in particular was shaken psychologically by the collapse after the First World War of imperial authority, from which that class had acquired its feeling of security and pride. Economically, the hyperinflation of 1923 wiped out almost completely the savings of the old middle class, whom the state proved incapable of protecting. As a result, the older generation grew bitter and resentful, but in a passive way; the younger generation was driven towards action. In contrast to the negative or resigned attitude of the working class (and among Catholic supporters of the liberal bourgeoisie), for the lower middle-class ‘the Nazi ideology – its spirit of blind obedience to a leader and of hatred against racial and political minorities, its craving for conquest and domination, its exaltation of the German people and the “Nordic race” – had a tremendous emotional appeal’ (182–3). Fromm sees the impact of political and economic changes in addition to the psychological dispositions of particular strata of German society

Violence

113

as being united at the precise moment of the greatest turmoil and uncertainty by the catalytic force of Hitler’s ‘authoritarian personality’. Hitler despised and ‘loved’ the masses in the typical sadistic manner; to his enemies he showed the destructive elements of sadism; and the masses ‘succumb[ed] more easily to the dominating force of a stronger will’. But just as the German people had to submit to the will to power of the leader, so Hitler too considered himself an instrument of a higher power, whether God, Fate, Necessity, History or Nature (191–204). It is my contention too that the mythic representation of the Volk as a racial community (excluding the other), of the destiny of the German people and of their yearning at a time of confusion and disorder for strong leadership had been maturing over the past century; but they were transformed from ‘mood’ into action only by the historical crisis of the postwar period. Above all, the paranoid persecution of ‘enemies’, on the one hand, and the exultant sense of mass solidarity, on the other, reveal the intensity of feeling expressed in such myths – myths, which in their intellective forms of ‘racism’, ‘romanticism’ and ‘nationalism’ were evident in other European countries at the same time, and for the same reasons, but never took on the violent and obsessive qualities of those of the Hitler era.

Nation and power Thus, the Nazi movement combined, to extraordinary effect, structural domination and emotional drives in four leading themes: destiny, race, aggrandisement and the ‘leader principle’. It is necessary to examine these in more detail. (Destiny and aggrandisement are coupled: Germany’s ‘destiny’ was realised through conquest.) Domination and destiny: Hitler himself emphasised that the obstacle facing the Nazis of existing ‘conceptions and ideas, as well as movements . . . [can only] be broken with technical instruments of power if these physical weapons are at the same time the support of a new kindling thought, idea or philosophy [Weltanschauung]’ (Hitler, 1936: 187). It was precisely this compelling force of a new idea – with the ‘magic power of the spoken word’ (116) – that provided the mass of the German people, divided, demoralised, leaderless and helpless, with a new driving sense of national purpose, an appeal especially to the youth and the unemployed, and a consciously ‘dynamic’ vision of German grandeur. Hitler’s success was democracy’s failure. The fundamental flaw was this: democracy was grafted onto an authoritarian system, which never really accepted democratic institutions and, in time of crisis, did little or

114


nothing to save them. This problem can be traced back to the previous century, when liberal and democratic movements were brutally rejected in 1848 and then, two decades later, when the triumph of nationalism – German unification – was achieved not by parliamentary means but by armed force. The effective use of power had an enormous impact on public opinion. Liberals who had roundly condemned Bismarck’s militaristic strategy and his unscrupulous intrigues before the Prussian victory that brought about unification came out in fulsome support of Realpolitik as soon as it could be seen to have enhanced the power of the German Reich. In this process, as Hans Kohn notes, the self-abasement of German liberals and the middle class before the Junker landowners and the military experts was obvious. One confessed liberal academic, in his ‘Self-criticism’, apologised for having once believed that democratic agitation could transform Germany. Instead, as if by a ‘miracle’, the ‘defeat of our principles has brought us boundless salvation’. After the second of Bismarck’s wars, he observed, we start life anew with ‘faithful obedience’ (Kohn, 1960: 159). Even more striking was the emotional conversion of the jurist Rudolf von Ihering, who at first was ‘revolted’ by Bismarck’s ‘shameless’ instigation of war against Austria, which violated every legal and moral principle. But after Prussia had decisively defeated its rival, ‘what a surging of the emotions’ he then recorded, running from fear, suspense and indignation to pity and, in the end, ‘once more a rejoicing of the soul, an ecstasy of happiness such as my heart has never before known’. Such an event, he went on, truly marked a ‘turning point in German history’. For it is ‘this spirit [of victory] that lifts us all out of a state of impotence and ignominy and gives to the name of Germany in Europe a lustre and a tone that it has not had for a thousand years’. And in a chilling afterthought: ‘I have forgiven the man [Bismarck] everything he has done up to now, more, I have convinced myself that it was necessary’ (Ihering’s letters, in Simon, 1968: 110–12). Max Weber, the eminent sociologist and conservative German nationalist, later admitted that Bismarck’s great triumph contained the seeds of disaster. ‘Bismarck’s terrible annihilation of all independent convictions among us’, he wrote to a liberal politician, was responsible for the political immaturity that had such tragic results. For the downfall of imperial power in 1918, followed by the inability of the Weimar regime to overcome a series of crises, once more gave rise to a violent popular reaction. This in turn was exploited by Hitler’s successful fusion of power from below (the mass movement of national socialism) and of power from above: the continuing authoritarian structure of the armed forces, the

Violence

115

bureaucracy, the Prussian landowners and the big industrialists (documented in Bracher, 1973: 95–9, 106, 218–21, 289–91). Thus, nation and power were indissolubly linked in Germany, during the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, in a way that had no parallel in Western Europe. Neither in Britain nor in France was the nation-state in question, rather it was the political, economic and social constituents of the nation that were contested. In Germany, by contrast, the struggle was at a far more elemental level. This struggle was reflected in the Volk myths, expressing the yearning for unity of all Germans, and in the seductive Nazi propaganda of race hatred and territorial conquest (Lebensraum, ‘space to live’). ‘All life is bound up in three theses’, as Hitler declared in 1938: ‘struggle is the father of all things, virtue lies in blood, leadership is primary and decisive.’ And again: ‘The whole work of Nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness – an eternal victory of the strong over the weak’ (quoted by Bullock, 1986: 398–9). Racism: Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi ideologist of racism (The Myth of the Twentieth Century), insisted that the race-myth was a ‘power from the soul, which set a direction to all inner emotions’. He charged ‘the Jew’ with the ‘dream of gold, of the power of lies and hatred’, to be realised in ‘mastery of the world’ (Rosenberg, 1937: 453, 455–6). The Nazi apologist’s ‘dream’ is the very essence of racism in its polarisation of values, its projection onto others of the dreamer’s own inner feelings and its ‘primordial sense of “defilement”’. Rosenberg’s myth of the noble German, concerned only with ‘honour, duty, truth and loyalty’ is counterposed to that of the crafty, scheming, lying Jew obsessed with wealth and world domination. The fact that the heroic German dream had not been realised, according to Rosenberg, was due to the crime of ‘race-mixing’, that is, mixing ‘enemy blood’ with one’s own ‘pure blood’. It was to counter that ‘blood-crime’ that the author concluded his turgid culturalhistorical survey with the insistent message that ‘today, this inner voice [of German war heroes] demands that the myth of Blood and the myth of the Soul, of Race and Ego, Volk and Personality, Blood and Honour . . . must support, work through and determine the whole of life’ (699). Hitler’s portrait of the Jews similarly drips with venom and hatred. Every mingling of ‘Aryan’ blood with that of ‘lower peoples’, he denounced in Mein Kampf, results in an end to culture. Germanic inhabitants will remain masters only as long as they do not succumb to ‘defilement of the blood’, for ‘among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew’ (1936: 313–34, 331, 335, 355). Out of this ghastly propaganda, the ‘theory’

116


of race became a ‘myth’ and the myth in the age of Hitler became a dreadful reality. The fusion of the primordial – the ‘defilement’ of the pure race – and the conceptual – the ‘world-historical’ struggle for existence – produced the Nazi myth of race. Rosenberg’s belief that the ‘life of a race’ does not follow a logical pattern, ‘but rather the development of a mystical synthesis, an activity of soul which cannot be explained rationally’ lies at the very heart of racism. It is ‘less a mode of perception, than of faith’ (1937: 117–18). To recapitulate: Germany’s destiny – to overcome humiliation and to assert its ‘rightful’ place in the world – is the leitmotif of nationalist writings and activities from the nineteenth century onward. Hatred of the Jews – the second major theme – stems from what are, in effect, deep-rooted feelings of inferiority; it is the Jews who are either responsible for the humiliations suffered by the Germans, or benefit from this condition. Third, the belief in Lebensraum (living space) reflects both the impulse of national destiny and the race doctrine: the superior race has the right to dominate the inferior. Finally, the Führerprinzip subsists on the strong emotional support, characteristic of German romanticism, among both ‘power-worshippers’, liberal and conservative, and the mystical believers in the Volk: it is the leader, as in the heroic days of the all-conquering Germanic tribes, who incarnates the will of the people. Hitler uncompromisingly insisted on the leader principle: ‘With us the Leader and the Idea are one, and every party member [after 1933, every citizen] has to do what the Leader orders. The Leader incorporates the Idea and alone knows its ultimate goal’ (Hitler’s statement in 1930, quoted by Bullock, 1986: 157; Hitler, 1936: 500–1). It is the extraordinary potency of the Nazi combination of ‘social dynamics’ with charisma and terror (Schoenbaum, 1980: 278) that demands an explanation, not simply in structural terms, but also psychologically, as in the interpretation of myths. Bracher, for instance, in his analysis of institutional structures convincingly accounts for Hitler’s accession to power as well as for the virtual absence of organised resistance, even from among Social Democrats and Communists, who still polled about one-third of the electoral vote. He attributes such an (unexpected) outcome to three main factors, the first being Hitler’s astute alliance with extreme nationalist politicians and with leading industrialists and military officers (each of which firmly believed that they could manipulate the ‘demagogue’ Hitler, and not the other way round). The second factor was the yearning of the moderates, including the Catholic Centre Party, for stability instead of turmoil (thus voting, suicidally, for the March 1933 ‘Enabling Act’, which authorised Hitler, as Chancellor,

Violence

117

to dispense with parliament). Finally, there was the illusion of the Left that the Nazi dictatorship could not last, but must soon collapse (Bracher, 1973: 280–5). Yet the sheer intensity of Hitler’s policies and their violent character cannot be explained solely in structural terms. For it is the extremism and virulence of Nazism – not just in doctrine, but in action – that distinguishes Hitler and his followers from other authoritarian regimes, then and now. This ‘unique’ quality calls, as I have suggested, for interpretation of the affective element in German thought and behaviour, which was so readily exploited by Hitler. The importance of myth and ‘mood’ are, indeed, masterfully demonstrated throughout Mein Kampf. ‘Faith is harder to shake than knowledge’, he insists, and ‘hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has consisted [less in scientific knowledge] . . . than in a fanaticism which inspired them [the masses] and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward’ (371). And in the fateful speech to his armed forces commanders on 23 November 1939: ‘I have to choose between victory or destruction. I choose victory . . . I shall shrink from nothing and shall destroy everyone who is opposed to me’ (quoted by Bullock, 1986: 569). The end result of war, aimed initially at the ‘destruction of our Western enemies’, bound together Hitler’s four obsessive themes: racial superiority, Lebensraum, national destiny and the will to power. For it was through war that the social violence inherent in the Nazi movement, could ‘legitimately’ be unleashed against external enemies. In the same upsurge of patriotism, Hitler calculated, he would eliminate the peculiar object of his hatred, the Jews. Thus, for Hitler, the long-prepared war of vengeance in Europe provided the answer. The very nature of the conflict – ‘victory or defeat!’ – would give him the opportunity he needed. Two months later, in January 1939, Hitler openly told the Reichstag (parliament) that the next war would bring the ‘extermination of the Jewish race in Europe’ (quoted by Bracher, 1973: 457). The horror of the Nazi war and the dreadful policy of exterminating the Jewish population are, as Primo Levi writes, an ‘inexhaustible fount of evil’ (Levi, 1979: 188). How, as Ralph Dahrendorf asks, in Society and Democracy in Germany, was Auschwitz possible? How was National Socialism possible in the country of Kant and Goethe? ‘The question is unbearable’ (1969: 5, 365–6, 394). Dahrendorf’s account reveals the predicament of a sociologist, whose structural analysis of events can only explain so far. He remains critical of intellectual history’s predilection for changing reality into metaphor, but offers no substitute for the interpretive approach.

118


Karl Dietrich Bracher, in his own excellent survey, also places emphasis on the ‘conditions which permitted an alliance between conservativeauthoritarian and technistic, nationalistic, and revolutionary-dictatorial forces’, in the context of the ‘reaction of the Romantics to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to a rapidly changing industrial society, and to the problems of the belated, never completed German national state’ (1973: 607, 609). But, he continues, only in the upheavals of the First World War and in the crisis of the Weimar Republic ‘could the theorems of extreme nationalism be transplanted . . . into the realm of political reality’. Nevertheless, to limit the inquiry to Weimar or the First World War is a mistake. ‘The entire formative development of the German national consciousness must be called into question if we wish to understand the road to catastrophe.’

6 The Enigma of Politics

It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him. Kafka, The Castle

The Castle: force and law There are two major interpretations of Kafka’s extraordinary, enigmatic work. For one, it is a profound theological/existential allegory; for the other, a devastating social and political critique. All Kafka’s main figures have an allegorical quality, according to Edwin Muir, they are not mere individuals; ‘they are images of man in conflict with fate’. Joseph Kafka in The Trial first defies, then tries to discover, then is overtaken by divine justice. K in The Castle tries to be accepted by divine grace, which first eludes him, but is granted him when, on his deathbed, he gives up the struggle (Muir, Introduction to Kafka, 1967). The other interpretation is that of Kafka as social critic of the blundering or criminal irrationality on which bureaucratic rationality turns. He reveals the absurdity of rules that exclude the physical and moral person of those who are administered to the profit of his or her dossier, which is either inaccessible or goes astray. An electric current runs through all his work: a passionate opposition to authority, to power (Michael Lowy, Franz Kafka, rêveur insoumis: review by Michel Contat, Le Monde des livres, 9 April 2004). 119

120


In between these two interpretations, as Hugh Haughton emphasises, is Kafka’s blend of ‘absurd literalism and literal absurdity’ – a ‘modern infernal comedy of infinite interpretation’ – with events that are as ‘circumstantially real as any other events in western fiction’ (Haughton, Introduction to Janouch, 1985). For Kafka tellingly exposes the real crisis of moral and political authority in a world of ‘bureaucratic procedures and routine institutional violence’. In his stories the most ordinary social institutions are transformed into the ‘theatre of terrorization, violent metamorphosis beyond the limits of the containably human’. Haughton insists on the ‘covert terrorism of the corporate, secular state’, in which Kafka is the ‘topographer of its imaginary architecture, of corridors, filing systems, back-rooms, and stifling public spaces’. Here the human mind tries to justify both itself and the world ‘while trapped in an oppressive, mystified social order’. In this disturbing environment Kafka’s hero constantly searches for evidence, information and authority from those he meets, yet their testimony is always suspect. Significantly, the ‘unique interplay of the fantastic and the official’ in Kafka’s fiction, as Haughton argues, shows the impress of his professional life as a lawyer in the semi-official Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. Kafka’s vision of modern social structures of power, and their oppressive internalisation in the form of unspecified guilt and perpetual self-harassment, no doubt developed from this experience. For as Kafka himself wrote (Letters to Milena, cited by Haughton), ‘the office is not just any old stupid institution (though it is that too, and superabundantly, but that is not the point, as a matter of fact it is more fantastic than stupid) but it has been my life up to now, I cannot tear myself away from it’. Finally, Kafka’s identification in his novels with the guilty outcast figure and his terrible sense of the mechanics of social humiliation Haughton attributes to the ‘double heritage’ of the assimilated Jew, consciously identifying with the respectable, established social order and unconsciously identifying with the alien and displaced outsider. For Kafka does recreate story, parable, myth, epic, fairytale, Hasidic tale, Haughton concludes; but his stories have become as problematic as scriptural texts from remote epochs. In Kafka’s world, experience is not transmissible in the form of ‘wisdom’, yet we cannot do without stories. This is the story of The Castle, symbol of salvation, of unattainable grace. After a long journey, K arrives late in the evening at a village near the castle ‘veiled in mist’. At night he is awakened by a young man ‘dressed like a townsman, with the face of an actor’, who introduces himself as the son of the Castellan. He tells K: ‘This village belongs to the Castle, and whoever lives here or passes the night here does so in

The Enigma of Politics

121

a manner of speaking in the Castle itself. Nobody may do that without the Count’s permission. But you have no such permit, or at least you have produced none.’ K retorts that he is the Land Surveyor whom the Count is expecting. The young man says he will ring and inquire. The Castellan is asleep, he is told, but an under-castellan is available to find out from the Central Bureau if a Land Surveyor is really expected. This report, ‘in its combination of malice and prudence’, gives K an idea of the surreptitious way in which even underlings in the Castle are trained. ‘Not a trace of a Land Surveyor’, according to the son of the Castellan. But another call follows. It is all a mistake. ‘Very queer, very queer’, but how to explain it? The message is unpropitious, K reflects, for it means that the Castle is well-informed about him; on the other hand, it is ‘quite propitious’, for if his interpretation is right, the Castle has underestimated him and he will now have more freedom of action than he had thought possible. In the morning K asks the landlord if the two assistants he is expecting can be put up at the inn. ‘Certainly, sir’, came the reply, ‘but won’t they be staying with you up at the Castle?’ That’s not certain, K answers, as he has to find out what work he is expected to do. Besides, he does not think life at the Castle would suit him: ‘I like to be my own master.’ ‘You don’t know the Castle’, explains the landlord. As K leaves the inn, he notices a dark portrait of a man of about fifty on the wall. Is that the Count, he asks? No, the landlord replies, it is the Castellan. So it was his son whom K met last night? No, not at all, whispers the landlord in K’s ear, for the son exaggerated: ‘his father is only an undercastellan, and one of the lowest, too’. ‘The villain’, laughed K. The landlord, instead of laughing, observed: ‘Even his father is powerful.’ So you think everyone is powerful, insisted K. ‘No, I don’t think you are powerful.’ The landlord opens the door and K goes out into the brilliant winter morning. Now he can see the Castle above him. It is clearly outlined in the sparkling air and is lightly covered with snow. But there seemed to be much less snow on the hill than down in the village. Here the cottages almost disappeared under heavy layers of snow, ‘but up on the hill everything soared light and free into the air, or at least so it appeared from down below’. Children now emerged from their school near the village church and noisily surrounded K. ‘You are looking at the Castle?’ inquired their teacher. ‘Yes, I am a stranger here’, answered K. ‘You don’t like the Castle’, returned the teacher quickly. ‘What?’, countered K a little taken aback. ‘Why do you assume that I don’t like it?’ ‘Strangers never do’, said the teacher. K is disconcerted, annoyed by the conversation. For the first time since his arrival – from a distant land – he felt really tired. If he were to

122


force himself to go at least as far as the Castle entrance that would be enough for the day. So he resumes his walk, but it is longer than he anticipated. For the street he is in, the main street, did not lead up to the Castle hill, it only appeared to do so and then turned aside, and though it did not go away from the Castle it did not get any nearer either. At every twist in the road K felt that this time it would surely lead to the Castle, and only because of this belief did he continue. What amazed him was the length of the village, which seemed unending. Exhausted, K turned aside to seek shelter. Rested, he went back to the street to hear a voice from a small hut, asking if he was waiting for someone. For a sledge, replied K. ‘No sledges will pass here, there’s no traffic’, came the voice. ‘But it’s the road leading to the Castle’, objected K. ‘All the same’, said the voice with a certain finality, ‘there’s no traffic here.’ The man then volunteered to take K in his sledge. ‘You’re the Land Surveyor’, declared the man, ‘and you belong to the Castle. Where do you want to be taken?’ ‘To the Castle’, returned K, quickly, ‘I won’t take you there’, said the man without hesitation. ‘Oh, well, take me to the inn’, said K. As they set off, the Castle, which K had hoped to reach that very day, was beginning to grow dark. The sledge took a turn in the road and they were already near the inn. K was greatly surprised to find it so dark. Had he been away for so long? Surely not for more than an hour or two. And it was the morning when he left. K observed that the village people, who either rejected him or seemed afraid, posed no real danger, for they simply forced him back on his own resources, thus helping him to concentrate on what he could do; on the other hand, those who ostensibly ‘assisted’ him to reach the Castle, actually turned him away, whether by design or not, from his objective and tried to destroy him. Chatting to the barmaid of the inn, Frieda, who becomes his mistress (taking her from her lover Klamm, an official of the Castle), K claims that while the opposition one meets in the world is great, and all the more so the higher one climbs, there is no shame in accepting help from someone who is also struggling on the way up, even if he is small and has little influence. The landlady, who intervenes, is unimpressed. ‘Herr Klamm is a gentleman of the Castle’, meaning that he is of very high rank. ‘But what are you?’, she said, addressing K. ‘You are not from the Castle, you are not from the village, you aren’t anything. Or, rather, unfortunately, you are something, a stranger, a man who isn’t wanted and is in everybody’s way, a man who is always causing trouble, a man whose intentions are obscure . . . ’ Nevertheless, K considered his situation hopeful; but at the same time the confidence he now felt was also treacherous. For the authorities let


123

K go wherever he liked – of course only within the village – and thus ‘pampered and enervated’ him, excluding the chance of conflict, and carried him away to an ‘unofficial, totally unrecognised, troubled and alien existence’. It could easily happen, if he were not aware, that one time or another, taken in by the apparent favour of the authorities, he might behave so unwisely as to fail disastrously. Then the authorities, still kind and friendly, and apparently against their will, but according to rules he did not even know existed, might have to come and dispose of him. ‘Never yet had K seen vocation and life so interlaced as here.’ K soon found his view of the authorities confirmed when he went to see the village Superintendent. ‘Take a seat and let me know your wishes’, the latter said to K. Again he had a remarkable feeling of ease in his contacts with the authorities. ‘Really I must tell you the plain unvarnished truth of the matter’ confided the Superintendent. ‘You’ve been taken on as Land Surveyor, but, unfortunately, we have no need of a Land Surveyor. The frontiers of our little state are marked out and all officially recorded.’ ‘I can only hope that there’s some misunderstanding’, retorted K. ‘Surely I haven’t made this endless journey just to be sent back again.’ ‘That’s another question’, replied the Superintendent, who went on to explain that a misunderstanding was possible in such a large governmental office as the Count’s, when occasionally one department ordains this and another orders that: ‘neither knows of the other, and though the supreme control is absolutely efficient, it comes by its nature too late, and so every now and then a trifling miscalculation arises . . . ’ Of course, that applies only to the most petty affairs, as in the Land Surveyor’s case. All the same, ‘nothing here is done without taking thought’, added the Superintendent. ‘Nothing!’, said K, ‘and what about my being summoned here then?’ ‘Even your being summoned was carefully considered’, said the Superintendent; ‘it was only certain auxiliary circumstances that entered and confused the matter.’ After a lengthy account of how a report from Department A went by mistake to Department B taking ‘months, if not years’ to be found, the Superintendent asked if the story did not bore K. ‘No’, said K, ‘it amuses me.’ The Superintendent replied: ‘I am not telling it to amuse you.’ ‘It only amuses me’, said K, ‘because it gives me an insight into the ludicrous bungling which in certain circumstances may decide the life of a human being.’ But the Superintendent explained that it was a ‘working principle of the Head Bureau that the very possibility of error must be ruled out of account. This ground principle is justified by the consummate organisation of the whole authority.’ ‘What about the Control Authority?’ that he previously mentioned, asked K. ‘Is there a Control Authority?’ Only a total stranger, retorted

124


the Superintendent, could ask such a question. ‘There are only control authorities.’ This was news to him, cried K, seeking to distinguish between what is transacted in the offices and his own personal case, ‘situated outside of the offices and threatened by their encroachments, which are so meaningless that I can’t even yet believe in the seriousness of the danger’. You have to understand a ‘peculiar characteristic of our administrative apparatus’, defended the Superintendent. ‘Along with its precision it’s extremely sensitive as well. When an affair has been weighed for a very long time, it may happen that suddenly in a flash the decision comes in some unforeseen place’ – a decision that settles the case, usually justly, yet no less arbitrarily. That should support his being confirmed as Land Surveyor, argued K, producing a letter from the Castle official Klamm. This letter is not at all an official letter, pointed out the Superintendent, but only a private letter, meaning only that Klamm takes a ‘personal interest in you if you should be taken into the state service’. As for the telephone call from the under-castellan noting K’s engagement as Land Surveyor, it was quickly dismissed by the Superintendent. ‘You haven’t once up till now come into real contact with our authorities’, he told K. ‘All those contacts of yours have been illusory, but owing to your ignorance of the circumstances you take them to be real.’ ‘There’s a certain amount of truth in your view of the case’, nevertheless admitted the Superintendent, ‘you’re right in thinking that the pronouncements of the Castle are not to be taken literally. But caution is always necessary.’ Back at the inn, K ran into the teacher, who said he came at the insistence of the Superintendent, who complained of K’s ‘discourtesy’ to an ‘old and experienced man’. K said he had other things to think about than polite behaviour for ‘my existence is at stake, which is threatened by a scandalous official bureaucracy’. Making his way to new lodgings at the school, K found it freezing a little, yet the firm snow made walking easier. But already it was getting dark. The Castle, whose outline had become blurred was as silent as ever; for K had never seen the slightest signs of life – perhaps it was quite impossible to make out anything at that distance, and ‘yet the eye demanded it and could not endure that stillness’. When K looked at the Castle, it often seemed to him as if he could see someone who appeared to be free and untroubled as if he were alone, and at the same time realised that he was being observed – and so he could not focus his gaze, but turned aside. This strange impression he felt more strongly than ever today because of the early dusk. ‘The longer he looked the less he could make out and the deeper everything was lost in the twilight . . . ’


125

Still in the course of his quest for truth and perfection, K stumbles across the meaning of his strange experience, that is, the reversal of all values: the activities of the people of the village are of no concern to the infinitely superior inhabitants of the Castle – provided that they do not transgress the authority, and the interests, of their superiors. Conversely, the behaviour – and the values – of those living ‘above’ are incomprehensible to those living ‘down below’. It was from the outcast family of Barnabas, his castle-messenger – but is he really a messenger? – that K found confirmation of his view from this terrible story. Barnabas himself was tormented by doubts that he really belonged to the service of the Castle. ‘He goes into the bureaux’, his sister Olga tells K, ‘but are the bureaux part of the real Castle?’ He is admitted into certain rooms, but they’re only a part of the whole, for there are barriers behind which are more rooms. ‘And the doubt doesn’t stop there’, she continues. ‘Barnabas sees officials, Barnabas is given messages. But who are these officials and what are the messages?’ Although he is directly assigned to Klamm, Barnabas doubts that the man he meets really is Klamm. It is true that in the village, ‘out of glimpses and rumours and through various distorting factors’ an image of Klamm has been created, which is correct in fundamentals. But in detail it fluctuates, for ‘he is reported as having one appearance when he comes into the village and another on leaving it’, according to Olga. Of course, all these differences can be easily explained, Olga goes on, they are not the result of magic: ‘they depend on the mood of the observer, on the degree of his excitement, on the countless graduations of hope or despair which are possible for him when he sees Klamm’. This should be a sufficient explanation if one is not personally interested. ‘For us, however; it’s a matter of life or death for Barnabas whether it’s really Klamm he speaks to or not.’ ‘And for me no less’, answers K. Although K then claimed that Olga and her family had a ‘mistaken reverence’ for the authorities – by insisting that even though Klamm’s work may have no significance whatever, he had at least been set there by somebody ‘for some purpose’ – she pointed out that K had no idea of the plight the family was in. ‘You must be told the secret’, she said. ‘There’s a great official in the Castle called Sortini’, who appeared at the village celebration given by the Fire Brigade three years ago. ‘He’s a small, frail, reflective-looking gentleman’, who stood by the fire engine watching Olga’s sister: ‘perhaps Amalia had attracted him’. Next morning, said Olga, the whole household was aroused from deep sleep by a scream from Amalia. She was standing by the window holding a letter in her hand, which had been handed to her. After Olga read it Amalia tore

126


it in pieces and threw the fragments in the face of the man standing outside. ‘That was the morning that decided our fate.’ The letter was from Sortini ordering Amalia to see him at the inn and to come at once. The letter was couched in the vilest, most abominable language, ending: ‘See that you come at once, or else –’ ‘Sortini horrifies me’, agreed K, because of ‘such an abuse of power’. ‘But you don’t realise the really decisive thing’, said Olga. Amalia’s treatment of the messenger could be excused, but it was because she did not go to the inn that ‘the curse was laid upon our family’. ‘Surely Amalia could not be accused or punished because of Sortini’s criminal proceedings?’, urged K. Not in a regular suit of law, Olga explained, but she – and the whole family – were heavily punished in other ways. ‘In your opinion it’s unjust and monstrous, but you’re the only one in the village of that opinion.’ Of course, ‘we’re all supposed to belong to the Castle, and there’s supposed to be no gulf between us’, Olga went on. This may be true on ordinary occasions, but ‘it’s not true when anything really important crops up’. The family was ostracised, excommunicated. ‘Our whole world is in ruins’, said Olga, ‘for it’s all engineered from the Castle.’ Every connection was broken ‘and our best friends were the quickest to go’. Without hope of any kind they could not live and ‘we began each in his or her own fashion with prayers or blustering to beg the Castle’s forgiveness’. But before they could be forgiven they had to prove their guilt, was the Castle’s response, and ‘that was denied in all the bureaux’. As for a pardon this can only come from the whole authority: ‘apparently even the authority can only condemn and not pardon’. ‘Apparently’: indeed, the only information about the Castle and its complex regulations is by hearsay, through intermediaries, who are more or less trustworthy but whose knowledge is still a matter of interpretation. In addition there is the unalterable distance – the gap, even the abyss – between everyday life in the village down below and the life and laws of the superior beings in the Castle, holding the power of life and death. What is justice above – the regulations of the state must be obeyed – is injustice below. And yet there is a mysterious power emanating from the Castle, which brought K from his ‘strange land’ to seek his fortune. To summarise: Kafka’s view of the contradiction between ‘divine’ potential and ‘abusive’ practice has been treated in the previous two chapters as the confrontation between ‘force’ and ‘law.’ The use of force – externally by interventionist powers, internally by oppressive regimes – brutally disrupts the frail bonds of law, that is, consensual ways of regulating social behaviour. The contrast discussed in the present chapter, however, is more between ‘Law’, as an ideal proper to the good society,


127

and positive ‘law’, reflecting economic and political power relations. Thus, in Kafka’s terms, the Castle represents ideal ‘grace’, but its custodians act arbitrarily, even cruelly and unjustly, towards those who live ‘below’. In all three chapters emotions play a crucial role, negatively for the most part but also positively as in the present chapter, varying according to the intensity of ‘passions’ (noted by Clausewitz) and the structural context. In Chapter 4, for example, ‘Great Powers’ were motivated to intervene in the unstable affairs of client states – contrary to their initial ‘rational’ inclinations – precisely because of their obsessive fears of a chain-reaction developing from the ‘loss’ of one domino to the next, and so on down the line, threatening their overall security. Similarly, the growth of extremism, examined in Chapter 5, was fuelled by a combination of traumatic events – defeat in war, ruinous inflation, massive unemployment – arousing extraordinary emotions of love and hatred: adoration of the Leader, who alone could save the fatherland from destruction; mingled fear and hatred of internal and external ‘enemies’. Only in the present context of democracy – and of internationally cooperative ‘regimes’ – is there a more equitable relationship between ‘force’ and ‘law.’ Nevertheless, this relationship reflects the fundamental ambiguity of ideal standards of conduct (government of, by, and for the people) confronting the reality of economic and political power structures. Indeed, democracy could not exist without the inspiration – and hope – that is aroused among ordinary people; but it is endangered by the greed and arrogance of those in power.

Democracy – and its ‘deficit’ How are such ambiguous situations and such mysterious – perhaps illusory – hopes possible in a civilised country? This is the land that Kafka describes in The Trial, ‘with a legal constitution, there was universal peace, all the laws were in force’, where the subject of his story ‘without having done anything wrong’ was arrested one fine morning. Extending the allegory to the present day, how can the symbolic and institutional power of dominant classes still be so pervasive? How can democratic parties and social movements be so often frustrated? While the potential for progress is clearly established, the ‘deficit’ of democracy also demands attention. Such a contradictory situation is inherent in the social construction of democracy (see Girling, 2004: Conclusion). Four main factors are involved. The first two are, substantively, the values of democracy – in Kafka’s allegory, The Castle’s promise

128


of grace: in secular terms, the goal of the ‘good society’ – and, procedurally, the means to realise these values. The values or ‘inspiration’ of democracy can be divided into two main types: the individualist notion of democracy, derived from Locke and reformulated by John Stuart Mill, centring around personal liberty and the protection of property; and the collectivist notion of the ‘general will’, proclaimed by Rousseau, presuming the distinction between the sovereign will of the people, which is always directed towards the common good, and the partial wills of individuals and associations, which are deviant and self-interested. Such are the two contrary strands of modern democracy: the more individualist or pluralist Anglo-American type and the more collectively oriented or social-democratic type. The second issue is one of procedures, that is, the means by which substantive values are to be realised. Both pluralist and social-democratic conceptions require an elected assembly ‘representing’ the popular will (in practice, the will of the majority predominates). The prerequisite of the democratic system, therefore, is freedom of thought, speech and association for the system to be truly representative of public opinion. The latter, in turn, is expressed by regular, free and fair elections based on universal adult suffrage. Importantly, the ‘rule of law’ – an impartial, independent system of justice – is required to sustain these functions. Now, values themselves may be contradictory (Weber’s ‘warring gods’, noted in the first chapter), such as freedom versus equality, liberty versus solidarity, social justice versus order. Institutional procedures, on the other hand, may become ossified over time or be considered as an end in themselves, usurping the place of values (producing Kafka’s world of ‘bureaucratic procedures and routine institutional violence’, as Haughton puts it). As for the collectivist tradition, its possibility of error lies in its selective emphasis on values, which may be perverted in the service of power (trapping human beings, in Kafka’s bleak vision, ‘in an oppressive, mystified social order’). The pluralist tradition, on the other hand, errs by its over-attachment to existing procedures, tending to block progress in the name of the status quo. For procedures without values are sterile; but values without procedures (to realise them) are futile. The two remaining factors in the social construction of democracy are of a different though related order: that is, a realistic assessment of what democracy can do and what it cannot do. Perhaps the major achievement of the democratic system is that both substantive values – conceived as the ‘common good’ – and institutional procedures provide an essential mechanism (which may or may not be used) for peacefully resolving social conflicts. The will of the majority, in effect, adjudicates


129

contentious issues; the minority accepts the majority verdict in the expectation (or hope) that it will be able in time to persuade most citizens that its views are justified. Further, the crucial problem of succession from one leadership to another, which bedevils authoritarian regimes, is resolved by parliamentary vote or by general elections, and not by coup or on the battleground. Such, to repeat, is the major virtue of democracies. It follows that only under liberal or social democracy can human rights be most assured, by definition: for every citizen must be free from arbitrary arrest or intimidation to express his or her will in free elections. The reconciling function of democracy demonstrates the importance, above all, of values. For it is this sense of the common good that inspires both government and opposition to act together, when they do so, despite underlying political rivalry. Too often, of course, parties out of office oppose for the sake of opposition – to damage or destroy those in power – regardless of the issues at stake. But it is possible to find common ground for action, as recently in Germany, when members of the Christian Democrats voted with the Social Democrats to carry out essential social security reforms – and in 2005 formed the Grand Coalition. The final problem is what democracy cannot do – and it is this ‘deficit’ in legitimacy that makes possible Kafka’s nightmare world, irrevocably divided between dominant elites and powerless people; for the latter are at the mercy of obscure and confusing regulations – which they cannot change or challenge – designed to ensure their subjection. There are two related aspects of this ‘legitimation crisis’. The first is that democracy is representative and not direct (as in ancient Greece). Yet in practice ordinary citizens cannot choose precisely who will ‘represent’ them; for they cannot select the person they most prefer, if they are to have any chance of success, but only those who have been made available by organised political parties or interest groups. The practical result is the formation of a ‘political class’ of more or less professional politicians, whether in government or in opposition, with interests that increasingly diverge from those who ‘elect’ them. The second limitation on democracy is the over-concentration of democratic theorising on politics – in part due to its historic origins – and consequent neglect of economics. Democracy emerged in the course of political struggle against absolutism, at a time when economic concerns were subsidiary. The situation is very different in the ‘globalised’ world of today. As a result, democratic theorists and practitioners find great difficulty in coping with the economic system. Moreover, in theory the two systems are mutually exclusive: democracy, the sovereign ‘will of the people’, is all-powerful. In practice, it tends to be the other way round.

130


To adapt Orwell: all interest groups are equal – in pluralist theory – but some are more equal than others. For the evidence is abundant that democratically-elected governments are obliged to defer in important respects to business interests (national or international) simply to keep the system going. The resulting contradiction between electoral pledges and government practices – in order to maintain business ‘confidence’ and ensure international competitiveness, often at the expense of citizens’ interests – is a second, major reason for the democratic deficit. This, too, suggests the need to enhance the role of values. For the prevalence of market forces in the contemporary world reflects the economic penetration – and even ‘colonisation’ – of what once were autonomous political and social spheres. To restore their countervailing function, by re-creating an essential system of checks and balances and so to offset economic and other forms of power, requires the inspiration of values: notably freedom, integrity and solidarity. It follows that in any realistic assessment of democracy both the ‘assets’ – its reconciling social mechanism and its guarantee of individual rights – as well as the ‘deficits’, largely in the economic field, have to be taken into account. The democratic deficit, thus, can be defined as the gap between legitimate expectations (democracy of the sovereign popular will or ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’) and the social realities of a world of power. On one side of the divide there are disillusioned citizens who feel neglected, abandoned, excluded. They resent what they see on the other side of the divide: arrogant, detached, self-interested political and economic elites. In addition, and this too is where Kafka’s insights are so disturbing, wherever there is a marked dichotomy between elites and citizens – engendered by the social construction of democracy – it usually takes the form of elite rationality on the one hand versus popular feeling on the other. It has been memorably expressed by Antonio Gramsci, theorist and former political party leader, imprisoned and tortured under Mussolini: The popular element ‘feels’ but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element ‘knows’ but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel. The two extremes are therefore pedantry and philistinism on the one hand and blind passion and sectarianism on the other . . . The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know . . . distinct and separate from the people-nation, that is, without feeling the elementary passions of the people, understanding them and therefore explaining and justifying them in the particular historical situation . . . One cannot make politics-history


131

without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation. In the absence of such a nexus the relations . . . are, or are reduced to, [those] of a purely bureaucratic or formal order . . . (Gramsci, 1971: 418). ‘Feeling’ and ‘knowing’: structural conditions, whether economic, political or social, can be analysed rationally to indicate certain possibilities of action. But the motivation to act in one way or another depends greatly on affective qualities (feeling). It is this mobilisation of psychic energy that tips the balance in favour of a certain course of action (and not a different one). For example, the decision to go to war or to negotiate a settlement, which are literally matters of life or death, may well depend on the outcome of the conflict between virulent nationalist emotions, on the one hand, and ardent desire for peace, on the other. While ‘economic development’, ‘pluralist politics’ and ‘socialisation’ are everyday expressions of an exclusively rational order, for a fuller understanding they need to be complemented by their affective components. ‘Capitalism’ in this sense is not just the rational organisation of production, distribution and exchange, or of calculability, profitability and the creation of wealth; it also draws on psychological motivations – rapacity, acquisitiveness, rivalry, indeed ‘exuberant irrationality’. Politics is not just the ‘rational choice’ of producers and consumers in the electoral marketplace, or the articulation and aggregation of interests, resulting in equilibrium; politics is the use and abuse of power (notably when persuasion fails) characterised often by ruthlessness and mendacity, and by the mythic appeal of charismatic leaders. Within society the search for identity is not simply a matter of consensus; the identity of a group is also defined in relation to those outside the group – the ‘other’ – perceived as different from, or hostile to, the group. These are emotionallycharged beliefs, often taking the form of myths (‘manifest destiny’, the ‘chosen people’, ‘land of the free’ and so on), expressing the way in which people experience formative periods in their history – whether economic (the ascendancy of capitalism), or political (the conjunction of nationalism and power), or socio-cultural (changing conceptions of the self and of society). Disturbingly, and this is in line with Kafka’s exceptional insights, there is a connection between the ascendancy of capitalism – notably in the United States – and the enfeeblement of democracy. This can readily be explained historically. The industrial revolution, expanding in the early egalitarian environment shaped by small farmers, shopkeepers,

132


traders and artisans, created an entirely new way of life – the regularity and precision of mass production replacing the cycle of the seasons – as well as a new and unequal set of personal relations, centring around the possession or control of wealth. For the values of capitalist society privilege the ‘titans’ of industry and finance, and indeed the ‘work ethic’ of all who are ambitious to succeed, encouraging a process of mass production and mass consumption. Conversely, those who lose out – the weak, the ignorant and the poor, deprived of paternalist protection – are considered to have deserved their fate. Their ‘laziness’ or ‘fecklessness’ is responsible for failing the test. Thus, virtues and vices are re-established in society, providing for the winners not only emotional satisfaction at their own success, but self-righteous indignation at those who do not succeed. Capitalism in its ‘pure’ form, unmediated by state arbitration or intervention, is peculiarly prone to such social discrimination. From this point of view, welfare support, which diverts scarce resources from productive use and saps energy and morale, is the last thing the poor require. Although a mixed economy has developed in the United States since the Great Depression, the predominant myths evoked by laissezfaire capitalism persist. Deprived of public support, the helplessness of the have-nots eventually erodes belief in the capacity of democracy to remedy their plight. As many as 36 million Americans, for example – more than 12 per cent of the population – lived under the poverty line in 2003, according to the Census Bureau in August 2004. And 45 million had no health insurance. At the same time, the influence of business on the political process has increased enormously. Two months before the November 2004 presidential elections, Bush and Kerry and some independent groups had collected between them more than $1 billion in campaign funds – double that amassed during the same period in 2000. Naturally, powerful economic donors expect a return on their ‘investment’. Capitalism is greed – the commercialisation of values – but why expect it to be otherwise? Why should we imagine capitalism to be perfect, or rational (in Weber’s sense), without being influenced by emotions? The history of capitalism is one of routinisation and crisis, of booms and slumps, of wealth and bankruptcy. Therefore, why should we expect Schumpeter’s ‘creative-destructive’ capitalism to be free from crisis? Given the psychological motivations – greed for acquisitiveness, rivalry and conflict for competitiveness, and belief in impersonal forces to justify ruthless decisions – how could it be otherwise? Given similar psychological motivations in politics – will to power, rivalry, ruthlessness – how could we expect power politics to be different?


133

Churchill recognised the imperfections of democracy, but considered any alternative system to be worse. But what if Nietzsche is right; that hardship, struggle, will to power (including repression of the weak) are the only way to improve the species? And that soft, pampering pitying politics (of social democracy and the welfare state) results only in degeneration of the stock? Both Thatcherism and its neo-liberal equivalents elsewhere emphasise competition, dynamism, hardness, struggle – the evidence of success being its great rewards (for the few). For the philosopher Immanuel Kant, economics, politics and social consciousness form a ‘Trilogy of Passions’, that is, qualities of possession, power and ‘esteem’, the latter to be understood as consciousness of one’s self and of one’s place in society. Such resources or properties, as Ricoeur points out, create the ‘human world out of the nature – greed, domination, self – they started with’ (Ricoeur, 1965: 169–70). The ‘good’ in economics is material improvement, as is the use of power to achieve the common benefit. ‘Esteem’ is recognition of the worth of others, which is reciprocated. Such are the positive uses of the ‘passions’. They can also – illuminated in Kafka’s work – take a negative form. Here the collusive circle of economic and political elites acts in its own interests, disguised as the ‘national interest’. The secrecy of government institutions combined with stringent libel laws (in many countries) are designed to prevent embarrassing or even criminal information from being revealed, even when this is in the public interest. Finally, civil society, when united against economic or political abuses, is a major force for reform; but it can also disintegrate into merely sectional or corporate interests, of lawyers, doctors, accountants and the like. Kafka’s nightmarish world is revealed when the head of the most powerful country in the world, claiming that it acts always for the good, allows foreign prisoners to be tortured. Nor is a rare democracy (in the Middle East) beyond Kafka’s realm, when carrying out a highly-publicised trial of a political suspect. According to a judicial report by the InterParliamentary Union: ‘From the beginning of the inquiry to the last day of the trial, the prosecution has worked almost as much on the media aspect of the dossier as on its juridical content, by organising the leakage of information presented as resulting from interrogations of Mr. B . . . at a time when the latter was detained in secret, so that neither he nor his lawyers could reply. [Further] by choosing to organise a public trial before the tribunal of the district of . . . rather than a non-public hearing before military jurisdictions, which has generally been the practice . . . Indeed, the B. affair demonstrates that lack of international rules, far from enhancing security, has above all undermined the authority of justice,

134


by throwing discredit on the way in which inquiries and procedures have been conducted’ (Le Monde, 20 May 2004). Now, Kafka’s The Trial takes the process a stage further: ‘For the Defence was not actually countenanced by the Law, but only tolerated . . . [The] proceedings were not only kept secret from the general public, but from the accused as well . . . For even the accused had no access to the Court records, and to guess from the course of an interrogation what documents the Court had up its sleeve was very difficult . . . And in the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up’ (said K). Nevertheless, Kafka himself was ‘earnestly and implacably a seeker for the right way of living’, according to the testimony of his friend Max Brod (Epilogue to The Trial), while K insisted on his innocence (‘Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K’) and until he was worn out by the dubious proceedings ‘knew how to stick up for his rights’. It is in this spirit that politics – the positive aspect of Kant’s ‘trilogy’ – can make a difference. Thus it was that President Roosevelt, reviving popular morale with his ‘New Deal’ at the height of the Great Depression, was triumphantly re-elected. Conversely, the British people in 1945 turned away from the great wartime leader Churchill and voted instead for a social revolution. In 2004, the Spanish electorate disavowed their prime minister – confident of success – and chose an entirely different course. And, against all the odds, the Congress Party under Sonia Gandhi, defending India’s poor, won a majority – although the consequences for the poor have yet to be seen. To conclude with a positive analysis of democratic potential from Kafka’s country, now the Czech Republic. Thus, Jiri Peher, former counsellor of the philosopher-president Vaclav Havel, describes the conflict between two conceptions of democracy, one represented by Havel himself, the other by the neo-liberal Vaclav Klaus (currently president). The conception of the latter – similar to the ‘procedural’ approach I have outlined above – is that democracy is limited to what he calls ‘standard mechanisms’ and to the interplay of political parties. For Klaus, society is composed of free, atomised individuals, which may group themselves in parties to defend their common interests. ‘Such a vision grants little space to civil society.’ Havel, on the other hand, while not neglecting the importance of mechanisms and democratic institutions, goes beyond this by demanding that democracy should be a living organism, inspired by a robust, lively and diversified civil society. ‘Havel’s model is a moral one, there is a combat between good and evil [as experienced in his own courageous struggle against totalitarian rule], between values and non-values.’ For Havel’s opponent, on the contrary, politics is a conflict


135

of interests and not principles (interview with Martin Plichta, Le Monde, 13 January 2001).

Conflict and cooperation: power and values In the past [man] looked on bloodshed as an act of justice and exterminated those he thought necessary to exterminate with a clear conscience; but now we consider bloodshed an abomination and we engage in this abomination more than ever. (Dostoevsky, ‘Memoirs from a Dark Cellar’) If the discord between ‘interest’ and ‘principle’ is a major source of political discredit within democracies, such a contradiction is far more flagrant in foreign affairs, where Realpolitik has long been the ruling mode. Only gradually and spasmodically have international law, multilateral decisionmaking and the endorsement of human rights provided a serious alternative, obliging the proponents of power politics to heed the voice, not only of reason (rather than force), but also of universal principle rather than national self-interest. The crisis over Iraq illuminates this fateful choice. The clash between the Bush administration, in particular, and the governments – and peoples – of France and Germany, among others, is far more than a matter of political or regional rivalry or of how to deal with an ambitious dictator: it was, and is, the fundamental question of what kind of world order is at stake. Either it is one, as noted above, of reinforcement of the rules of international law and of institutional forms of cooperation among nations in resolving crises (such as Iraq) or one, basically, of reliance on superior force and a unilateral approach. In the latter case, cooperation with other countries or institutions is acceptable – so long as it accords with the policy of the superpower. Contrary to attitudes during much of the cold war and as late as the Clinton administration, when cooperative approaches were by and large followed, unilateralism under Bush, Cheney and the Pentagon neoconservatives became the governing practice, enshrined in the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Admittedly, military force toppled the horrible dictator Saddam Hussein. But the Franco-German proposal to give the arms inspectors a last chance of investigation, within a specific and limited period, might have achieved the same purpose without bloodshed. In any case, a critical report by the inspectors against Saddam would have been a legitimate case for war, endorsed by the UN Security Council. Use of overwhelming force won out instead, marking a return to the old ways of power politics that have resulted in so many wars of destruction

136


and disaster. Such a regressive step has replaced the attempt to create a more cooperative and civilised world, not just in international relations, but also in safeguarding the environment (against what is objectively a far greater menace than international terrorism), setting up an international court to try war crimes, preventing proliferation of nuclear and other weapons, and so on. Instead, the ‘interests’ of one country, narrowly defined by an extreme conservative administration, prevailed. In practical terms, moreover, the results of power politics in Iraq are hardly satisfactory, not least in regard to the ‘overall’ strategy of the ‘war against terror’ – for this is an enemy that has been reinforced both by the diversion of US efforts to Iraq and by the new recruits to terrorism inspired by the anti-Americanism that this struggle has unleashed. Even within Iraq the situation is double-sided: positive in that a brutal tyrant has been overthrown; negative given the chaotic infighting among Iraqi factions, which is likely to persist. It would be an irony, but hardly a cause for democratic rejoicing, if Iran-style mullahs came to dominate the political process. More fundamentally, the unilateralist doctrine of pre-emptive war is not only arbitrary – who decides which country is a threat to security? – it is dangerous when decisions are made by a small, highly-ideological clique, impervious to the advice or criticism of other countries and of its own better-informed institutions. Does not this suggest that instead of rallying around the world leader under all circumstances (‘my country right or wrong’, extended worldwide) it is better to establish some countervailing force, even among allies, to check arbitrary or harmful policies. ‘Power tends to corrupt (judgement)’, according to a famous statement, ‘and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. That is what democracy is set up to prevent. Above all, and whatever the potential effect of change from one administration to another, the world context remains deeply ambiguous: power and ‘interest’ still dominate the historical record, as the following examples show, while ‘principle’ appears more in lip-service than reality. Thus, the ‘war’ on terrorism is conceived basically as a military operation – as in previous or ongoing campaigns from Vietnam to Iraq – even though it is equally important to understand the social ‘roots’ and ideological inspiration of terrorism. On the other hand, the notion of humanitarian intervention to save large numbers of people from disaster is increasingly asserted against the traditional conception of national sovereignty – such interventionism being justified by the doctrine of human rights. But this issue raises a vital question: are human rights universal – applicable to all countries – or are they a ‘Western’ import, masking


137

neo-colonial interference, which should be rejected in favour of homegrown values, ‘Asian’, ‘Islamic’ or others: in other words, should cultural relativism prevail? All these factors, revolving around ‘national interest’ and universal principle, are or have been at work in such major conflicts as those between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, between African nationalists and supporters of apartheid in South Africa, between Palestinians and Israelis, between different ethnic groups in Zaire/Congo, backed by outside ‘interests’, and in many other places. Yet it is reasonable to suppose that political compromise – rather than resort to force – could have resolved these conflicts (as has indeed been the case in South Africa and, with setbacks, in Northern Ireland) especially if introduced at an early stage before passions were inflamed. Some progress at least has occurred. For ‘humanitarian intervention’ was debated for the first time by the UN Security Council in 2002 – ten years after the French founder of Médecins sans frontières, Bernard Kouchner, had urged the international community not to stand by passively while civilian populations were being massacred, as has happened in almost all recent conflicts. But it was only after certain governments had contested NATO intervention in Kosovo that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan also insisted, in 1999, that humanitarian intervention was an ‘international obligation’. He then posed the question: ‘if humanitarian intervention effectively constitutes an inadmissible infringement of sovereignty, how should we react in the face of such situations as we have witnessed in Rwanda or Srebrenica, before flagrant, massive and systematic violations of human rights?’ The UN General Assembly was deeply divided on the subject. Algerian president Bouteflika spoke for many when he fiercely defended the principle of national sovereignty (in effect, given the polarised situation in Algeria, he was seeking to prevent embarrassing inquiries into massacres of civilians by Islamic extremists and by the military). He went on to ask: where does ‘aid stop and interference begin in our affairs?’ (survey by Afsané Bassir Pour and Claire Tréan, Le Monde, 2–3 June 2002). The report in 2002 of the expert commission requested by the UN Secretary-General did not propose modifying the UN Charter but rather to define rules of behaviour that conformed more closely to its spirit. It was the responsibility of the state, in the first place, to protect its people. But, the report went on, ‘when a population suffers severely from a civil war, an insurrection, or repression carried out by the state or as a result of the failure of its policies, and when the state is not disposed or able to

138


put an end to these sufferings or to avoid them, then the international responsibility to protect (the population) has priority over the principle of non-intervention’. The ‘just cause’ legitimating an external intervention would be a situation either of ‘considerable loss of life’ or ‘ethnic cleansing on a large scale’ achieved by assassination, forced expulsion, terror or rape. Moreover, such intervention should operate multilaterally and have the open support of the population at risk. Military intervention should in any case be a last resort, only after all possibilities of prevention and peaceful settlement are exhausted. Finally, intervention should be ‘proportionate’, that is, using only the minimum means necessary, and it should have reasonable prospects of attaining its objective. These conditions for humanitarian intervention were approved by the UN Secretary-General’s panel of world leaders reporting in November 2004 and endorsed by Kofi Annan himself in March 2005. The Secretary-General supported the panel’s definition of terrorism, on the legitimate use of force (similar to the conditions stated above) and notably the defence of human rights. On terrorism he acknowledged the right to resist enemy occupation, but insisted that it should be understood in its true sense: such resistance could not justify intentionally killing or wounding civilians or non-combatants with the aim of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organisation to do or abstain from doing any act. As for human rights, the Secretary-General criticised the lack of credibility of the UN’s own commission – countries notoriously abusing human rights are members – and called for ‘concrete measures’ to prevent atrocities (and see below). On the issue of poverty the Secretary-General recalled that more than one billion people live on less than a dollar a day. But two-thirds of the poor are in Asia and economic prospects in China and India provide hope for reducing world poverty by half by 2015. Nevertheless, there has been little progress in overcoming Aids, malaria and tuberculosis: and ‘Aids is the most murderous pandemic in the history of humanity.’ Finally, as he emphasised two years before, the United Nations is at a critical stage: ‘If the Security Council does not regain the confidence of member states and world public opinion these states will devote themselves more and more exclusively to their own national perceptions of emerging threats and their own judgment as to the best way to deal with them.’ Replying obliquely to the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, the Secretary-General had pointed out in 2003 that only the United Nations could provide legitimacy in confronting threats to security and world peace. The logic of pre-emptive war, on the contrary, represented a fundamental change in respect of the principles on which peace and stability


139

have been based for more than half a century. If such a doctrine were to be adopted it could create precedents that multiply the unilateral recourse to force, without juridical foundation, whether justifiably or not. Justification, however, is no problem for President Bush. As he stated in an interview (with Fox News): ‘Our aims and ambitions are noble. We believe in peace. We firmly believe in freedom. When we see people suffering, we help them.’ For ‘America is a good nation, authentically good.’ Paradoxically, the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war has more in common with its enemy, terrorism, than it has with its ethical ally, the principle of human rights, which one would expect to be privileged given the president’s concern for peace, freedom and goodness. This is because pre-emptive war is deemed to be at the service of higher goals (the safety of the nation under divine guidance) than are the conventional rules of international practice: and it is these higher goals that are said to justify unilateral action, whatever the opinions of others. As for terrorist operations, which kill innocent people, they are no less justified by their proponents, because they serve the will of God. In effect, the opposing extremes of pre-emptive war and religious war ( jihad) are perverse universals, that is, universal as doctrines, but applied for entirely selective reasons: namely, the national interest (of a superpower) on the one hand, the narrow and bigoted interpretation of religious sanctions, on the other. Only human rights – disfavoured or rejected by both ‘doctrines’ – have a truly universal character, both in theory and practical scope. It is from selective reasons, too, that suicide bombers are considered terrorists by the one side and martyrs by the other. But what is important, as the Iranian researcher Farhad Khosrokhavar has pointed out, is the motivation of ‘candidates for a sacred death’. Such neo-martyrs identify themselves with an illusory community of the ‘faithful’ in opposition to a community of the ‘evil’ which is just as illusory. Nevertheless, both good and evil-doers are not primordially defined theologically but by their concrete experiences of a world which is no longer coherent and which is seen, by the former at least, as profoundly unjust. Thus, one type of neo-martyr originates from ‘disinherited youth’ excluded from the benefits of modernity, while the world around is impregnated with dreams of abundance. The other type is from a very small fraction of the middle class, professionally trained, but alienated from the West. Yet even for the disinherited, exclusion is not a sufficient cause: two other factors are needed – humiliation, that is, the denial of dignity in everyday life, and the disintegration of social support systems, which provided protection and community help. So long as these traditional systems exist there is no logical reason for martyrdom (‘New Martyrs of Allah’, Le Monde, 2 October 2001).

140


Another researcher, Joseph Maila, emphasises the ‘globalisation’ of terrorism, whereby the metaphorical reduction of ‘the enemy’ to the United States symbolises every enemy. Decoupled from place or meaning, the Islamist referent of militant action, mobilisation and combat then becomes a universal ideology of rejection. Writing before the American invasion of Iraq, however, the author argues that the terrorist campaign against the United States is limited, because restricted to certain groups, networks and individuals. What is important is that terrorism should be fought at that level. ‘To generalise the response or to construct countermoves as if facing a universal threat is to transform a particular challenge into a universal war’ (‘The “heroes” of a frenzied anti-globalisation’, Le Monde, 4 October 2001). Kofi Annan’s own distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ threats to humanity, introduced at his press conference at the UN on 8 September 2003, is not dissimilar to these two analyses. Weapons of mass destruction and terrorism are hard threats. Soft threats are poverty, privation and disease. And he counsels: ‘Frankly, if one were to conduct an opinion poll in the regions of the world, I am not sure that weapons of mass destruction or terrorism would arrive at the top of the list of people’s concerns.’

Human rights Human rights are very much a matter of people’s concern. For human rights pose a challenge to old ways of thinking, and ordering, society. Either the basic rights of the individual, as a citizen and as a member of society, are foremost, or they are not. If they are not, then some other conception of society must prevail – traditionally, for example, that of the hereditary chief or king, whose rule was considered synonymous with the good of society; currently the ‘power state’ directed by an authoritarian political elite, or by a military, business or bureaucratic apparatus, or by the last survival of a communist party politburo. Human rights thus reveals the fundamental issue: either some form of dialogue between government and civil society, or repression (see Girling, 1991: 1–5, 28–33). But human rights are not a simple, easily applied formula. Basic rights to life and freedom are, of course, a necessary condition for a democratic society. But the question remains whether such rights are limited, as in classic liberal conceptions, to legal and political guarantees. The United Nations asserts, to the contrary, that satisfactory economic and social conditions are also a human right. Indeed, some third world countries


141

claim priority for ‘development’ – that is, considered as social and economic rights – over ‘Western’ legal and political rights: although whether such ‘social’ rights really exist for the majority of citizens, and not just a privileged minority, is another matter. Nevertheless, the two claims are not mutually exclusive. For it is evident that a basic minimum standard of living is necessary for freedom to be effective. There is a further, controversial issue: are human rights absolute and universal in scope, or are they to be considered less relevant than indigenous, non-Western values? In my view, whatever the hierarchical – hence inegalitarian – values of the past, human rights are universal in this era. They represent a universal aspiration for a standard, or way of life, which it is hoped that governments and peoples will increasingly achieve. This is not to say that human rights dictate a particular form of government or society; but that observance of human rights provides an essential minimum standard, on the basis of which members of society can freely choose their form of rule. Some form of pluralist democracy, however, would seem to be a precondition for the establishment and safeguarding of human rights: that is, freedom of belief, expression and association for all, equality under the law, an independent judiciary, regular free elections with universal suffrage, and the like, which alone can sustain the rights of all citizens. For the classic examples of human rights in action are precisely the popular struggles for independence and ‘the Rights of Man’, in the American and French revolutions, against arbitrary, unrepresentative, despotic regimes. It is impossible to ignore, however, an important counter-theme, critical of the ‘selfish’ individualism of (Western) democracies. The argument insists on the priority of collective action over individual competitiveness for the benefit of society as a whole (usually implying greater equality as well as material improvement). There is no guarantee, however, that the authoritarian decisions of a ‘collectivity’ – as in some versions of the ‘Asian values’ thesis, presupposing individual obedience to authority – will actually benefit the majority, even when the collective is said to be acting on behalf of ‘the people’. To repeat: a regime that is unaccountable to its citizens operates without essential popular and institutional safeguards against the tendencies of all monopolies – political or economic – to abuse their positions of power. Legal-political and socio-economic rights – as stated above – are both necessary and complementary. Without legal and political rights there can be no guarantee of the continuance of social and economic improvements. Without social and economic rights to a minimum ‘civilised’ standard of living, legal and political

142


freedoms become meaningless. Indeed, it is the linkage of these rights that provides citizens with the democratic leverage to assert popular demands against the structures of power that exist in all societies. Human rights, in this comprehensive sense, are not ‘culturally relative’, considered to be appropriate only for the advanced industrialised countries of the West. Moreover, those who condemn human rights as a ‘Western’ intrusion often do so from ulterior motives, namely the preservation of special privileges and vested interests: these are of course vulnerable to any effective agitation for popular rights. Interesting in this regard are the democratic ‘reform’ plans adopted by Arab kings and heads of state at their Tunis summit on 23 May 2004, which include ‘promoting the role of women’, ‘deepening the basis of democracy’ as well as Islamic consultation, ‘enlarging the field of political participation’, putting into action ‘justice and equality’, ‘respecting human rights and freedom of expression’ and so on. The solemn adoption of these reforms, under strong international pressure, opens the way for progress in countries whose constitutions and fundamental laws usually ignore such problems. Nevertheless, states the Tunis document, reforms should take place ‘in accordance with the cultural and religious values’ of the countries concerned, which will apply them ‘each in view of its conditions and its own possibilities’. In the face of such conditions, democratic governments are in a dilemma: whether to expose abuses of human rights in other countries, to the anger and irritation of their leaders, or to keep quiet for the sake of cooperative economic or security relations. The dilemma is all the greater where gross violations of human rights occur. Non-intervention, as in the case of Rwanda, may even encourage murderers to act with impunity. Humanitarian intervention, on the other hand, could serve as a pretext for one power to intervene (in its own interest) in the internal affairs of another. This is a normative, that is, a political decision: whether state sovereignty overrides human rights, or the other way round. Is it really worth troubling over human rights in ‘far-away countries’? This is the same kind of question, George Steiner reminds us, that Voltaire was asked by his contemporaries: why do you worry all Europe about the fate of one man (referring to the ‘Calas affair’ of the false accusation, torture and execution of a provincial figure)? Voltaire replied, ‘parce que je suis homme’, ‘because I am man – a human being’. This must be our answer, too.

Part III Society: Vision and Division


7 Environment

Very little is still known about it, but the whole planet will change. We haven’t the necessary equipment to say when and how. But we are sure of one thing: the size of disturbance will be something never seen in recent history. (Didier Paillard, climatologist, Nature/Le Monde, 12 January 2001)

Feeling about nature Listen carefully this, you can hear me. I’m telling you because earth just like mother And father or brother of you. That tree same thing. Your body, my body I suppose I’m same as you . . . anyone. Tree working when you sleeping and dream. Listen carefully, careful And this spirit e come in your feeling And you will feel it . . . anyone that. I feel it . . . my body same as you. I telling you this because the land for us, Never change round, never change. (Bill Neidjie, Story about Feeling) [W]hile aspects of Tao [the ‘Tao’ of Chinese Landscapes: the ‘Tao’ is the true ‘Way’ – of intuition rather than reason – informing all life] can be expressed in the painting of flowers, plants, birds, animals, 145

146


and insects, the category of landscape offers the fullest possible expression of the unity of Tao, the harmony of Heaven and Earth. For, in landscape paintings with their panoramic vistas, views of mountain peaks and valleys, and scenes at various seasons, all depicting the forces of nature in sky, earth and water, there is the opportunity to present everything in proper perspective, in relation to the infinity of Tao and in due relation to the rest of nature. The aims and lofty motives of Chinese landscape painters may be clearer, perhaps, if we follow the continuous thread of this idea of the harmony of Heaven (Yang) and Earth (Yin) as it wove through every aspect of landscape painting . . . The attention given to accurate representation is accompanied by an elaborate symbolism . . . The idea of a layer of symbolic significance is in accord with the belief in the living quality of trees, rocks, and all things in nature . . . each has appearance (the material, yin) and an inner vitality (the spirit, yang), the whole representing the harmony of the Yin and the Yang, the great vivifying unity of Tao. (Mai-mai Sze, The Way of Chinese Painting) [T]he concept of landscape as transcending time and place and as possessed of more than human stature, the notion that it should partake of the sublime as music and poetry do, and that its language is essentially poetic as that of poetry is pictorial – all these ideas are to be found in Chinese writings on landscape painting . . . (On Hsia Kuei, 1180–1230; hand scroll, ‘Ten Thousand Li of the Long River’) . . . landscapes, painted in what seems to have been a fever of impassioned generation. It is as though the elements that go to form them had been melted down in the crucible of the artist’s visual imagination and poured molten onto the silk . . . Man is in fact no more prominent in these scenes than in the landscapes of the eleventh century A.D.; but he is now caught up in a tremendous – sometimes terrifying – concourse of the elements. The glare of light and the swirl of mist do indeed help to secure an effect of depth, of mi yuan or ‘lost distance’, and so of physical actuality for these paintings; but they also serve to engulf man in a lonely and mysterious universe where he has never set foot before . . . these pictures have heroic proportions; for they serve to convey something of man’s own destiny. (William Willetts, Chinese Art, ‘Painting’)

Environment

147

The landscape in Chinese painting became the landscape of the cosmos, the ideal natural worldview in the artist’s mind. There is also no need for the viewer to ponder the rationality of the composition, for the towers, pavilions, huts and bridges are but random additions by the artist. This kind of landscape painting fuses the human realm (of the artist) and the natural world into one, sublimating both to create the ideal landscape. This idea of two entities merging into one is infiltrated with the cultural personality of Chinese painting, where man and nature are intimate and in harmony. (Chinese Paintings, Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, 2000) Nature became the Absolute through which people could seek salvation. In the words of Omine Akira (1987: 7) ‘The path to salvation for human beings – the path of genuine human existence – is to live entrusting to and in accord with nature’, a nature which is essential to the sacred Buddha . . . [The similarity of Nature as ‘natural law’ and as ‘forces of nature’] rests on one of the central ideas in Japanese – as well as Chinese – thought. For . . . ‘nature’ corresponds to the cosmic whole, i.e. the totality of existing phenomena . . . nature is nothing but the visualization or manifestation of the ‘universal Principle’, which is the flow of energy created by the interaction of yin and yang forces and the five elements. This Principle underlies all things and regulates growth and decay, life and death, joy and sorrow, light and darkness, and so on. Nature and the universal Principle . . . are inseparable and intrinsically linked . . . the identification of man and nature . . . are means to achieve enlightenment, or satori, by the way of contemplating upon nature . . . (Pamela J. Asquith and Arne Kalland, ‘Japanese Perceptions of Nature’ in Asquith and Kalland, 1997) [In] my thoughts There was a darkness, call it solitude, Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes Of hourly objects, images of trees, Of sea and sky, no colours of green fields; But huge and mighty Forms that do not live Like living men mov’d slowly through my mind By day and were the trouble of my dreams. . . . life and nature, purifying thus The elements of feeling and of thought. (Wordsworth, The Prelude)

148


In simple earnest, I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit courses, drives, & eddies, like a leaf in Autumn: a wild activity, of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, & impulses of motion, rises up from within me – a sort of bottom-wind, that blows to no point of the compass, and comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole Being is filled with waves, as it were, that roll & stumble, one this way, & one that way, like things that have no common master . . . The farther I ascend from animated Nature, from men, & cattle, & the common birds of the woods, & fields, the greater becomes in me the intensity of the feeling of Life; Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have, an opposite . . . In those moments it has been my creed, that Death exists only because Ideas exist; that Life is limitless sensation; that Death is a child of the organic senses, chiefly of the Sight; that Feelings die by flowing into the mould of the Intellect, and becoming Ideas; and that Ideas passing forth into action re-instate themselves again in a world of Life . . . (S.T. Coleridge to Thomas Wedgwood, 14 January 1803, in Roger Hudson, 1991) Parting at the mountains, The clouds fly off. Yet when I see them once again return, So does my hope. (Sugawara no Michizane, cited in Tanizaki’s memoirs)

Global warning These extracts from an Australian Aboriginal poet, from art historians’ analyses of Chinese landscape painting and from Japanese – and English Romantics’ – attitudes towards nature provide an intuitive sense of the one-ness of humanity and the world of nature: a world that is now threatened by the consequences of massive industrialisation and excessive consumerism. The ‘story about feeling’ is no less an inspiration to act on and against dominant economic and political power structures in order to save the environment – and civilisation itself – from destruction. In the 1950s, for example, there were twenty great natural catastrophes; in the 1990s four times as many. The number and cost of climate-related disasters – hurricanes, floods, droughts – is steadily rising. In the worst year, 1991, tens of thousands died as a result of floods, storms and eruptions (Tim Radford, ‘Disasters’, Guardian Weekly supplement, August 2002). The

Environment

149

World Meteorological Organisation warned in 2003 that such extreme weather conditions, including high and low temperatures and record rainfall and storms in different parts of the world, are consistent with predictions of global warming. Supercomputer models show that, as the atmosphere warms (as a result of economic activity), the climate not only becomes hotter but much more unstable (Michael McCarthy, Independent, 3 July 2003). The UN Environment Program calculated in December 2003 that weather-related catastrophes cost the world more than $60 billion during the year. Meanwhile Munich Re, a major reinsurance company, noted that economic losses due to natural disasters had risen six times in the last three decades and reinsurance payments ten times. ‘Extreme weather events around the globe are on the increase. We need to act now to stop global warming. The problems are clearly visible, and we see them in our data’ (Natasha Bita, The Australian, 12 December 2003). In January 2004, Britain’s most senior government scientist, Sir David King, strongly criticised the refusal by the Bush administration, in particular, to confront global warming. Writing in the journal Science he contrasted the US-declared urgency in pursuing the war against terrorism with its reluctance to curb the emission of greenhouse gases: ‘In my view, climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today – more serious even than the threat of terrorism’ (Mark Henderson, The Australian, 10–11 January 2004). In an ‘urgent’ call for action in June 2004, the British and French foreign and environment ministers warned that the acceleration of global warming is a structural fact in the evolution of the planet. ‘It is undoubtedly the major challenge confronting humanity, in the long term, to ensure its future. The facts, corroborated by numerous scientific studies, are obvious. And so are the extreme climatic phenomena’, including heatwaves, repeated flooding, increased desertification and melting of glaciers: ‘yet the collective will of states is still much too weak in relation to the gravity of the challenge’ (Le Monde, 25 June 2004). A secret report prepared for the US Defense Department, also in 2004, warned that climate change may lead to global catastrophe costing millions of lives and is a far greater risk than terrorism. The report predicted that ‘abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies’. Examples of probable scenarios are that Britain will have winters similar to those in current-day Siberia as temperatures drop radically by 2020. By 2007, violent storms will make large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable and lead to a breach in California’s aqueduct system supplying all water to densely populated southern

150


California. ‘Disruption and conflict’, the report concluded, ‘will be endemic features of life. Once again, warfare would define human life’ (Report to the Pentagon by Peter Schwartz, former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group and Dough Randall of Global Business Network, California: report ‘obtained’ by the Observer, reprinted Canberra Times, 24 February 2004). The president of the French environmental and energy control agency, Michèle Pappalardo, urged a 3-year campaign starting in May 2004 to mobilise citizens into awareness of the need to conserve energy and to take action to slow down the effects of climate change. ‘In one century’, she pointed out, ‘the concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere has increased by 35 per cent. As a result, there has been a marked increase in temperatures and multiplication of extreme climate conditions.’ The average world temperature increased by 0.6 per cent during the twentieth century and the increase would vary between 1.4 and 5.8 per cent during the present century, confirmed the agency’s research director. ‘The sea level would rise between 9 and 88 cm between 1990 and 2100 and glaciers, in particular at the South Pole, are beginning to melt. Parasite-borne diseases such as malaria and yellow fever could gain ground’ (Muriel Frat, Le Figaro, 17 May 2004). ‘An ecological time-bomb is operating, for climatic warming is approaching the point of no return’, concluded a report by Public Policy Research and the Center for American Progress. ‘It is urgent that global warming not exceed 2 degrees more than in 1750’ (Le Monde, 30–31 January 2005). Bill Hare, a scientist from the Potsdam Institute of Climatic Research noted that even with less than 1 degree of increased warming, very vulnerable ecosystems could be affected. Between 1 and 2 degrees of increase, the impact on the environment grows significantly. Risks greatly increase beyond 2 degrees and could lead to large-scale extinction of species and dramatic changes in ecosystems, including ‘risks of famine and shortage of drinking water, as well as socio-economic damage especially in developing countries’ (Christiane Galus, Le Monde, 6–7 February 2005). The report backed by more than a thousand scientists – the ‘Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’ – warned: ‘Human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted’ (Tim Radford, Guardian Weekly, 8–14 April 2005). So which gets priority in the international community: global warming, economic growth, or the war against terrorism? The choice, which is political (the power to decide) lies at the heart of the environmental debate. These are some examples.

Environment

151

Not long after his (contested) election in 2000, President Bush abandoned a campaign promise to regulate power station emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the greenhouse gas, believed to cause global warming. Environmentalists in the United States and around the world accused the president of betrayal by selling out to the energy industry. For the US is the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide; with just 4 per cent of the world population producing nearly a quarter of the world total. The president’s move came as scientists found the first direct evidence that the greenhouse effect has become significantly stronger over the past 30 years, causing the global warming detected by climatologists. As Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth International pointed out: ‘President Bush’s decision sends a negative signal to the rest of the world about US willingness to curb pollution. If the world is to avoid a catastrophe it is essential for the US to take a lead in tackling the profligate use of fossil fuels’ (Mary Dejevsky, Steve Connor and Michael McCarthy, Independent, 15 March 2001). A few months later, at the UN Convention on Climate Change, in Bonn, 180 countries accepted the Kyoto Protocol limiting the use of greenhouse gases, but President Bush repudiated this commitment. Not long after, it was reported that the Bush administration, at the urging of the world’s biggest oil company, ExxonMobil, was seeking to oust the British scientist chairing the panel advising the world about the dangers of global warming. The US nomination of a more ‘suitable’ candidate followed an ExxonMobil memo to the White House, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, demanding that their candidates replace scientists with ‘aggressive agendas’. Bush’s decision to take the oil company’s advice is the latest in a long and successful campaign to undermine climate science. ExxonMobil had spent more than $1 billion in the 1990s financing the Global Climate Coalition, a group of oil, motor and heavy industries opposed to action against global warming because of its effect on sales. Companies such as Shell and BP, however, left the GCC as the evidence grew of global warming (Paul Brown, Guardian Weekly, 11–17 April 2002). The Russian government’s decision to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in October 2004 further isolated the Bush administration. Nevertheless, the policy of the US Environmental Protection Agency in the second Bush administration, according to its head, was subordinated ‘to maintaining economic competitiveness as a nation’ (Dan Glaister, Guardian Weekly, 10–16 December 2004). Moreover, the White House official who had formerly been the ‘climate team leader’ and lobbyist of the American Petroleum Institute, heading the oil industry fight against limits on greenhouse gases,

152


was revealed to have repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that played down links between such emissions and global warming. He made dozens of changes to reports by government scientists, aiming to cast doubt on their findings, including removal of evidence on the reduction of glaciers. This official, Philip Cooney, had been appointed chief of staff for the White House council on ‘environmental quality’ (Andrew Revkin, New York Times, 8 June 2005). Bush did admit at the July 2005 G8 summit that global warming was a reality, but rejected the consensus of other heads of state or government that action was ‘urgent’. Repeated droughts in the prairies, torrential rains in Quebec, gigantic fires in the forests of British Columbia, melting of arctic ice-flows: these are what Canada has experienced from years of global warming. As a result, scientists, politicians and economists agree on the need to act urgently, including strong support for the Kyoto Protocol. The Canadian objective is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 6 per cent (in relation to the 1990 level) between 2008 and 2012. The government has invested $3 billion Canadian for this purpose. But the financial calculation is simple. Already, climate change has cost the country dearly: $5 billion because of the drought, $3 billion for the Quebec crisis, and $1 billion yearly to meet extra health care and the loss of productivity due to the pollution fog in Ontario (Anne Pélouas, Le Monde Economie, 2 September 2003). China, too, suffered in its northern provinces from an exceptional drought in 2001 – the second worst since 1949. The economic cost in loss of cereal production, the social costs in water shortage and the environmental damage (increased desertification) are extremely high. Temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees higher than average and rainfall some 20 per cent less. Already some 50 million Chinese find difficulty in getting drinking water: the amount available per head of population is only one-quarter of the world average. Repeated droughts as well as industrial and agricultural over-production in highly-populated areas combine to exhaust or to pollute water reserves. After years of seeking to increase economic performance at all costs, the central government has at last come to realise the peril it faces. To add to its woes, desertification is spreading rapidly throughout northern China. More than a quarter of China is already desert and one-third is potentially under threat (Frédéric Bobin, Le Monde, 18 August 2001). As for the Kyoto Protocol, China – like other developing countries – is under no obligation to reduce its carbon emissions, which are expected to double between 2001 and 2025, approaching the present level of US emissions. But the damage caused by pollution in China is already so great that Beijing is compelled to protect its environment (Antoine Reverchon, ‘After Kyoto’, Le Monde, 16 February 2005).

Environment

153

Indeed the July 2005 G8 summit planned to help China, India and other developing countries to adopt clean energy technology and other effective emission controls. As for France: twenty years ago environmentalists were so marginal and so deprived of legitimacy as to have virtually no influence on political decisions. Now, however, one of the leaders of the Green movement, Alain Lipietz, can argue: ‘The Greens consider that the struggle against the economic defects of capitalism – pollution and the greenhouse effect – and the profound transformation of society are inseparable.’ And the FrancoGerman former student leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, further emphasises the ecological critique of capitalism, intervening ‘when it is evident that industrial production destroys non-renewable natural resources and that economic liberalism leads to the perversion of democracy’. Nevertheless, the environmentalists’ influence on the Socialist government, from 1997 to 2002, was far from achieving their objectives. Despite the rhetorical support for preservation of the environment by governments both of the Left and the Right – including a constitutional charter – the experience of participation in policy-making has been disillusioning. One well-known environmentalist, Nicolas Hulot, even turned down President Chirac’s offer to head the environment ministry, stating that he knew the former environment ministers and all related bitterly their inability to impose their policies on the more powerful ministries of agriculture, transport and industry. Indeed, the paradox of the Green appeal is precisely the contrast between intellectual realisation of the need for reform and the practical costs of transforming powerful, but environmentally counter-productive economic, political and social structures (Girling, 2004: 63–71). Business resistance to environmental reforms affecting profitability has been ferocious. Consider the tobacco industry as a microcosm of business in society. Cigarette advertisements provide information and stimulate demand, which are rational economic purposes. But such advertisements have a deeper, emotional appeal. They present a dream world of handsome men and attractive women, striding or riding through a beautiful landscape – the picture of glamour, youth and health. The substance of these dreams is actually a noxious weed, to which smokers become addicted. What ensues is not fun, but misery; not glamour, but ugliness; not health, but disease. How can industry get away with such deception? Some obvious reasons can be suggested. First, smoking satisfies a psychological need in individuals who are suffering the stress of urban or industrial life. Second, the tobacco industry is skilful at presenting an image of what life could be like, or should be like. Third, the industry is wealthy and has the resources to fight back against criticism. ‘The claims

154


that smokers are “addicts” defy common sense’, righteously declared a spokesman for the Tobacco Institute. ‘The Surgeon-General [US public health authority] has mistaken the enemy’, according to a senator from the tobacco state of North Carolina. ‘In comparing tobacco – a legitimate and legal substance – to individual narcotics such as heroin and cocaine, he has directed “friendly fire” at American farmers and businessmen.’ The Surgeon-General replied in kind. ‘I haven’t mistaken the enemy. My enemy kills 350,000 people a year.’ Smoking as a response to stress is thus a by-product of industrialisation; the industry is concerned more with corporate profits than with public health; it either ignores the evidence of disease or claims that ‘statistical correlation’ is no proof that smoking ‘causes’ lung cancer. Moreover, taxes on cigarettes make an important contribution to government revenue: determination to stop smoking once and for all would put an end to this source of funds. So governments compromise. Under pressure from those who are concerned with the welfare of the community, governments step up taxes on cigarettes and ban advertising, at least in part; but although advertising is known to attract people to take up smoking, especially young people, outright bans are usually avoided. Similarly, atmospheric, ground and underground pollution is a byproduct of industrialisation. Coal-fired plants, iron and steel mills, chemical works and oil refineries underpin our material existence, but they also damage our health. A major industrial product, such as automobiles, is an enormous convenience to ordinary citizens; yet cars and trucks emit poisonous gases that harm people and damage the environment. For as long as it could, the automobile industry either ignored the evidence of disease or claimed that the cost of effective pollution controls would cripple a vital national resource. Yet the cost of advertising glamorous – or robust – cars with high-powered engines in exotic scenery was not affected. As long ago as the 1960s the US Senate conducted hearings on air pollution, from which the environmentalist Barry Commoner quotes the correspondence between a concerned Los Angeles official, Kenneth Hahn, and the biggest car manufacturers. In 1953 Hahn had written to Ford asking whether any research or experimentation was going on that was ‘designed to eliminate or substantially reduce exhaust vapors’. It was known at this time that motor vehicles were responsible for more than two-thirds of all toxic hydrocarbon emissions. Ford’s reply was that its engineering staff ‘feels these vapors are dissipated in the atmosphere quickly and do not represent an air pollution problem’. Nearly two years later, Hahn was told by one major firm that ‘We will soon be in a position to recommend changes’; another 18 months went by and General

Environment

155

Motors announced that controls were to be introduced for all new cars sold in California – controls that eliminated only one-quarter of the hydrocarbons from the exhaust. Only after another five years were cars adequately equipped to deal with pollution. A reason for the industry’s ability to prevaricate, as Commoner points out (1971: 67–71, 78–9) is that ‘multiple complexities’, such as varied environmental conditions as well as differences in age, world conditions and economic status of people affected, all make it difficult to prove that any single air pollutant is a specific cause of a particular disease. Yet the statistical evidence is that air pollution is especially harmful to the poor, the aged and the young – those who are least able to exert pressure, and least able to resist. The consumer lifestyle in rich countries – and among the wealthy in poor countries – also bears its share of responsibility for inaction in limiting pollution and thus helping to preserve the environment. Although the European governments, for example, agreed in July 2003 to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions in conformity with the Kyoto Protocol, even a strict adherence to official directives would not solve the problem. Industrial pollution has certainly been reduced as a result of energy conservation (ever since the first ‘petrol shocks’), but this is not the case with urban construction of offices and apartments – and especially the transport sector, which represents about one-third of total emissions. Technical improvements without changing consumer habits are not enough. Limiting the speed of vehicles would reduce petrol or diesel consumption by some 15 per cent, as one expert points out, but this proposal meets with an angry resistance from car manufacturers, who promote their advertising campaigns around the power of their products. As for diverting transport from road to rail, the latter consuming two to three times less energy, individuals as well as enterprises are reluctant to make the change. Yet it is essential in the long term, in this researcher’s view, to ‘disconnect’ economic growth from energy consumption, which otherwise would increase exponentially. It is a ‘fundamental choice’, which is more than an economic decision. It requires the ‘cost of apprenticeship’: that is, ‘cultural investment’ and education of citizens (Benjamin Dessus, ‘ecodevelopment’ researcher: Le Monde des débats, July–August 2000; also Alain Faujas and Antoine Reverchon, Le Monde Economie, 2 September 2003). The campaigning of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is extremely important in this regard. As Laurence Tubiana, a specialist in sustainable development, points out, NGOs as well as scientific networks set up by academic foundations and certain firms have decided to bypass the inactivity of states. In particular, certain American foundations, such as the Pew Center, and the German Marshall Fund are financing a significant

156


transatlantic dialogue among experts in global warming (interview with Antoine Reverchon, Le Monde, 9 June 2004). Moreover, some major enterprises like Nike, Shell and BP have invested in durable development projects. Admittedly these are firms that have been heavily criticised in the past for their poor environmental performance. But these are exceptional cases: the great majority of firms, notably American but also from developing countries, have shown not the slightest interest. Above all, financial markets are disinclined to support investment in sustainable development (Laure Belot, Le Monde, 9 June 2004). This is indeed the basic problem for the environmental movement: the scientific evidence of environmental degradation is overwhelming, but awareness of the ecological consequences has been slow to develop, even in those countries where the destructive impact of unrestrained economic growth is most obvious. A leading American environmentalist, Barry Commoner, had actually singled out the five major issues of ecological concern in 1971, but they were only addressed seriously by the international community some 15 years later. These issues, in addition to pollution and global warming, are reduction of the ozone layer, disposal of hazardous wastes and acid rain. Ever since the industrial revolution, resulting in ever-increasing use of coal, oil and gas, ‘we have been burning these fossil fuels and reconverting them to carbon dioxide, the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere has been rising’, hence the warming or ‘greenhouse’ effect (Commoner, 1971: 29–30). Theoretical predictions put forward by an authoritative international meeting of scientists fourteen years later already included the possibility of devastating effects by the 2030s of rising sea levels, increased frequency and severity of flooding, increased desertification and salination in middle latitudes, a worsening of ‘current critical problems’ of food, water and forests in semi-arid tropical regions, soil erosion and increased frequency and intensity of storms in humid tropical regions (‘Greenhouse Effect’, 1985).

Awareness and response Such global issues can no longer be dealt with at the level of ‘private enterprise’ or ‘national sovereignty’ – indeed, they cause problems rather than provide solutions. As the Hague Declaration of major European countries and Japan stated in 1989: ‘Today, the very conditions of life on our planet are threatened by the severe attacks to which the earth’s atmosphere is subjected.’ Scientific measures to protect the environment were proposed at the 1992 ‘Earth Summit’ at Rio and the follow-up conference at

Environment

157

Kyoto in 1997. A further report by scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in 2001, then raised the possible range of temperatures throughout the world over the next decades, with extremely harmful effects for developing countries. Then the director of the institute of environmental sciences in Paris, Gérard Mégie, pointed out the ‘enormity’ of the increase in global warming as a result of the growing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As he put it, ‘today the system is totally unbalanced . . . The present task is to slow the rate of global warming’ (‘Are we entering a new climate?’, Le Monde des débats, July–August 2000). Klaus Topfer, executive director of the UN environment programme, warned of an ecological crisis: ‘A series of looming crises and ultimate catastrophe can only be averted by a massive increase in political will. We have the technology but are not applying it . . . There is no incentive to apply it because politicians are not forcing manufacturers to do so’ (Reporting on Global Environment Outlook 2000, Guardian Weekly, 23–29 September 1999). Commoner himself raises the question whether the ‘industrial pattern of economic growth is compatible with ecological stability, and even survival of the species’ (Commoner, 1971: 142–3, 217–18, 256–7, 296). Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, points to the responsibility of an increasingly complex division of labour in modern capitalism, which does not always develop smoothly and can result in ‘anomie’ (disorientation, lack of norms). This occurs where industrialisation is so rapid that social rules cannot keep up, and life becomes unregulated. The gap between people’s aspirations and what they actually achieve grows larger. In modern capitalist society people are induced to want more than they have, and the decline in the influence of social institutions such as the family and organised religion only encourages the competition for material improvement (Cudworth, 2003: 106–7, quoting Durkheim). Such obsessive materialism is at the expense of non-economic values, including our environment. Erika Cudworth, in Environment and Society, discusses a range of environmental responses, from ‘postmodernism’ (the environment is a social construct) to ‘critical realism’ (environmental degradation, revealed by scientific research, exists as a major, growing threat to the planet). She notes four strands within ecological or green theory: social ecology, deep ecology, eco-socialism and eco-feminism. ‘Deep ecology’, approving Chinese and Japanese conceptions of the oneness of humanity and nature, emphasises the danger posed by economic (hence human) exploitation of the environment. Social ecologists consider that oppression and exploitation in terms of class, caste, gender, race and by the state inevitably

158


lead to human exploitation of natural resources. They recognise, unlike deep ecologists, that science is ‘value free’. They argue, however, that scientific research is shaped by the social forces of the state and capitalism, which means that it may be complicit in environmental damage. As for eco-socialists, they emphasise above all the responsibility of the capitalist system which, motivated by profit, treats nature (and human beings) as a commodity and defines natural resources as objects for human use. Finally, eco-feminists criticise the social inequity that results from the exploitation of poor countries by rich countries. They see human domination of the environment as related to a world view that justifies the domination of women. Conversely, certain eco-feminists believe that women identify with nature through their bodies as mothers and nurturers. But what links all these strands is their insistence that there are major environmental problems, with social causes and consequences, and that society is inappropriately organised in relation to the natural environment (Cudworth, 2003: 24, 37–9, 54–6, 63). How, then, do environmental movements, including Green parties, mobilise for action and what solutions do they have to what they rightly see as the menace of environmental degradation? British Green Party policy, for example, takes a clear stand on five major issues, which are widely endorsed by environmentalists. Energy: earth’s resources are finite; essential measures to improve energy conservation include resource taxation and an end to production of nuclear energy (problem of disposal of hazardous waste). Transport: no new road building schemes, which encourage vehicle pollution; instead, expansion of rail and bus services; planning to ensure that shops and offices are located where people live. Economic policy: ecological limits on ‘free trade’, opposition to multinational investment, encouragement of local trade and barter systems; in sum, quality of life is the key factor. Human rights: every person has a right to basic material security; thus, an end to legal, economic and social discrimination on grounds of gender, sex, ethnicity, ability and age. Agriculture: a ban on factory farming, limits to the intensive use of artificial fertilisers and insecticides, subsidies for transition to organic farming, and prohibition of genetically modified crops. Unlike the German Greens and to a degree the French, the British party has not been successful politically – to a considerable extent due to the electoral system favouring larger parties. German Greens notably have broad policy commitments, including and end to third world debt, rights for marginalized social groups, minimum income, increased regulation of industrial and agricultural waste, division of large corporations into smaller local units and radical decentralisation in political decision-making. The

Environment

159

media-effective Greenpeace also has a platform including phasing out of fossil fuels, promotion of renewable energies to stop or slow down climate change, elimination of toxic chemicals, opposition to genetically modified crops and for nuclear disarmament. Both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are known for the quality of their environmental research (Cudworth: 85–94). Given the way in which the environmentalist message has been widely diffused in society and consequent awareness of the very real danger facing human beings, why is it that effective counter-measures have not been taken before it is too late? This is indeed the question: how to create the political will? In regard to policy, two noted environmental sociologists, Ted Benton and Michael Redclift, emphasise two different approaches, one broadly reformist, the other radical. Thus, political interventions to limit the environmental damage associated with industrial growth can either (1) incorporate ‘sustainable development’ within products and services through better environmental management and techniques or (2) abandon our current technological imperatives, which are leading to environmental disaster, and adopt ‘radically different and much “greener” forms of social life’. This includes ‘life-style’ change, but could include more radical views of social structure change. The first discourse is that of scientists and governments; the second that of the Green lobby and, to some extent, the public (Redclift and Benton, 1994: 16). Benton criticises the ‘managerialist’ or ‘technological environmental ideology’ because it can only define and propose solutions to environmental problems as they are produced and encountered by the dominant paradigm of growth and development. It can postulate reduced growth but ‘cannot contemplate qualitatively different lines of sociocultural and economic change’. In other words, environmental ‘management’ is a global strategy to secure the long-term sustainability of a particular kind of human culture and its dominant economic and political interests (Redclift and Benton, 1994: 37). And yet scientific and technical management has proved remarkably effective in resolving one important environmental threat – the thinning of the ozone layer. But this, as Barbara Adam points out (1994: 99), is precisely because the problem is challenging but manageable. It can be tackled by phasing out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and inventing an alternative substance, without needing ‘a change of values, economic practices or political structures’. A more substantial support for the reformist approach is the policy experience of the European Community (now European Union), reported

160


by one of its environmental researchers, Angela Liberatore (1994: 190–8). The framing of the ‘greenhouse effect’ as a policy issue – rather than as a scientific issue alone – started in 1986, with research that acknowledged existing uncertainties, but also argued for taking some immediate countermeasures in the field of industrial, agricultural and energy policy. If the greenhouse effect is shown to have ‘serious impacts’ on climate and agriculture worldwide, according to the European Commission in 1987, ‘the community should already be thinking about possible responses and alternative energy strategies’. A ‘crucial role’, reported by Liberatore, was played by the 1988 Toronto Conference on ‘The Changing Atmosphere’. It urged a 20 per cent reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in industrialised countries, ratification of the protocol on CFCs, and promotion of a global convention on climate change. Natural science findings formed the basis for identifying the problem of the greenhouse effect, insists Liberatore, and for framing climate change as a global, largely human-induced, and very serious threat. The overall scientific assessment, considered by the European Commission as a basis for evaluating alternative courses of action, can thus be summarised: carbon dioxide is the main contributor to the greenhouse effect; the main source of carbon dioxide is fossil fuel combustion; available models indicate the global temperature increase (between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees) will necessarily occur if atmospheric concentrations double with respect to pre-industrial concentrations. Such climate change (as already indicated above) may have various negative impacts (rise in sea level, depletion of water resources and of agricultural production, health problems and so on). Natural science findings, Liberatore concludes, need some ‘translation’ in order to become policy issues: This required the identification, evaluation and selection of measures and strategies aimed at preventing or mitigating the possible negative impacts of global warming. In other words, to become a policy issue the greenhouse effect had to become a ‘treatable’ problem, even if an extremely difficult, though a politically ‘manageable’ one. In this respect, the role of economists, policy analysts and energy technology experts has been crucial and it is their contribution – rather than that of natural scientists – which now represents the main scientific input to policy-making in the EC context. (Liberatore, 1994: 195) As a result, research on and introduction of energy efficiency and renewable energies are now a top priority of EC research, energy and environmental policy.

Environment

161

Nevertheless, in view of the massive impact on society of environmental degradation if current economic patterns persist, according to the 2002 Global Energy Outlook, is the limited ‘managerial’ approach sufficient? Indeed, such an approach, relying often on taxation (polluter pays) or on financial incentives (tradable pollution permits) to diminish the global level of warming is strongly criticised by the environmental economist Michael Jacobs (1994: 67–88). As Jacobs points out, the dominant neoclassical project imputes prices to the environment, ‘consumed’ by individuals as a commodity (in the same way as other commodities are consumed), by constructing supply and demand curves. This enables the economist to identify the appropriate (optimal) level of environmental protection for the society to adopt. The next stage is to turn these imputed prices into real-life prices by intervening in or creating markets for them. This enables the identified level of protection to be achieved (70–3). The problem, of course, is that it is ‘consumer preferences’ – willingness to pay so much for environment consumed – that identifies the desired level of protection and not the condition of the environment, established by scientific research. The environment is likely to be far more degraded – and therefore requiring more costly preventive measures – than ‘consumers’ realise or, if they do, would be inclined to accept. It follows, as Redclift and Benton suggest (1994: 20), that when institutional and socio-cultural factors (rather than economic preferences) are taken into account, then direct regulation might be more effective in safeguarding the environment than market-oriented incentives, such as taxation and tradable permits. It is important to realise, moreover, that environmental goods, in general, are not at all like actual commodities. They approximate much more to ‘public goods’, such as national security, which neoclassical economists already recognise as not susceptible to market-oriented approaches.

The price of courage The advice of Benton and Redclift certainly applies to France, where protection of the environment now forms part of the Constitution. Indeed, the objective of the French government is explicitly to divide by four its carbon dioxide and other emissions by 2050, which would mean reducing them by 3 per cent every year for the next fifty years – in other words, more in each year than has previously been achieved in 13 years! (Hervé Kempf, ‘Dossier on the Kyoto Protocol’, Le Monde, 16 February 2005.) The contrast been objective and reality is striking. In this regard an earlier episode is instructive.

162


In June 2004, the French foreign and environment ministers, with their British colleagues, launched an urgent call for action: ‘We must have the courage to tell our citizens: the acceleration of global warming . . . is undoubtedly the major challenge confronting humanity in the long term.’ While for tens of thousands of years the natural warming of the earth evolved at a very slow rate, the exponential growth in world energy consumption has totally altered the order of things. Climatic warming evolves one hundred times faster than its natural rate. ‘We are able to anticipate the consequences of current climatic change on the eco-system and the living conditions of future generations. Their cost – in terms of health, economy and ecology – is incalculable and manifestly far superior to the economic cost of measures aiming to control this phenomenon. France and the United Kingdom are determined to face up to this major climatic upheaval . . .’ ‘Control of climate change will determine the future of humanity. The collective responsibility of states and the personal responsibility of political leaders is engaged’, the foreign and the environment ministers solemnly insist. The Kyoto Protocol is a first step, necessary but not sufficient. ‘For the task is immense. The issue, for governments and for civil society, is to mobilise, going beyond the cycles of political life and beyond short-term considerations and the preoccupations of the moment.’ It is false, the ministers recognise, to state as an absolute principle that (economic) growth and protection of the environment are incompatible. What is important is to produce ‘eco-compatible’ growth in terms of modes of production and consumption. In Britain, for example, greenhouse gas emissions were reduced between 1990 and 2002 by 15 per cent and at the same time there was 30 per cent growth. ‘Now it is high time to act’, is the stirring conclusion. ‘Let us do it quickly!’ (Le Monde, 25 June 2004.) ‘It is urgent to act’, repeated the Raffarin government in its health and environmental plan of action for the years 2004 to 2008. Indeed, only a few weeks before, numerous researchers had launched a ‘Paris Appeal’, warning that the human species was in danger. Official objectives are ‘to breath pure air and drink water of good quality, prevent environmentally-induced pathologies, notably cancers; better inform the public and protect the people at risk’. The situation is alarming: some 30,000 premature deaths a year are linked with urban atmospheric pollution; the prevalence of respiratory allergies has doubled in 20 years; only 37 per cent of potable water resources are protected; and nearly a million workers would be exposed to carcinogenic substances. A major priority is to reduce diesel particle emissions by 30 per cent by 2010 for these are ‘one of the principal factors of health risks linked to urban pollution’. During

Environment

163

the same period, industrial toxic emissions should be reduced by 85 per cent for dioxins, 50 per cent for cadmium, 65 per cent for lead and so on. ‘The plan shows awareness of the problem of pollution, but it is very insufficient’, observed the cancer specialist Dominique Belpomme, interviewed by Le Monde (22 June 2004). It completely overlooks physical pollution, that is, the effect of ultraviolet rays, of radioactivity and electromagnetic waves. Nor it is articulated with the ‘cancer plan’ adopted a year before, although environmental degradation is at the source of an increasing number of cancers. Above all, the official plan does not seek to modify pollution as such, but only to make it less toxic. There is no attempt to reduce the source of pollution, but only to lessen indirectly the emission of toxic products. Thus, radical measures, which are effective, have not been taken. The reason for the serious lack of attention to chemical products is that ‘the government plan takes too much account of economic and industrial imperatives’. Further, while the plan talks of improving the quality of water, it says nothing about the amount of pesticides to be found in the water supply! Yet countries like Sweden and Denmark have reduced the use of pesticides by some 30 to 50 per cent during the last eight years. This is the heart of the problem: ‘to produce an effective health-environment plan requires reconsidering the course of industrial development’. Thus, reducing diesel emissions demands alternative methods, including manufacturing cars that pollute less, and using rail rather than trucks for transporting goods. Some industrialists, Professor Belpomme concludes, are aware of the need for change, but ‘there is a whole economic, financial and advertising lobbying activity that blocks progress. Nor have all politicians realised how serious the problem is . . .’ Only a month later his observation was confirmed. The supposed ‘landmark measure’ of the government’s environment plan – the system of ‘bonus/malus’ in buying new vehicles – was scrapped. This innovative project, proposed by the environment minister, would have provided a bonus for buyers of the least polluting new cars, while taxing (‘malus’) those who bought polluting cars, such as ‘sports utility vehicles’. Such a system of rewards and penalties would lessen pollution and at the same time provide revenue for further ecological improvements. But parliamentarians, industrialists and the ministry of finance got the upper hand. ‘Après nous le déluge!’

8 Women

The Baruya of New Guinea, among whom I have lived and worked, legitimise masculine domination and the exclusive right of men to rule by a primordial myth. Originally, women not only possessed the right of reproduction of life, but they had also invented weapons, tools and the sacred flute. But they made bad use of all this, which sowed disorder in the cosmos and in society. The first men found themselves obliged to steal their flutes and to expropriate women’s original powers. (Maurice Godelier, anthropologist)

Myths and social reality Consider that very symbol of emancipation – the French Revolution – bearing the universal message of liberty, equality and fraternity – but not for women. The sophisticated explanation of the time, which is still too much for certain countries, was expressed by that scion of the Enlightenment, the abbé Sieyès, inaugurating the ‘Rights of Man’. For the abbé distinguished between ‘passive’ female rights and the ‘active’ male rights of citizens. Natural and civil rights (passive), he argued, are those for which society is formed; political rights (active) are those by which society forms itself. All the inhabitants should enjoy the rights of passive citizens: protection of the person, property, freedom, and so on. ‘But not all have the right to take part in the formation of public powers: all are not active citizens’, such as women at present, children and foreigners. Those ‘who contribute nothing to sustain the public establishment’, Sieyès logically concluded, ‘should not actively influence public matters’ (Gaspard et al., 1992: 51–3). 164

Women

165

More representative of prejudiced opinion, then and now, was the sexist discourse of the celebrated philosopher of the ‘general will’, JeanJacques Rousseau, whose Contrat social inspired the revolutionaries of 1789. In his well-known treatise on education, Emile, he points out that the woman (Sophie): Should be a woman as Emile is a man, that is to say all that conforms to the constitution of her species and her sex to fulfil her place in the moral and social order . . . The one (Emile) should be active and strong, the other passive and weak. Having established this principle, it follows that woman is especially made to please man . . . When the woman complains of the unjust inequality to which she is subjected by man, she is wrong, for such inequality is not at all the work of prejudice but of reason. (Quoted by Guigou, 1997: 49) Some did have the temerity to assert the rights of women as well as men. Among them was the female revolutionary Olympe de Gouges. Rewriting the famous ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, she pronounced that ‘Woman is born free and has equal rights with man.’ The exercise of such rights, she went on, is limited only by the perpetual tyranny that man imposes on woman; these limits should be reformed by laws of nature and reason. For such heretical statements she was treated as hysterical, irrational and unreasonable – and (as a member of the opposition Girondins) sent to the guillotine. Related to the above, three myths of women endure. The first is of the evil nature of women, symbolised by the snake. The second is of women overcoming man’s natural domination by guile: Delilah and Samson. Both are illuminated in the work of August Strindberg, discussed below. The third myth is that women, seductive by nature, are a danger to men, who need to be protected from female charms by enveloping them largely or totally in opaque garments and enclosing them within the family walls. Finally, and this is not itself a myth but a social reality, sanctioned by these myths: women are not independent human beings but a property of their husbands (and their wider families) to be bought and sold like a commodity: household slaves with no rights of their own. In Strindberg’s plays, informed by these myths, man was to be shown as the more refined sex, but also the more debilitated by civilisation, doomed to be crushed by the more primitive and stronger female sex.

166


‘Her weapon of victory was to be not, as in the days of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, poison or dagger, but the much subtler weapon of spiritual murder through suggestion’ (Gunnar Ollén, quoted by Michael Meyer, in Strindberg’s The Father). Strindberg had the uncanny ability to create for himself a drama in his personal relations, which he then transformed into a work of art. Writing to a friend about his pending divorce from his wife, Siri, he complained: ‘Her witchcraft was unbelievable! Notwithstanding her crimes and all her debts she succeeded in making the first man she met believe that I was the guilty one! She got me to imagine for three years that I was ill, got me to imagine I was mad – and everyone pities and believed her . . . It will be interesting to see how this drama ends, probably in tragedy’ (quoted by Meyer). This was precisely the theme of his extraordinary play, The Father, in which Siri acted the part of the wife, Laura, who preyed upon her husband’s neurotic fears by insinuating that her husband was not the father of their child, driving him mad. Sexual deprivation – apparent in his divorce from Siri – became a major subject in Strindberg’s work. He began to attack the women’s movement as his particular enemy. ‘Soon the autumn thunderstorms will come!’ he wrote. ‘This year, they’ll be worse than ever, because when the women start fighting, all hell is let loose.’ In the years that followed, Strindberg’s tone grew more strident. Women were evil creatures who ensnared man, the noble and the strong, because they were able to wound him in his sexual being. Women were both criminal and insane. In A Fool’s Apology, Strindberg cried out: ‘I want to exhort the lawmakers to carefully consider the consequences of granting civic rights to semi-apes, inferior creatures, sick children . . . completely out of their minds during pregnancy, and irresponsible during the rest of their life, unconscious criminals, criminal, instinctively malicious animals who do not even know that that is what they are’ (Lagercrantz, 1984: 167–9). The deluded Captain, in The Father, as Lagercrantz points out, is an aristocrat, a giant surrounded by dwarfs. He belongs to the nobility of intellect and sensibility of which Strindberg considered himself a member. All the more tragic then is his self-induced fall. ‘You were a great child’, his wife Laura tells him in the play, one ‘who had come too late into the world, or had come unwanted.’ ‘Yes, I suppose it was that’, the Captain agrees. ‘Father and mother had me against their will, and so I was born without a will.’ ‘I thought you despised my lack of masculinity’, he goes on, ‘and I wanted to win you as a woman by being a man.’ ‘That was your mistake’, Laura responds. Behaving as a mother towards

Women

167

her child, she is a friend, but as a woman she is an enemy. ‘Love between man and woman is a war’: CAPTAIN: One word more – and this isn’t a fantasy. Do you hate me? LAURA: Sometimes. When you are a man. CAPTAIN: This is like racial hatred. If it is true that we are descended from the ape, it must have been two different species . . . I feel that, in this war, one of us must go under. LAURA: Which one? CAPTAIN: The weaker, of course. LAURA: And the stronger is in the right? CAPTAIN: Always. Because he is the one with power. LAURA: Then I am in the right. CAPTAIN: You think you have the power? LAURA: Yes. And tomorrow I shall have it legally, when I have you certified. Laura watches while the Captain’s old nurse puts the straitjacket on him, crooning to him as if he were still ‘my dear little baby’. ‘Strength has been vanquished by craft and weakness’, the Captain cries out: ‘Curse you, damned woman, and all your sex!’ Searching for theatres prepared to put on his play – it had been rejected by all the Swedish theatres to which it had been offered – Strindberg explained to a young Swedish writer, who was translating the work into Danish, how impossible it was, if one was a romantic, to live without an ideal: Mine was incarnated in a woman, because I was a woman-worshipper. When it fell, I fell! In my letters you will see . . . a trusting and credulous fool, who allowed himself to believe anything . . . so that the crimes of others might be concealed . . . It seems to me as though I walk in my sleep – as though reality and imagination are one. I don’t know if The Father is a work of the imagination, or if my life has been; but I feel that at a given moment, possibly soon, it will cease, and then I will shrivel up, either in madness and agony, or in suicide. Through much writing my life has become a shadow-play; it is as though I no longer walk the earth, but hover weightless in a space that is filled not with air but with darkness. If light enters this darkness, I shall fall, broken. What is curious is that in a dream which often recurs to me at night I feel that I am flying weightless, and I find this quite natural, as though all conception of right and wrong, true and false, had ceased

168


to exist for me, so that everything that happens, however strange, seems inevitable. (Meyer, ‘Introduction’ to The Father; see also Lagercrantz: 180–1) In this dream-world of ‘imagination’ Strindberg wrote Miss Julie, in 1888, the year following The Father. It expresses the myth of woman as whore, whose dangerous sexuality must either be channelled (by men) into prostitution or regulated by the household into the duty of procreation and domestic tasks. Any transgression must be punished severely – as a warning to others. This is the fate of the aristocratic Julie, whose repressed sexuality, constrained by convention, erupts during the midsummer eve festivities – when freer social relations are permitted once in the year. Miss Julie, as Strindberg explains in his preface, is a ‘modern character – not that the half-woman, the man-hater, has not existed in every age – but because, now that she has been discovered, she has stepped forward into the limelight’. This ‘half-woman’ pushes herself forward, ‘nowadays selling herself for power, honours, decorations and diplomas, as formerly she used to for money. She is synonymous with corruption.’ Degenerate men seem unconsciously to choose their mates from among them. ‘They engender an indeterminate sex to whom life is a torture, but fortunately they go under, either because they cannot adapt themselves to reality, or because their repressed instinct breaks out uncontrollably, or because their hopes of attaining equality with men are shattered’ (Meyer’s translation). The play opens as Julie has broken off her engagement to a suitable young lawyer, whom she has put through his paces, making him leap over her whip, ‘the way you teach a dog to jump’. Now she dances ‘madly’ with Jean, the insolent and cunning young valet of the Count, her father. ‘She’s a magnificent creature! What a figure!’, confides Jean to his womanfriend, the cook. As Julie enters, Jean inquires, gallantly: ‘Have you ladies secrets to discuss?’ Julie flips him in the face with her handkerchief, coquettishly: ‘Don’t be inquisitive!’ Jean, boldly but respectfully: ‘Is this some magic brew you ladies are preparing on midsummer eve, which will reveal the future and show whom fate has in store for you?’ Julie then asks Jean for the next dance. Jean: ‘As madam commands. I am at your service.’ Julie, softly: ‘Don’t regard it as a command. Tonight we are ordinary people trying to be happy and all rank is put aside.’ Returning from the dance, Jean warns Julie that ‘people are talking’, gossiping about seeing a lady dancing and then drinking alone with a man – ‘let alone a servant’ – on midsummer eve. Julie asks Jean to come outside and pick some lilac. ‘Impossible; I couldn’t’, replies Jean.

Women

169

Julie: ‘Surely you don’t imagine – ?’ ‘I don’t, but other people might.’ Julie: ‘What? That I should have an amour with a servant?’ Jean: ‘I’m not being conceited, but such things have happened – and to these people nothing is sacred.’ ‘Quite the little aristocrat, aren’t you?’, retorts Julie. Jean: ‘Yes, I am.’ Julie: ‘If I choose to step down –’ She fixes him with her eye. Jean: ‘You know, you’re strange.’ Julie: ‘Perhaps. But so are you. Everything is strange. Life, people, everything, is a scum which drifts, drifts on and on across the water until it sinks, sinks . . .’ Jean rubs his eye. Julie makes him sit and removes the speck of dust with her handkerchief. ‘Sit still now, quite still! Come obey me! I believe you’re trembling, you great, strong lout!’ She feels his arm. ‘What muscles you have!’ Jean: ‘Don’t you know it’s dangerous to play with fire?’ Jean tries to kiss her and Julie slaps him. Jean: ‘Are you joking or serious?’ Julie: ‘Serious.’ Jean: ‘You play games too seriously, and that’s dangerous.’ Approaching voices are heard, singing: ‘One young girl in a big dark wood . . . Met a boy she never should!’ ‘It’s a filthy song. About you and me’, Jean tells her. He realises that the other servants are coming to look for him ‘and if they find us together, you are lost’. She must run away . . . ‘Into my room, then. We can’t bother about conventions now.’ He drops to his knees: ‘Please! Come!’ After the peasants, singing and dancing, disappear, Jean, agitated, asks Julie: ‘There – you see! And you heard. Do you think you can possibly stay here now?’ Julie: ‘No. I don’t. But what can we do?’ Jean: ‘Go away – travel – far away from here.’ Jean and Julie fantasise about starting a hotel by the Italian lakes, with Julie as ‘the mistress of the house; the pearl of the establishment’. ‘Tell me you love me?’, urges Julie. ‘Of course I love you – can you doubt it, Miss Julie?’ Julie, feminine: ‘Call me Julie! There are no barriers between us, now.’ Jean, tormented: ‘I can’t! There are still barriers between us – there always will be, as long as we’re in this house.’ But he begs Julie to sit down calmly, ‘as though nothing had happened’, and think it over coolly: ‘Above all, no emotional scenes, or it’ll be all up with us.’ Julie, desperately: ‘Oh, my God! Have you no feelings?’ They realise they have no money to travel. Jean: ‘Then our whole plan collapses.’ Julie: ‘Do you suppose I’m going to remain under this roof as your whore? With them sniggering at me behind their fingers? Do you think I can look my father in the face after this? No! Take me away from here, from the shame and the dishonour – oh, what have I done, my God, my God!’ Then: ‘What dreadful power drew me to you? . . . Was I drunk, was I dreaming? Midsummer night! The night of innocent happiness.’

170


Julie steals the money from her father’s room. She is ready to leave. She hears the sound of a carriage outside. She takes up the axe which Jean has used to get rid of her pet bird: ‘Do you think I can’t bear the sight of blood? You think I’m so weak – oh, I should like to see your blood, your brains on a chopping block – I’d like to see all your sex swimming in a lake of blood – I think I could drink from your skull . . .’ She picks up Jean’s razor and makes a gesture: ‘What would you do? This?’ She tells Jean that although she loved her father – enormously – ‘I’ve hated him, too . . . it was he who brought me up to despise my own sex, made me half woman and half man.’ There are two sharp rings on the bell. The Count has arrived. Jean tells her: ‘Go now – while it’s light – out to the barn – and . . .’, he whispers in her ear. Two loud rings on the bell. Jean: ‘It’s horrible. But it’s the only possible ending. Go!’ Julie walks firmly out through the door.

Transgression – and punishment Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a story culminating (as does Strindberg’s) in brutality, hatred and betrayal. A well-off family live in an old house in a village, Ayemenem, in the lush tropical state of Kerala. Twins – a boy and girl, Estha and Rahel – are at a funeral for their cousin, who is half-English and half-Indian. The twins and their mother, Ammu, stand apart from the rest of the family, ostracised. What terrible thing have they done to be so publicly shamed? The story goes back and forth in time. After the funeral, Estha is separated from his twin and sent off to school in Madras. Rahel is expelled from three of her schools for strange, unsettling behaviour. Eventually she marries an American, then divorces him. She returns, 23 years after the funeral, to India, to Ayemenem, where her twin, Estha, has also returned. They are now 31 years old, the same age as that of their mother, also a divorcee, when she died alone and in poverty. Rahel has no feelings left. Estha is so traumatised by his (their) experience that he cannot speak: he is totally withdrawn. Rahel’s American husband could not understand the expression in Rahel’s eyes, even when they made love. He didn’t know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. ‘He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible public turmoil of a nation.’

Women

171

That was the ‘Big God’ that demanded obeisance. The ‘Small God’ (cosy, private and limited), ‘inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence’, then became resilient and indifferent. Nothing much mattered, because it was never important enough. Because ‘Worse Things’ happened in the country she came from, ‘poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace’. In comparison, the ‘britttle elation’ of the god of small things was the ‘relative smallness of his misfortune’. Ammu, mother of the twins, had finished school at the time when her father, a high-ranking official, retired. He insisted that a college education was an unnecessary expense for a girl, so there was little for her to do other than help in the household and wait for a marriage proposal. At someone’s wedding reception she met her future husband. His family were oncewealthy zamindars (landowners) who had migrated to Calcutta from East Bengal after Partition. The young couple had an elaborate Calcutta wedding. Looking back on the day, Ammu realised that the slightly feverish glitter in her bridegroom’s eyes had not been love, or even carnal excitement, but eight large pegs of whisky. He was an alcoholic. Ammu was pregnant when war broke out with China. Amid rumours of Chinese occupation and India’s impending defeat, Estha and Rahel were born. When her husband’s bouts of drunken violence began to include the children, and the war with Pakistan began, Ammu left him and returned, unwelcomed, to her parents in Kerala. She knew there were no more chances. There was only Ayemenem now. ‘A front verandah and a back verandah. A hot river and a pickle factory’ – ‘Paradise Pickles and Preserves’. The twin’s uncle, Chacko – an Oxford graduate and Marxist scholar, manager of the pickle factory – told them that though he hated to admit it, they were all anglophiles. ‘Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.’ He explained that history was like an old house at night. ‘With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside.’ The twins had no doubt that the house Chacko meant was the house on the other side of the river, in the middle of an abandoned rubber estate, which had belonged to an Englishman ‘gone native’. He had killed himself when his young lover’s parents had taken the boy away from him. To the twins it was the ‘history house’. ‘But we can’t go in’, Chacko explained, ‘because we’ve been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows . . . And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war.’ ‘We’re prisoners of war’, Chacko went on. ‘Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas.’

172


The history house – India’s history – is where the story begins. It is where Velutha, a Paravan or ‘untouchable’, went night after night, to the despair of his father, a toddy tapper, who remembered the days when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping onto a Paravan’s footprint. Even now Paravans were not allowed into the house at Ayemenem. They were not allowed to touch anything that ‘touchables’ touched. Velutha was a very talented young man, a few years younger than Ammu. Apart from his carpentry skills, he had a way with machines. It was Velutha who maintained the new canning machine in Chacko’s pickle factory. Velutha was indispensable. The twins were not supposed to visit Velutha, but they did. He made little toys for them and loved them. The twins loved him too. One day, not long after their young, half-English cousin had arrived, Rahel saw Velutha walking up the shortcut through the rubber trees. She slipped out of the house and met him. They hooked little fingers and shook hands gravely like bankers at a convention. Ammu watched them perform their Official Greeting. She wondered how Velutha’s body had changed into a man’s body, contoured and hard. She believed that the man she had seen yesterday in a mass demonstration, his arm knotted in anger, was Velutha. She hoped that he, too, ‘housed a living, breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she so raged against’. Standing in the shade of the rubber trees, holding Estha in his arms, Velutha glanced up and caught Ammu’s gaze. ‘Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment.’ In that brief moment, Velutha saw things that he hadn’t seen before. ‘Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by history’s blinkers.’ Ammu saw that he saw. One day the household got news of a white child’s body found floating downriver. The twins, too, had disappeared. Then Velutha’s father arrived, shaking with fear and blind drunk. He told Ammu’s mother what he knew. ‘The story of the little boat that crossed the river night after night, and who was in it. The story of a man and a woman, standing together in the moonlight. Skin to skin.’ They went to the ‘history house’, he said. ‘The white man’s demon had entered them.’ Their boat rocked on the water, waiting for the lovers to return. He had seen it all. Others had too. The whole village knew. It was only a matter of time before Ammu’s family found out, so he had come to tell them. Ammu’s aunt saw it as ‘God’s Way’ of punishing Ammu for her sins. She turned to Ammu’s mother: Velutha must go. ‘Tonight. Before it goes any further. Before we are completely ruined.’ Ammu’s mother was mad with anger, spewing her venom. She thought of her daughter, naked,

Women

173

coupling in the mud with a man who was nothing but a filthy coolie. ‘She imagined it in vivid detail: a Paravan’s coarse black hand on her daughter’s breast. His mouth on hers. His black hips jerking between her parted legs.’ His particular Paravan smell. Like animals, she thought. The two women worked out a plan. They locked Ammu in her room. Ammu’s aunt then went to the police station to tell the inspector of the sudden dismissal of a factory worker, a Paravan, who had tried to force himself on her niece. She said it happened last night, when it was dark and raining heavily. ‘He came to the house to threaten us.’ The inspector assured her of the full cooperation of the police. The rascal would be caught before the day was out. The history house thus became the scene of a double tragedy. For the twins and their cousin had taken the little boat for an adventure, without telling anyone: they would spend the night at the abandoned house. But with so much rain the river had risen dangerously. In the darkness they hit a log and the boat overturned. The twins, good swimmers, made it to the shore, but the cousin was swept away. Exhausted, the twins were soon fast asleep. They did not see Velutha, who had previously swum out to the house and was lying asleep in the shadows. A posse of policeman also crossed the Meenachal river, sluggish and swollen by recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth. They reached a grassy clearing and found the house. The policemen stopped and fanned out. They positioned themselves strategically, crouching by the broken, low stone boundary wall. Softly through the grass they crept towards the house. They found their quarry still asleep. They woke Velutha with their boots. Estha and Rahel also woke, screaming. ‘Cowering on the floor, rocking between dread and disbelief, they realized that the man being beaten was Velutha.’ They heard the thud of wood on flesh. The muted crunch of skull on cement. The gurgle of blood on a man’s breath when his lung is torn by the jagged end of a broken rib. (Dreadfully injured, Velutha died that night.) Estha and Rahel watched, mesmerised, the absence of caprice in what the policemen did, their sober steady brutality. ‘The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws . . .’

Inequality and discrimination The ‘laws’ express social discrimination of women – subjectively interpreted by men as an inferior species – as well as inequality, that is, objectively compared with men. The slogan of ‘equal pay for equal work’, for

174


example, is mere rhetoric so long as the known gap between male and female incomes persists. And those who break the laws – both women and men – face harsh and even deadly punishment. Thus, the murder of Velutha with the disgrace of his lover as well as the ‘honour killing’ – by suicide – of Miss Julie. Indeed, Julie’s fate exemplifies what Pierre Bourdieu calls the ‘complicity’ of the victim with her own subordination, namely, the internalisation by women of the roles imposed on them by men. Worldwide, the spectrum of inequality and discrimination ranges from developed lands where ‘feminised’ occupations are nonetheless disfavoured and prospects of promotion for well-qualified women confront a ‘glass ceiling’, to conditions in the developing countries, which also vary from relatively tolerant male attitudes towards women to unbelievably repressive and cruel behaviour. The latter reflects centuries-old traditions of women subordinated to men, as the girl to her father, the wife to her husband, and the mother to her son. Women, in sum, are a ‘possession’ of the male household: inferior beings, without rights, but only duties. Any show of independence by women is liable to provoke a hysterical reaction by patriarchal society, for it undermines male authority and is seen as a threat to the whole social order. Where women – as in the West – have made major gains, Geneviève Fraisse points out, it is largely due to three factors: access to contraception and abortion, economic independence, and universal education. The first enables women to control their own bodies, and was gained only after a long and bitter struggle. The second is no less revolutionary, in that women in the workforce are no longer dependent on their fathers and husbands. Finally, education – acquiring knowledge – enables women to prove themselves as professionally competent as men (Fraisse, 2000: 53, 114, 149, 163–4). These three factors are largely absent from the developing world, especially among the poorer countries (and among the poor of wealthier countries) and in the more tradition-bound rural areas. Thus, in the United Nations’ report on ‘Women 2000’ – focusing on equality, development and peace – twelve critical issues were identified as fundamental obstacles to the improvement of women’s lives. These are: poverty, lack of education and training, disease, violence, armed conflicts, economic discrimination, difficulties in access to institutional mechanisms, unequal influence on decision-making (that is, the question of power), abuses of human rights, slanted media reports, environmental degradation, and the harsh situation in particular of girls (Florence Beaugé and Pascale Krémer, Le Monde, 7 June 2000).

Women

175

Poverty is a major problem: 70 per cent of poor people in the world are women. As the UN report emphasises, globalisation has added to their difficulties, in that governments tend to reduce public expenditure and social programmes in an effort to improve economic competitiveness. Moreover, the number of female single-parent households is increasing. At the same time women’s wages throughout the world are on average only half those of men. And women often have no access to such essential resources as credit, loans or inheritance. As for education, the situation is gradually getting better. The literacy rate of young men and women (from 15 to 24 years old) is hardly any different in such areas – including the West – as Latin America and East Asia. Nevertheless, among adults as a whole, according to Unesco, twothirds of the 875 million illiterates are women. In Africa, for example, as Joni Seager points out, the rate of illiteracy among males over the past 30 years fell from 61 per cent to 31 per cent, and among females from 82 to 49 per cent. In the world as a whole, male illiteracy was reduced from 29 to 15 per cent, and female illiteracy from 45 to 26 per cent. The gender gap reflects the fact that proportionately fewer girls are enrolled at school than boys, and they are removed from school at an earlier age. Girls are still held back by presumptions that educating them will be a ‘waste’, that they should be in the home and not in the workplace, and that girls are less capable than boys. The biggest gap between enrolment rates for boys and girls is in Sub-Saharan Africa. In several countries the average number of years of full schooling is less than one year (Seager, 2003: 76–9). Indeed, poverty is a major cause of illiteracy, as Mary Robinson, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, reports. In many countries the sums allocated for public expenses are derisory, resulting in a shortage of schools offering good free education. Cultural stereotypes also contribute: ‘Girls do a lot of work in their family home’, is a typical attitude. ‘If they are not there, who will replace them?’ Yet education for girls is one of the most effective strategies for overcoming poverty (‘Third World and Education: Girls First’, Le Monde, 9–10 March 2003). World health is improving, according to the UN ‘Women 2000’ report. Increasing numbers of doctors and midwives are being trained. But one woman dies every minute from complications in pregnancy or childbirth. Of all the health measures monitored by the World Health Organization, the greatest discrepancy between rich and poor countries is in maternal mortality. Most of these deaths could be prevented, Seager argues (2003: 38), by providing basic prenatal health care, improving maternal nutrition, and by providing the legal, social and health support

176


that would allow women to avoid unwanted pregnancies. According to the UN Population Fund, only just over half the births in developing countries take place in the presence of qualified personnel (doctors, nurses or midwives). Where better health care is provided, for example in Oran, Algeria, where public hospitals have provided a free service since the 1970s the rate of maternal mortality was reduced by 42 per cent (Le Monde, 10 October 2000). Currently, more women than men are being infected by Aids. Opening the 2004 international conference on Aids in Bangkok, UN SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan urged mobilisation as a matter of pride and not shame: ‘Aids is unique in the history of humanity. We must stand up united to fight it.’ He warned that Aids was now spreading rapidly throughout South and East Asia, where China, India and Indonesia constitute 40 per cent of the world’s population. Sub-Saharan Africa, already, is being devastated by Aids, which is wiping out an entire generation – predominantly the breadwinners, teachers, nurses, mothers and fathers, reported Sarah Bosely in the Guardian Weekly (9–15 July 2004). There are 25 million infected in the region – two-thirds of all those with HIV in the world. Women become infected at an earlier age than men. Part of the reason may be biological, but it is also to do with the unwillingness or inability of young girls to refuse sex with older men. Bosely notes that there are twice as many 15–24 year-old women in South Africa living with HIV as men; in Kenya and Mali there are four-and-ahalf times as many. In seven countries of southern Africa life expectancy has dropped dramatically. Those born between 1995 and 2000 are predicted to live on average to only 49. Before Aids they would have lived to 62. The impact on development and struggling African economies is dire. Most of those who work in the fields are women. It is estimated that a fifth of agricultural workers will have died of Aids by 2020. Businesses are hit as they lose staff. Hospitals suffer the double burden of loss of nurses and doctors as well as the huge increase in patients with Aids-related diseases. And although women are more and more aware of the danger of Aids, as Colette Berthoud points out, they are also more vulnerable. The power to decide on sexual protection does not belong to them. If they propose the use of contraceptives they may be accused by their partner of being unfaithful, and they risk being thrown out of their family household. If husbands are unemployed, wives may be forced into temporary prostitution, while young girls may depend on the support of a ‘godfather’ if they seek to pursue their studies (Le Monde diplomatique: Manière de voir, April–May 2003). Indeed, three-quarters of young people infected (between 15 and 24 years old) are female, the

Women

177

UNAids 2004 report stated. The reason is not simply ignorance of the risk, but ‘chronic lack of power’. Acts of violence against women, including rape and sexual mutilation, are widespread. As Joni Seager puts it, for millions of women the home is the most dangerous place they could be. Far from being a place of safety, the family is often a cradle of violence. ‘Women suffer cruelties in their home every day, from all family members. Domestic violence is a means of keeping women “in their place”, literally confined to relationship, household or family structures defined by patriarchal authority.’ Violence against women, she goes on, is a constant feature of women’s lives: women of no race, class, or age are exempt. At least one woman in three in the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime by a member of her family; for a majority of such women the abuse is repeated over months or years. In an astonishing number of cases ‘ordinary’ domestic violence culminates in murder. This is especially the case when women try to leave an abusive relationship. Rape, too, is an everyday threat – often in women’s own homes and from men they know. Nevertheless, rape is a very much underreported crime, because social stigma is typically attached to the victim as much as or more than to the perpetrator. Rape in war is at epidemic proportions (Seager: 26–9, 58–9). Indeed, the UN report, ‘Women 2000’, calculates that a century ago 90 per cent of those killed in war were soldiers or other military personnel. Today, 90 per cent of casualties are civilian – three-quarters of them women and children. Raped women are doubly wronged, as Florence Beaugé points out (Le Monde des livres, 4 February 2005). First they are raped and then they are believed to be polluted. In Algeria, for example, as in other Arab-Muslim countries, ‘a woman who has been violated is not considered to be a victim but as a guilty person. She is better dead than surviving as an object of dishonour for the whole family . . .’ ‘Rape is violence intended to assert male power and control’, as Seager puts it. The forms of violence vary from country to country, but the purpose remains the same. In Bangladesh, for example, the UN population fund reported that nearly half the women are subjected to violence by their partners, sometimes so far as to lead to suicide. Bangladesh tops the world assault table, followed by India, with 40 per cent (Guardian Weekly, 28 September–4 October 2000). In India the most cruel cases are known as ‘dowry deaths’, when husbands, disappointed by the small amount of money or goods brought by their brides, or for other reasons, kill their wives or burn them to death, then passing off the crime as an ‘accident’. As Françoise Chipaux reports, nearly 7000 women – from much understated

178


official figures – died in 1998, generally after having been beaten, humiliated or deprived of food for a long time. For in India ‘women have no existence of their own’, according to a women’s NGO, ‘Common Programme for Women’, ‘and at every stage of their lives are the property of a man’ – father, husband, brother or son. According to traditional laws, anchored in religious beliefs, men cannot be saved unless they give birth to a son. At the same time the father has the responsibility of marrying his daughter(s), often a heavy financial cost. Moreover, the extreme poverty of some 400 million Indians (out of a population of a billion) severely disadvantages girls, who are often deprived of food for the sake of boys. At school, too, boys benefit at the expense of girls: thus literacy for women is no more than 40 per cent compared with 60 per cent for men (Françoise Chipaux, Le Monde, 7 June 2000; see also R.-P. Paringaux, on dowry deaths, Manière de voir, April–May 2003). Genital mutilation is another cruel ‘punishment’ culturally inflicted upon some 130 million women – increasing by 2 million a year – especially in parts of Africa and the Middle East (Seager: 54–5). The most severe form, infibulation, involves the removal of part or all the external genitalia and stitching or narrowing the vaginal opening. The majority of mutilations (85 per cent) in Africa consist of a clitoridectomy. These mutilations can cause severe harm to women: kidney damage, abscesses, gangrene, infertility and death (Maggie Black, Guardian Weekly, 12–18 February 2004). But ‘in a society where excision is synonymous with feminine virtue and family honour’ it is very difficult to prevent this practice – carried out traditionally by women. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that ‘excision reflects the will of men to control the sexuality of their women and daughters by mutilating them’ (R.-P. Paringaux, ‘Against excision in Senegal’, Manière de voir, April–May 2003). Honour at stake: in rural areas especially of a number of countries, ranging from Afghanistan to North Africa, girls and women are segregated. They are protected as the ornament of the household from outside, for they symbolise purity (or faithfulness); they are a model of submission and devotion. Traditionally, they should not go outside unless largely or totally covered, thus hidden from the lustful glance of men. At the same time, women are seen as naturally lascivious, needing to be controlled. If unmarried girls should try to break out of the repressive family circle, refusing for example an arranged marriage, or seeking an independent life or going out with boys, it is considered to be immoral behaviour bringing dishonour on the family. Such shameful conduct can only be purged by punishment, even death, meted out usually by a brother of the offender to demonstrate family solidarity.

Women

179

Ellen Goodman notes that in just one Pakistani province in 1997 more than 300 women were victims of honour killings. In 1998, some 2300 women were victims of acid attacks in Bangladesh (Guardian Weekly, 6–12 April 2000). Interviewing Asma Khader, a leading woman campaigner against honour killings in Jordan, a foreign reporter asked her how she had come to take this stand. Eighteen years before, she said, a woman had approached her by the judicial tribunal in Amman, asking for her help. She said her husband was in prison for having killed her 15-year-old daughter, who was pregnant without being married. Her husband could not tolerate this. Asma Khader replied, ‘It’s terrible, but your daughter had broken the rules of our society, and you know this is not permitted.’ Breaking into sobs the unknown woman exclaimed: ‘But you haven’t understood me. It’s my husband who violated her and made her pregnant.’ Ever since that time, as a young lawyer, Asma Khader’s life had taken a complete change, devoted to ending discrimination against women. As a researcher at the centre for the study of the Middle East explained: ‘Honour, a fragile value shared by the family, is incarnated in the women, especially in regard to sexual behaviour. It demands safeguarding the virginity of girls before marriage, prohibition of adultery for married women, and even such fluid notions as dressing decently and caring for one’s reputation.’ Bringing family honour into disrepute requires vengeance against the offender. Murders are usually carried out by a brother, but sometimes by a father, uncle or cousin, who are often unpunished, or given light sentences. It is difficult to know the total number of honour killings throughout the world, but they are estimated to be at least five thousand a year (Florence Beaugé, Le Monde, 5 April 2001). Violence, including honour killings, is widespread in Afghanistan, according to a recent Amnesty International report. Afghan women still face rape, domestic violence, forced marriage and routine denial of justice, with the international community failing to protect them, two years after the fall of the Taliban ( Jonathan Steele, Guardian Weekly, 9–15 October 2003). As for Pakistan, an article in the prominent newspaper Dawn criticised opinion for neglecting the situation of half the population: ‘The way in which women are generally perceived is still worse. Those who try to put forward the rights and privileges of women are categorically condemned as immoral and non-Islamic in powerful Islamic religious circles.’ An influential Urdu newspaper added that ‘more than a thousand innocent women are imprisoned’ throughout the country because of false accusations based on a religious decree on morality. It is not yielding to emotion, the Dawn reporter went on, to say that Muslim

180


men should die of shame to accept such treatment of women. Even professional women face discrimination. Of 190,000 federal civil servants in Pakistan there are only 9000 women, half of whom work in education, whose prospects of promotion are systematically obstructed by their male colleagues (Courrier International, 15–21 November 2001). Women also face discrimination in matters of divorce. The law in Iran, for example, states that a man can divorce without reason. The wife, however, must provide ‘motives for divorce: drug-using, adultery, impotence, violence’. The problem is to prove these faults, a female lawyer declares. With very rare, and recent, exceptions the judges are all men. One of them, when asked why, according to the Koran and the Constitution of Iran, only women had to provide ‘motives’ for divorce, replied: ‘The man is responsible for the family. He is the boss. It is painful for him to divorce . . . If he does divorce it is because he has good reasons and the tribunal does not have to ask for them’ (Marion Van Renterghem, Le Monde, 11 March 2004). Islam is the dominant religion in the belt of mainly Arab countries stretching from Afghanistan to North Africa. But the problem of misogyny is not so much religion as such, argues Abderrahim Lamchichi, but the way in which the Koran is read, at a particular moment of history, how it is elaborated, interpreted and diffused. The Koran is ‘polythematic and polysemic’ (containing various meanings) which Muslims have always been able to comment on and elucidate for themselves. It has always been possible to instrumentalise religion in the direction of a simplistic manichaeism, of conservatism and intolerance or, on the contrary, as an expression of freedom, compassion and intellectual renewal. On the question of equality between men and women, the present juridical and social situation of women is deplorable and horrifying in most Muslim countries. But is such bad treatment intrinsically linked to a sexist and alienating religion? Or is it rather a matter of reactionary interpretation by religious or civil authorities, based on man’s desire to dominate, to the detriment of a religion, which has insisted from its origin on the equal dignity of men and women, exalting love and pleasure? (‘Towards Islamic Feminism?’, Manière de voir, April–May 2003). As for the situation in 15 countries, including Indonesia, where Islam is the dominant religion, it is evident that unilateral repudiation of the wife by the husband, without justification, is the rule in the majority. Only in Turkey, Tunisia, Senegal and Mali (as well as Morocco in 2004) is repudiation forbidden and divorce available to husband and wife without discrimination. Examining the issue of the status of women – equal or less? – only in these five countries have women the right to

Women

181

work, to travel, to study, to marry and to vote. In the Arab Gulf states, however, women have the right to vote and have been appointed ministers in their governments (Kuwait fell into line in 2005). Elsewhere, to a greater or lesser degree, women are considered as minors. As for inheritance, apart from Turkey, none of these countries grants equal rights to women. Islamic law states that the daughter, in the event of her parents’ death, receives only half the share allotted to her brother, while the widow receives one-eighth of her husband’s share (‘Islam and Women’, Le Monde, 16–17 December 2001). In Algeria, the ‘reformed’ family code adopted in February 2005 still retains ‘tutelage’, usually by the father or brother, over women. Moreover, unlike the situation of men, women’s right to ask for divorce is strictly limited. Even Saudi Arabia, under international pressure, is attempting some mild reforms. (People remember, but do not talk about it openly, the fate of the women who defied the authorities by driving their cars some years ago: they were all arrested and for several years lost their jobs.) For the first time in history, the Saudi people were able to elect some municipal councillors in February 2005 – but women were excluded. How could they expect to vote, a Saudi researcher explained, when mixed gatherings of men and women are banned? ‘The government also fears a backlash by the most conservative men in power as well as by the ultra-religious groups who control justice, the religious police and, behind the scenes, women’s education’ (Mouna Naim, Le Monde, 11 February 2005). Such ‘partial reforms’, as the 2005 report of the UN Development Program on the Arab world points out, are not effective. For reform requires a favourable social environment, instead of the current situation of political restrictions and the extremely defective state of freedom and good governance. Freedom is at the mercy of two sorts of power: that of non-democratic regimes and of tribal and traditional customs. Moreover, the most flagrant violations concern religious, cultural or ethnic minorities – and women (Le Monde, 8 April 2005).

Factors for progress How is it possible to escape from this infernal cycle of (male) violence and repression, (female) traumatisation, and more repression? Clearly the achievement (as in the West) of the three factors noted above is essential: that is, women’s control of their body (contraception, family planning); economic development, including the participation of women in the labour force, opening the way to independence; and universal education resulting in a high rate of literacy for men and women. Civil

182


society is a product of these three factors. It is the influence of civil society on political and economic institutions that not only helps to enact laws ensuring equality of men and women but also to change both domineering attitudes among men and fatalistic passivity among women. In this transition to greater equality between men and women, Thailand provides a good example. It is a country where economic development, urbanisation, the growth of civil society and political reforms (putting an end to military dictatorship) are preparing the way for democratic change – but where patriarchal obstacles, for example, on the question of divorce, are still strong. As Philippe Doneys points out, in an important essay on the strategy and achievements of Thai women’s groups, these organisations ‘demonstrate the quiet changes taking place whereby non-state actors affect both policy and the structure of decision making itself’. This is done especially by reconstructing the legitimate sphere of political debate, where new actors contribute their opinions, in terms of judgement as well as professional expertise. Women’s groups have developed an extensive network – spanning grassroots, human rights, development and research organisations as well as foreign support agencies – opening up a legitimate domain of political activity to influence political changes, notably the formulation of the democratic 1997 Constitution. Paradoxically, however, the large number of women’s groups and their activism is in contrast to the low ratio of women in the parliament or in higher government positions (Doneys, 2002: 163–4). Thai women, as Doneys observes, are often described as enjoying more freedom than women in other Southeast Asian countries – and far more than most women in South Asia and the Middle East – especially when they venture outside the private world of the family. Thus, in 1997, women made up more than 47 per cent of the labour force, the highest percentage in Asia. In the bureaucracy, too, women make up the majority of employees, but only as a result of their predominance in the lowest three ranks (out of eleven) in the civil service. Moreover, women were not allowed to become local government officials, such as the village head, and as a result of their absence many labour and family laws are still discriminatory. It was only as a result of strong pressure from women’s groups that in 1982 the local government law was changed. Another major obstacle was a government resolution in 1978 excluding women from the official position of deputy district chief. Women’s groups mounted a major campaign in 1990 and the ban was finally lifted in 1993. Two women were then promoted to the positions of provincial governor and deputy-governor (Doneys: 166–7, 172).

Women

183

Thus, the Thai women’s movement has clearly demonstrated ‘the politicization of social life’ implied in the concept of the public sphere, where reform is shaped from outside the state. The struggle to end discrimination has been carried into the media, and the discursive mechanisms used (such as conferences, hearings and seminars) have been combined with an array of democratic mechanisms ranging from lobbying and collaborative tactics to mobilisation. Despite these achievements, the Family Law still allows a man to divorce on the grounds of adultery – a right not extended to his wife, unless the husband openly admits he has another partner. This is a situation that the Council of State attempts to justify by reference to ‘men’s and women’s nature as well as the traditions of Thai society’! Moreover, as previously noted, women are still poorly represented in parliament and government. As Juree Vichit-Vadakan explains (quoted by Doneys): ‘the modus operandi of the rules of the game for all important conduct of political networks, alliances and exchanges, set up by men who dominate the political process, strongly favour “old hands” and seasoned players and nurture the character of “an old boys’ club”.’ One of the most common reasons given by women for their reluctance to enter politics is precisely that politics is a man’s world, both in terms of male domination and its practical activities. Hence the ‘low self-esteem’ and lack of confidence among women in regard to politics, noted by another feminist organiser. This means that over and above legal changes, as Doneys concludes, much work is still needed to educate and train men and women, as well as to increase women’s self-confidence in both the public and political spheres. In this way, they can ensure full participation in the political process and make it more democratic. It is evident, too, that the strategy of informing and reaching women at the grassroots level is an important precondition for women’s entry into the political sphere, and thus to the reform of a political system dominated by men (Doneys: 171–2, 178–9). Also in transition is the emerging middle class in China and India, forming about one-fifth of the billion-plus population in each country. The difference, however, is striking in regard to the urban and rural masses. In India only some 40 per cent of women (and 60 per cent of men) are literate, while in China, largely as a result of the Mao-era educational campaign, almost 90 per cent are literate. Possessing an abundance of skilled and educated workers, men and women, China has achieved extraordinary economic growth, especially in the coastal provinces. An expanding professional sector, as one specialist points out (John Gittings, Guardian Weekly, 13–19 2001), draws its staff equally from both sectors: in some areas, such as communications, women are

184


often in the majority. The downside is the widening income gap between men and women. Urban women, who made on average 70 per cent of men’s wages in 1990, now make less than 63 per cent. Rural women earn only 40 per cent on average of what men make. The unemployment figures are also disturbing: only 72 per cent of young urban women now have jobs – nearly 19 per cent less than 10 years ago. Nevertheless, the pressure of women’s groups and civil society, as in Thailand, to end the discrimination suffered by women has borne fruit, not only in a draft declaration in 2003 by African foreign ministers, but also especially in Turkey (with its lay constitution) and recently in Morocco, where the parliament, backed by the reforming King Mohammed VI, approved one of the most progressive laws on women’s and family rights in the Arab world. Notably, polygamy is no longer to be permitted (except in rare cases). The new laws also raise the age of marriage for girls from 15 to 18, and give wives joint responsibility with their husbands in family matters (Guardian Weekly, 29 January–4 February 2004). Equally important, women no longer need the permission of their father or brother to marry (Le Monde, 12–13 October 2003). But the social context of extreme poverty affecting millions, according to Ahmed Charai (Le Monde, 27 July 2004), remains a serious threat, not least in giving rise to violence and extremism. As for Turkey, a new civil code entered into force in 2000 giving wives equal rights with husbands in the family. Women no longer need the authorisation of their husband to work and they take part in all decisions concerning their children and the home. As in Morocco, the age of marriage for girls is increased from 15 to 18. However, most marriages in rural areas are arranged and girls are often married at a very early age (Nicole Pope, Le Monde, 6–7 January 2002). In Brazil, too, the legislature passed sweeping changes in 2001 to the civil code, granting equal rights to women in marriage and divorce, in household decision-making and in a wide range of family matters (Seager, 2003: 102).

Achievement and frustration The same process of social movements putting pressure on political institutions for necessary reforms takes place in Western countries – but at a more advanced stage. The most serious abuses have been remedied, yet inequality persists. The problem now is to move on from the negative (ending major forms of discrimination) to the positive: taking advantage of what has already been achieved to seek greater personal and collective fulfilment.

Women

185

The situation in France – home of the celebrated theorist and activist of the women’s liberation movement, Simone de Beauvoir – illustrates both the successes, always temporary, and the frustrations of this unending process. The first major task is to decide what are the objectives and then the tactics of the women’s movement. The question of objectives clearly depends on a correct analysis of the situation: is the social, political and economic inequality of women compared with men the result of structural factors – that is, is male domination basically produced and reproduced by the various institutions of society, notably, the family, school, workplace, the state – or can domination be overcome by the political process of reform in the way that royal absolutism by and large yielded to democracy? In other words, is patriarchal authority so entrenched that only force – revolution – can eradicate it: the radical solution? Or is mass mobilisation and parliamentary legislation possible – the reformist solution? Two influential sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Touraine, take opposing sides on this fundamental issue. It is worth looking at their arguments (see also Girling, 2004: chapter 4). Reformism, with Touraine, strives for the better integration of women in society. Radicalism, with Bourdieu, insists that society itself must be changed if women are to achieve equal rights with men. Feminism, as a social movement, in Touraine’s view, demands a pragmatic struggle for women’s rights, in law, in the economy and in politics. Radicalism, to the contrary, demands the uncompromising rejection of male domination of society by the revolutionary overthrow of institutions that reproduce structural inequality. The efficacy of pragmatic reformism was especially evident in the 1970s (legalising abortion, reimbursing methods of contraception, establishing equality in the family) but it was followed by stagnation and dissension. Only in the 1990s did the women’s movement revive with the successful campaign for ‘parity’, that is, equal access of men and women to elected positions. Touraine’s endorsement of parity stems from his theoretical emphasis on the creation of a free and active ‘subject’ – in this case emancipated women – working collectively as a social movement to put pressure on democratic institutions to carry out meaningful reforms. Bourdieu subverts parity. Even if the feminist movement has contributed a great deal to the enlargement of political discussion on issues that were previously evaded or ignored, he argues, one cannot overlook the negative and for the most part subconscious attitudes – both of men and women – which ‘contribute so strongly to the social relations of domination between the sexes’. For although the campaign for parity has the merit of reminding us that universalist principles of constitutional law

186


are abstractions without a social content (and thus require a form of positive discrimination to achieve equality) yet those women who actually benefit from parity come from the ‘same regions of social space’ as the men who currently occupy dominant positions. In other words, one form of domination (masculine) will be replaced by another (that of men and women) all of whom are members of the same dominant class. Bourdieu correctly claims that despite social and political reforms structural inequality persists. But he minimises the very real improvements in the situation of women that have been achieved in comparison with their position half a century ago, or indeed compared with their plight in much of the developing world. (Before 1965, for example, French wives could not go out to work without the permission of their husbands.) How to assess these differences is a matter of perspective: judged from the point of view of the intended end result, women suffer greatly from inequality; from the point of view of the process of reform, women have gained immensely. Moreover, on the very issue of revolution or reform, as one prominent feminist, Françoise Picq, points out, the 1968 ‘paradigm’ of women’s liberation is no longer realistic. ‘The extravagant hope to put an immediate end to oppression and to abolish patriarchy within a generation has been extraordinarily effective . . . in forging new representations of women.’ But it is hardly probable, she adds, that such a radical movement can develop in a ‘reasonably reformist’ France, which has lost the taste for rupture and confrontation, and no longer believes in grand ideological systems of liberation. Thus, the problems begin, according to Albistur and Armogathe (1977: 455–6), authors of an important history of French feminism, precisely when it is necessary to determine the objectives and define the tactics of struggle: Which had priority, the struggle against male power or the struggle against capitalism? Which new analyses could women provide in relation to Marxism and the work of Freud? How should struggles be popularised, by direct and spectacular action against all the fronts of patriarchy, or rather by a more classical way of using tracts, newspapers and demonstrations, etc? Finally how to organise at a minimum level and how to meet, speak and decide: by turbulent general assemblies favouring power tactics, or in small study-groups, less open to direction, but also less representative and perhaps less effective? No doubt the answer is a combination of radicalism and reformism, in the sense that mass mobilisation against discrimination and inequality

Women

187

requires the inspiration of a revolutionary (even utopian) goal in order to put effective pressure on political institutions to carry out reforms. Such an answer, I suggest, can be found in the career of Simone de Beauvoir, whose pioneering study, Le deuxième sexe, published in 1949, was reviled by important public figures (men) and remains an inspiring example to others (women). Her message, essentially, is that the unequal status of women – at work, in the professions and especially in politics – as well as their own feelings of inferiority are not the result of biological ‘eternal’ differences but are historically and socially created. What was done at one time, can therefore be undone – but only by the individual and collective effort of women and a change of mentality by men. For women have been taught to accept masculine authority and so they renounce either criticising or examining or judging on their own account. ‘Women are made to suffer’, they say, ‘but that is life; one cannot do anything about it.’ This resignation engenders patience among women, which is often admired. But it also leads to a kind of fatalism. ‘Never having experienced the power of freedom, they do not believe in liberation; The world seems to be ruled by an obscure destiny against which it is presumptuous to rise up.’ And yet to overcome the inferiority in which women have been ‘situated’, they must revolt. ‘They must refuse the limits of their situation and seek to open the ways of the future . . . There is no other issue than to struggle for liberation’ (vol. 2: 310, 314, 349). Half a century later, what is the situation? In a report to the Jospin government in 1999, the Socialist deputy Catherine Génisson emphasises the unequal status of French women, notably at work. ‘In spite of being prohibited, discrimination in terms of hiring, salary, access to training and promotion has not disappeared.’ While 80 per cent of women between 25 and 50 years of age are at work they still have to support 80 per cent of domestic tasks. (While men and women living alone devoted about the same time to household tasks, in a couple with two children the father worked an hour and a half, the mother well over six hours.) Women are to be found predominantly in part-time work, with low salaries. Only 45 per cent of women are in full-time work, compared with 77 per cent of men. Moreover, the differences in earnings in 2001 between men and women has hardly changed since the 1970s, according to the national statistical institute, Insee. Today, when men and women carry out the same type of work – in terms of qualifications, sector of work, size of firm and so on – men still earn 8 per cent more than women at the beginning of their careers (in the 1970s it was 10 per cent). As for economic activity as a whole, the gap between the sexes increases to 26 per cent after five years of employment, exactly the same

188


as in the mid-1970s (Pascale Krémer, Le Monde, 24 August 2001). Four years later the gap remains the same. One reason is that most women work in jobs for which few qualifications are required, and without social recognition. Another is that ‘discrimination develops from the first job’, even though women are better educated than men (Margaret Maruani, Le Monde, 25 March 2005). Inequality in the professions and in politics is also the norm. Only 7 per cent of leading executives in the 5000 biggest French firms are women. Fewer than 12 per cent of parliamentarians elected in 2002 – despite the law on parity – are women. The problem, particularly affecting professional careers, is first educational (the different attitudes of and towards girls and boys) and then promotional: men and women often start on an equal basis, but when it comes to promotion to senior positions women hit the ‘glass ceiling’. As a result of both factors, only 24 per cent of physicists and 20 per cent of mathematicians are women, and fewer still occupy positions of responsibility. Official research shows that fewer than one in three researchers is a woman and only 4 per cent are at the top; their prospects of promotion are scarcely better at the universities. In the enlarged European Union, by comparison, about 11 per cent of women share the top decision-making positions in the fifty largest enterprises (in France it is 10 per cent of chief executives, and just over one-quarter of all managers, or ‘cadres’: Le Figaro, 14 June 2004). Women in the United States make up nearly half the managerial and professional staff – but only 12 per cent of corporate directors (Guardian Weekly, 28 November–4 December 2002). As for the administration in France, an official report by Anne-Marie Colmou in 1999 stated that although women formed 57 per cent of salaried employees in the civil service ‘they are rare in executive posts and positions of responsibility’ (Gérard Courtois, Le Monde, 18 February 1999). In 1997 there were only 13 women in the 168 posts of director; there were five women prefects for a total of 109; there were four university presidents out of 88; nine women inspector-generals of finance out of 74; 40 of the 201 members of the Conseil d’état were women. Confronting the dispiriting lack of change, the feminist movement in France is divided into four main streams: pragmatic feminists, such as the campaigners for parity; neo-Marxists, who combat the ‘enemy’ of patriarchy allied with exploitative capitalism, but who no longer consider that revolution is an option; psychoanalytical feminists, varying from attachment to Freudian theory despite its misogyny to radical differentiation of the sexes, affirming the ‘revaluation’ of women’s identity; and postmodern ‘literary’ figures, who are often deprived of feminist status

Women

189

by the other streams. In practice, the most important distinction is between the first two groups, who insist on the struggle to achieve equality and are ready to cooperate with as well as contest existing political institutions for this purpose, and the latter two groups, who emphasise women’s separate identity. The fragmentation of the women’s movement reflects a widespread sense of malaise, of being in an impasse. Progress now seems to be blocked. What can be done? Compared to the spectacular challenges of the past, it is more difficult to mobilise around workaday issues. Gradual improvements are probably the best hope. This is not an inspiring prospect when so many obstacles still need to be overcome. How is such a situation possible in an economically developed country? Why are social movements – the mobilising force for change – so often frustrated? How can the symbolic and institutional power of dominant classes still be so pervasive? The condition of women is the social paradigm par excellence: politically free, but economically constrained.

9 Dark Energy

For most of the 20th century, our understanding of the physical properties of space progressed little beyond Einstein’s theories . . . But technology has come a long way in the past 30 years. Today, with the help of space telescopes such as Hubble, scientists can observe the formation of new stars, the explosion of suns, and the destruction of planets. Age-old questions are finally being answered, while previously held notions about the universe have been disproved. Six years ago, a group of scientists observing supernovae – exploding stars – found that the universe was not only expanding but expanding at an accelerating pace. Last year data from Hubble and the wmap microwave observatory confirmed that a force called ‘dark energy’ was indeed causing the universe to inflate . . . The implications are profound . . . Until recently, physicists assumed the universe was composed of ordinary matter – the stuff that makes up planets, stars, galaxies, supernovae and all the other objects that astronomers can see with their telescopes. Today, scientists believe less than 5 per cent of the cosmos is ordinary matter. ‘Dark matter’ – mysterious particles left over from the Big Bang, which cosmologists believe gave birth to the universe 14bn years ago – makes up around 25 per cent. The universe is dominated by the even more mysterious dark energy, a force that is counteracting gravity and pushing everything apart . . . (Victoria Griffith and Clive Cookson, ‘Manifest Destiny . . .’, Financial Times, 30 July 2004)

190

Dark Energy

191

Science and society ‘Dark energy’, as a mysterious force dominating the universe, is the theme of this book. But it is translated at the humbler level of human society into emotional power, revealed by magic realism, and explained – or rather rationalised after the event – by the (social) sciences. Natural science itself is magic realism: ‘magic’ is what is previously unimaginable – flying in the sky, landing on the moon, communicating instantly worldwide – while ‘realism’ expresses the concrete effect on society of scientific achievement. Hence two main views of science. (1) Magic – the ever-increasing possibilities for good or ill: the extraordinary potential for improvement, on the one hand, and a Frankenstein’s monster, out of control, on the other. Science, in other words, enormously expands the range of choice, which is a question of power (politics) and of morality. (2) Realism – science is neutral: what people do with scientific discoveries is their responsibility, not that of science. Consider, for example, atomic weapons, used destructively on wartime Japan; but held in reserve as an instrument of dissuasion – thus, keeping the peace – throughout the cold war. But the notion of science as neutral (argued below) is insufficient. Science is not just an instrument. The authority, accuracy and certainty imparted to ‘science’ creates a state of mind that is considered by Foucault, for example, to be part of a universal process – measuring, classifying, ‘normalising’ – to control the lives of ordinary people by those in power. Habermas, too, argues that modern natural science is ‘inherently oriented to possible technical control’. What is at stake is the way in which the rationality of science and technology has come to pervade the whole of our world (quoted by Outhwaite, 1994: 21). The great Russian novelist Dostoevsky, from a different moral perspective, also fears the harmful effect of science on the free will of human beings. Rational discovery versus political manipulation. These are some examples. Sir Harry Kroto, Nobel prize winner and president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, explains that chemistry, in particular, is the ‘fundamental key to the development of the sustainable technologies we need to survive’. The reason for some optimism is that ‘chemists are creating magic molecules that do “crazy things” . . . The newest molecules can juggle electrons and photons in novel ways presaging revolutionary electronic and photonic devices, and soon molecules will seek and destroy defective sites in the body . . . The humanitarian impact on the future will be at least as dramatic as in the past.’ He lists ‘a few possible exciting humanitarian chemical developments’.

192


New inexpensive techniques to provide pure water to the half of the world that has only contaminated water to drink; catalysts that can enable sunlight to split water directly into hydrogen and oxygen and so develop a real hydrogen/oxygen-fuelled economy; new cheap and efficient materials that can convert the colossal amounts of sunlight that fall each day on the Earth’s surface, directly into electricity on a scale commensurate with our needs; new genetic technologies such as the development of wheat and rice capable of fixing nitrogen by pathways similar to the symbiotic bacterial mechanism that certain root crops have developed – a breakthrough that would obviate the need for organic fertilisers and save 10 to 20 per cent of the world’s fossil-fuel supply; crops that counter the land salination and erosion problems we now face; rice that contains vitamin A (those opposed to GM crops must offer viable alternative strategies – but see below); new medical and health care strategies that are desperately needed to combat diseases such as malaria, TB, Aids and cancer; development of effective CO2 sequestering technologies to halt global warming; safe nuclear waste disposal strategies to enable us to utilise nuclear power safely. Such are the kinds of scientific innovation, Professor Kroto concludes, that can attract young scientists ‘presently disillusioned with the inability of our global capitalist infrastructure to resolve the truly vital issues’ to turn their enormous creative potential to solving the problems that confront us. ‘If we do not do this soon, this potential will be channelled into useless or destructive activities and we shall only have ourselves to blame’ (Sir Harry Kroto, ‘Comment’ on science education, Independent, 8 July 2004). Similarly, from an optimistic perspective, information science, with the widespread use of the Internet, cannot but facilitate the growth of democracy. The arrival of the Internet, Lucas Delattre insists, profoundly changes the rules of democracy. While television favoured mass communication according to a vertical, centralised model, the Net system, interactive and horizontal, gives citizens access to an unlimited amount of information . . . With new information and communication technologies, totalitarian regimes appear to be banished. Political communication is no longer monopolised by the political parties or the wealthiest lobbies, but spreads through ever more influential networks: non-governmental organisations, discussion forums, newsgroups and association of all kinds. At the heart of the information society is the notion that each has the right to accountability: the customer from the seller, the shareholder

Dark Energy

193

from the enterprise, the citizen from the politician. ‘Ideas such as participation, transparency and responsibility take on a new dimension.’ Yet Delattre is aware that use of the Internet has not done away with the traditional power circuits. Even when political parties are worn out or discredited they remain powerful. And he ends with Tocqueville’s conclusion to his Démocratie en Amérique: ‘It depends [on nations: read people] whether or not equality will lead them to slavery or freedom, to Enlightenment or barbaric behaviour, to prosperity or misery’ (Delattre, ‘The paradoxes of e-democracy’ Le Monde, 25 November 2000). Tocqueville’s advice is salutary. In 2004, an open letter by 60 prominent scientists, including 20 Nobel prize winners, charged the Bush administration with manipulating information to fit its policies on a range of issues from climate change to whether Iraq had been trying to make nuclear weapons. When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions . . . This has been done by placing people who are professionally unqualified or who have clear conflicts of interest in official posts and on scientific advisory committees; by disbanding existing advisory committees; by censoring and suppressing reports by the government’s own scientists; and by simply not seeking independent scientific advice. The scientists declared that they were not taking issue with the administration’s policies: ‘We are taking issue with the administration’s distortion of the process with which science enters into its decisions’ (Alok Jha, Guardian Weekly, 26 February–3 March 2004). Indeed, on the controversial issue of genetically-modified foods, Sir John Krebs, chairman of an international conference on food safety, called on governments to set up a world body to monitor biotechnology and the role of multinationals as the only way to restore public trust. ‘We need [representatives of ] industry, regulators, scientists, consumers, and we need to consider ethics, values and beliefs, issues of world trade, intellectual property rights and exploitation of the developing world. By ironing out these problems and reaching a consensus, then politicians can decide the way forward.’ His proposal was backed by Sir Robert May, the British government’s chief scientific adviser, and Professor Durant, head of science communication at the Science Museum in London. ‘There is a crisis of credibility for policy-makers’, said Durant. ‘There should be clear and specific reasons for policy being made behind closed

194


doors. In Britain we have the opposite. In my view that is the wrong way round’ (Paul Brown, Guardian Weekly, 9–15 March 2000). Confronting this major crisis in confidence over the safety of GM foods and to a certain extent therapeutic cloning research, Lewis Wolpert, professor of cellular biology at the University of London, insists on distinguishing science itself from the technological applications resulting from scientific research. Science produces ideas on the functioning of the world, while technological ideas are about usable objects. Trustworthy scientific knowledge is not concerned with values, morality or ethics. Science tells us what the world is like. The fact that we are not at the centre of the universe is neither good nor bad. And the same goes for the possibility that genes influence our intelligence or our behaviour. Dangers or ethical problems only appear when science is applied as a technology. Professor Wolpert believes that ‘the better our understanding of the world, the more able we will be to conceive a just society. One cannot renounce the possibility of doing good – by putting scientific ideas into practice – on the pretext that these ideas could also lead to bad results.’ If we were to censor scientific knowledge, he continued, we would be on a slippery slope: for ‘there is no knowledge or information that is not susceptible to being manipulated for unworthy purposes’ (Report on the Genoa Conference of European scientists by Martine Perez, Le Figaro, 26 March 2004). Nevertheless, there is a ‘situational logic’ of scientific discovery, referred to above, whose very ‘authoritativeness’ serves to diminish people’s sense of autonomy – in other words, the ‘free will’, with its connotation of a genuine choice between doing good or evil, which also inspires Dostoevsky’s great novels. Thus, in his strange and powerful story, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, he argues: ‘For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice . . . ?’ Who would want to be reduced ‘to a mathematical formula’? Dostoevsky’s great fear is that ‘when all desires and reasons can actually be calculated’ then ‘something in the nature of a mathematical table’, classifying and controlling behaviour, will replace the individual will and the power of choice, which are essential to being human. Dostoevsky himself ardently believed in the moral choices proclaimed in the New Testament; but, as André Gide (1967) points out in his study of Dostoevsky, he questioned the existence of an omnipotent God that could allow such suffering to exist in the world – even for the sake of allowing human beings to be free to choose between good and evil. ‘The chief problem dealt with throughout this

Dark Energy

195

particular work’, Dostoevsky wrote to a friend in 1870 about his plans for The Brothers Karamazov, ‘is the very one which has, my whole life long, tormented my conscious or subconscious being: the question of the existence of God.’ Replacing ‘God’ with the omnipotence of ‘Science’ recasts Dostoevsky’s dilemma in contemporary terms. Such is the ‘humanist education’ of science, writes Bernard Edelman, a specialist on Nietzsche: ‘exorcism of animality, belief in the grandeur of science, regulation – or rather calculability – of mankind: for if people can calculate themselves, they can live in security, away from cosmic hazards or the hazards of their own lives . . .’ (Le Monde des livres, 25 August 2000).

Morality and power Science turns everything upside down. Accordingly I, too, have inverted the usual order – fiction to analysis – of these chapters. Yet the question remains: is ‘science’ to control us, or are we to control science – for the good of humanity, in Dostoevsky’s opinion? Science is neutral, from the scientists’ perspective. But consider the slogan of the American National Rifle Association: ‘Guns don’t kill people. People do.’ All the same, the more guns that are readily available and the less the restrictions on their use, the more people that are killed. This is the connection. Science – and its application – expands the range of choice. In medieval times, for instance, bows and arrows had little effect on fortresses, although lengthy sieges did. The use of gunpowder – invented by the Chinese – revolutionised the art of warfare. Cannonballs could now pulverise the strongest castles and mow down footsoldiers. But battles were still limited. Armies were engaged for the ‘campaigning season’, avoiding winter if possible, and releasing soldiers to take part in harvesting. The invention of machine guns marked a new stage: thousands could now be slaughtered, instead of dozens. Then came tanks, poison gas, aeroplanes and nuclear weapons. State of play The stage is set for Rolf Hochhuth’s play, Soldiers. A personal note: my second-hand copy of this work, bought over the Internet, contains a dedication by the author, in German: ‘To the Pole Kolakowski, the Tragedy of the Pole Sikorski’, referring to the subplot of Soldiers: the supposed elimination of General Sikorski, head of the Polish government in exile. For Sikorski openly suspected Stalin – and not the Germans – of having murdered several thousand Polish officers at Katyn, and thus

196


appeared to threaten the Western–Soviet alliance, which was vital for victory. The Polish leader, in Hochhuth’s play, suffered a fatal ‘accident’. Kolakowski, to whom my copy of the book was dedicated, is presumably the intellectual dissident at that time (1967) who was shortly to leave Poland for Oxford and became well known for his philosophical studies. Thus, the cultural role of philosophy, he wrote, is ‘never to stop questioning what appears to be obvious and definitive’. And again (in 1983): ‘never to allow us to forget that that there are questions that lie beyond the legitimate horizon of science and are nevertheless crucially important to the survival of humanity’. In 2003, Leszek Kolakowski received the prestigious Kluge prize for his work. It is 1964, one hundred years after the signing of the first Geneva Convention, in Hochhuth’s play, with the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, attacked by German bombers in 1940, as a background. The ‘Everyman’ of the old sixteenth-century play has become a soldier: in fact, a former bomber pilot, named Dorland, now dying of cancer, and bitterly regretting his past. Dorland is re-enacting his wartime experience by bringing in Prime Minister Churchill, on the one hand, and Bishop Bell of Chichester, on the other, in an antagonistic dialogue on the firebombing of cities. Referring to the Nazi murder of two million Jews in Poland, Sikorski himself sets the tone: ‘where does this irrational hatred come from?’ Dorland’s humanitarian aim, by contrast, is to spur the conscience of his audience to reflect on the killing of innocent civilians and to urge the banning of air attacks on cities – a new Geneva Convention. ‘All Geneva’s efforts so far’, writes Hochhuth in his stage directions, ‘have been sabotaged unanimously by the military leaders of the civilized nations.’ The draft submitted to the representatives of 85 countries seven years before, ‘disappeared into the filing system of the bureaucrats’. Conventions exist regarding both land and naval warfare – but none so far regarding aerial warfare. It does not therefore matter, Hochhuth observes, whether this Everyman play is staged as ‘reality’ or as a dream: ‘persons and places in a trial of conscience are precisely as real and actual as we suppose and admit them to be to ourselves’. Although Hochhuth considers the verse form of the play to act as a ‘breakwater’ against those overwhelming moments – so often unavoidable in drama – when ‘feeling wells over’, the use of blank verse also gives an epic quality to this ‘trial of conscience’: DORLAND: And that is where the Red Cross stands today: The Hague conventions could not protect Rotterdam – but the man who destroyed Rotterdam, him they protect!

Dark Energy

197

Those were German bombers that destroyed Rotterdam. Later, Dorland led the first attack ‘on the center of the unarmed city’ – Dresden – ‘we knew to be a refugee collection point’. On the second attack, Dorland bailed out of his falling plane and was forced by the people of Dresden: Two weeks on end, to drag with my bare hands the cooked and quickly rotting corpses from cellars, gardens, houses, and off pavements, cooked soft with the heat, to one of the five pyres in the Old Market . . . Horse carts brought in the heaps of dead . . . my job was to unload them, and to lay them in layers . . . Always just five hundred bodies – then the flamethrower . . . And Dorland recalled the 134,000 people killed by the firestorms in Tokyo in a single night. ‘But what we didn’t know’, he told his son, also a bomber pilot, ‘was that Japan had been making offers of surrender for months before the bombs were dropped.’ And he thought of the scientist Robert Oppenheimer’s ‘unforgettable admission’ about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: ‘We wanted to have it done before the war was finished, and there would be no further opportunity.’ Science Churchill’s intimate friend, the physicist Frederick Alexander Lindemann, became his scientific adviser. Hardly had Hitler moved into the Chancery in 1933, ‘from where he could give the force of law to his hatred of Jews and intellectuals’, than Lindemann went to Berlin to invite important scientists like Einstein to take refuge from the Nazi persecutions in England. ‘All services must be paid for’, comments Hochhuth, ‘and the Western world paid for this immeasurable service nine years later, when her leader, Churchill, accepted Lindemann’s miscalculation that by destroying the working-class areas of the German towns, victory would be brought about within eighteen months.’ From the moment the British prime minister accepted Lindemann’s formula for reducing to ashes the industrial quarters of all German cities of more than 50,000 inhabitants, and gave the order for it to be used as a major offensive weapon, Churchill defended ‘the Prof.’ like a tiger against all scientific attacks. Anyone who cast doubt on the effectiveness of the terror-raids – Churchill found the expression a good one – was done for. Even such reputable defence experts as Tizard and Blackett, a Nobel prize winner, were not heeded.

198


‘Set the place on fire’, recommended Lindemann, later elevated to the peerage as Lord Cherwell. ‘The dislocation of the working population, the gas, light, and main water – these will paralyse industry, and only these.’ As he pointed out, ‘The panicking force of fire is immeasurable.’ You start with one-and-a-half million small calibre incendiary bombs, dropped over the tightest possible area of the town, causing localised fires, which then: . . . will coagulate into a single conflagration . . . Here you have the burning inner city, in whose center temperatures of up to eight hundred degrees will soon consume not only all the normal combustible material, but also – and this is the funny thing – the oxygen . . . Therefore: the rapidly increasing need for oxygen in the center of the fire results in a suction draft on the perimeter, which drives the air from the quarters contiguous to the city center centripetally toward the heart of the conflagration. These air streams, the Prof. goes on, are described, aptly enough, as firestorms. ‘They sweep through the streets, with force and a velocity reaching the highest speed on our windscale.’ Hochhuth interrupts the scientific adviser to quote a secret German report, reprinted in the memoirs of Air Marshal ‘Bomber’ Harris, revealing that firestorms in Hamburg (codenamed Gomorrah) reached a force of 160 mph. ‘Trees three feet thick were broken off or uprooted, human beings were flung alive into the flames . . . The panic-stricken citizens knew not where to turn. Flames drove them back from the shelters, but high-explosive bombs sent them scurrying back again. Once inside, they were suffocated by carbon-monoxide poisoning . . . in a crematorium which was what each shelter proved to be.’ Cherwell resumes: In the center, therefore, a windless furnace. On the perimeter, hurricanes – which will carry along all those objects . . . P.M.: Objects – what sort of objects? CHERWELL: Animate and inanimate – men, animals, trees, lorries, balconies, roofs, chimneys, and other architectural features. P.M.: All this – is hurled all over the place?

Dark Energy

199

CHERWELL: Not all over the place, drawn centripetally toward the furnace. A typhoon is not itself a chaos; it merely leaves one behind it. P.M.: . . . This report, coming while Hamburg burns, Will sound the death knell of German megalomania. Conscience The protagonists: ‘Churchill is the element itself, the personification of the war-drive, the bloodstream of the century in which more human beings have been done to violent death than ever before in world history’ – Hochhuth. Although Churchill ignored the speeches of George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, denouncing the Allied bombing of cities, causing the death of so many innocent people, he made no effort to stop the controversial prelate. What the bishop expected of the prime minister – to cease this bombing campaign – was all the more hazardous, Hochhuth explains, since it would be a full year after the devastating air attacks on Hamburg before Bomber Harris’s superiors realised that the destruction of residential areas was strategically useless. Even then they were unable, despite their efforts, to halt the progress of Churchill and of Bomber Command, whom the prospects of victory ‘had sent out of control’. In Dorland’s (Hochhuth’s) play, Bell confronts Churchill with the accusation: ‘Do you not shrink from actions which are called murder when Hitler performs them?’ P.M.: No. The battlefield is at the enemy’s level. How otherwise am I to throttle him, stamp him out? I must struggle with him on the same ground, According to my technical capacity. Churchill denounces Hitler for killing, in one city, Amsterdam, 100,000 citizens. Bell: ‘We kill with Gomorrah (Hamburg) in a single night’ more people than Hitler killed so far in all his raids on England. And Bell continues: Like every man in England, I thanked God When in the hour of need you took the helm; But Gomorrah is not self-defense. We are too close to victory – our fury is unworthy . . . Are not these actions a betrayal of the ideals that impelled us all – unanimously to declare

200


war on tyranny? Here from various reports [on the Hamburg bombing] Forty-five per cent more female casualties than male, Twenty per cent of the dead – under fourteen years of age . . . A working class area [where] every third inhabitant or more was burned to death. ‘I cannot condemn the war’, he adds later, ‘only its worst inhumanities . . . But children are no enemy.’ Murdering civilians is the act of a moral criminal. Churchill, outraged: ‘I protest in the name of the men of all bomber forces . . . ’ But Bell has the last word: For what the bomber pilot does is still not his subjective guilt but that of our society. Bell leaves: ‘his voice fades like that of mankind in the tumult of the massacre of history’. A dream ‘But we have science’, Dostoevsky observes ironically, ‘and with its aid we shall again discover truth, though we shall accept it only when we perceive it with our reason. [From the scientific perspective] Knowledge is higher than feeling, and the consciousness of life is higher than life. Science will give us wisdom. Wisdom will reveal to us the laws. And the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness.’ And that, Dostoevsky goes on, ‘is what we have to fight against’. Instead, love your neighbour as yourself: ‘that is the main thing, and that is everything, for nothing else matters’. It is the dream of a golden age, of ‘innocent and beautiful people’ at peace with themselves. They did not strive to gain knowledge of life as we strive to understand it, because their lives were full. ‘But their knowledge was higher and deeper than the knowledge we derive from our science . . . while they knew how to live without science’ (‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’).

Conclusion

The conclusion follows from the premise (of the Introduction): the question confronting humanity is whether the emotionally-charged drives for ‘possession, power and social production of knowledge’ take a positive form – that is, for equitable distribution of wealth, genuine participation in public decisions, and self-knowledge – or are instead overruled by greed, domination and selfishness. Possession, from a neutral (but potentially positive) perspective, consists of rules guaranteeing individual or collective ownership, which are essential for the production of goods and services on which everyone depends. Power to make someone do what he or she would not otherwise do (and vice versa) is essential to any social order. And knowledge of self and society, however derived, makes that order meaningful. It is when these ‘neutral’ qualities are taken to extremes – considered as ends in themselves – that possession becomes ‘greed’, power becomes ‘anger’ (violence) and manipulated knowledge becomes ‘illusion’: the causes of suffering in this world. Constructive or destructive consequences characterise the varied social activities examined in previous chapters. In these I bring out the emotional charge of a chapter/theme, revealed in fiction, and then analyse the structural conditions that stem or divert the flow of psychic energy. Such fictions have been chosen for their imaginative quality and their relevance to the theme. Indeed, I cannot do better than recall from the introductory chapter the appraisal by S.L. Goldberg of Joyce’s Ulysses, where reader and artist realise a sense of the wholeness of life, of its irrational paradoxes, intermingled decay and vitality, absurdity and mystery: where moral criticism and mythic parallels converge. It is in this way that I consider the challenge of change, resulting either from economic revolutions (destructive and creative), or the devastation of war, or political unrest, indeed new ways of thinking. This 201

202


challenge to the existing order produces enormous emotional tension: the flow of psychic energy may be channelled constructively or may burst out of control. It is exemplified in the fateful alternative of ‘modernisation’ – democracy or authoritarianism – posed in Chapter 2. Global capitalism, too, is Janus-faced. It has an immense potential for the common good: the creation of wealth for better living standards, preventing disease, providing housing, making possible universal education and promoting equality among men and women. But capitalism also serves to strengthen the existing (or emerging) holders of economic and political power – the ‘military-industrial complex’. Indeed, arms exports by the major powers find a ready market throughout the world, even among the poorest nations and among the most dictatorial regimes, which need weapons to crush any revolt by the oppressed. Violence internally is endemic in such situations. But it is no less evident – externally, at least – even in the most advanced nations of the modern world. Despite their rhetoric of support for freedom and democracy, it is ‘interest’ rather then ‘principle’ that governs their foreign policies. The ultima ratio is force rather than justice (see Epilogue: ‘Story of O’). Unenlightened self-interest and short-term perspectives are no less characteristic of governments when they confront the degradation of the environment and the menace of global warming: après nous le déluge! As for women’s rights, despite progress in certain countries, the entrenched power of the patriarchy and its horrifying punishment of ‘transgression’ remain formidable obstacles to emancipation in most parts of the world. The odds are against a constructive outcome of Kant’s ‘trilogy of passions’: possession, power and knowledge. But if the ideology of progress is an illusion, the myth of progress may yet inspire people to act when they sincerely believe. ‘We the People’ when motivated by the founding principles of freedom and democracy are empowered to struggle against the exigencies of capitalism and realpolitik – for a better society. The future is open: there is no fatal determinism.

Epilogue: Theatre of the Absurd

These ‘world views’ were written when I was in Washington during the last year or two of the cold war. They were intended to form part of an ‘alternative’ reading of international politics. But I did not pursue this matter, for even as I was revising the text the cold war came to an end. And yet these particular scenes, reflecting the paranoia of the cold war, are no less relevant today, with new problems (and misfortunes) emerging from ‘old’ situations. The ‘docu-drama’ – facts interspersed with fictions – follows: ‘The Janus Aspect’ sets the stage. The second act – ‘A Fatal Disease’ – is not about Aids. Like Camus’ La Peste, it is an allegory – in this case, the propensity to violence – of the human condition. ‘Wizard of Oz’ looks more closely at a diplomatic venture – the IranContra affair – transported across the Pacific. The next scenario is what really happened: stranger than fiction. It is the documented case of the bizarre (even ‘bazaar’) goings-on of such key players as Marine Col. Oliver North, his boss Vice-Admiral Poindexter (VADM in the text), formerly National Security Adviser to the President (RR), and a strong cast of supporting actors. The last act is the ‘Story of O’: it is the world’s oldest profession of faith.

The Janus aspect Janus is the god of international relations: one face shows the rational actor, the other the mask of the absurd. The ‘absurd’, as Camus puts it, is the fate of human beings: it is the gap between expectations and reality. It is the ‘confrontation’ between the human desire for happiness through the pursuit of reason and ‘the unreasonable silence of the world’ (Le Mythe de Sisyphe). 203

204


The ‘reasonable’ premise of America’s containment of communism, for example, was the expectation of modified communist behaviour, to conform, if not to Western principles, at least to Western policies. But containment also resulted in frenzy over China and disaster in Vietnam. Massive rearmament under Reagan may have been a rational response to previous Soviet gains. But the administration’s frustration over the Iran-held hostages and its vehement hostility to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua produced the Iran-Contra Affair: classic theatre of the absurd! The absurd is bipartisan, embracing the Soviet Union and its followers. What could be more absurd, in Camus’ sense, than the supposed embodiment of proletarian ideology (communist party and state) destroying an authentic organisation of the workers (Polish Solidarity)? Is it any less absurd that ‘scientific socialism’, with its ‘planned’ economy, should have led to economic chaos in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Vietnam, to structural crises in Eastern Europe, and to agonising reappraisal even in the communist heartland? Fuelling the absurd are the emotional drives of fear, suspicion, rage, greed, envy and ambition. The ‘frustration-anger-aggression’ complex, analysed in Ted Robert Gurr’s Why Men Rebel, is hard at work in international relations. It is psychoanalysis rather than political analysis that is needed to explain Eisenhower’s testimony to Kennedy that Laos – remote, sparsely-populated, landlocked, undeveloped Laos – ‘was the key to the entire area of Southeast Asia’ (as recorded in the Pentagon Papers); that the ‘loss’ of any single country in Southeast Asia – as presidents from Truman to Nixon proclaimed – ‘would probably lead to relatively swift submission to or alignment with communism’ of the rest of Southeast Asia and India, and in the longer term of the Middle East, endangering the ‘stability and security of Europe’ (National Security Council statement, June 1952, also reported in the Pentagon Papers); that if Soviet aggression was not countered in strife-torn Angola the United States would lose throughout Africa (according to Henry Kissinger, as Secretary of State in the Ford administration); that Soviet intervention in Afghanistan could ‘pose the most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War’ (President Carter in January 1980); and that if communism was not stopped in Nicaragua it would come to threaten the very borders of America (President Reagan in April 1983). (In the twenty-first century, Iraq, which had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction under Saddam Hussein was attacked for being a threat to American security.) These statements we now recognise as absurd: but they had most serious consequences. The fears, suspicions and hatreds underlying them – similar to infantile rages – were real, if hard to analyse. It was the force


205

of emotional drives, not sober calculations, that incessantly provoked crises, leading one side to Vietnam, the other to Afghanistan. Is this too bleak a picture? Despite the blunders of foreign policy, alliance structures have survived, and economic progress surely vindicates the power of reason. Economic growth since World War II has brought unparalleled prosperity to the West, and enormous improvements in living conditions in many countries in the third world. Yet even the apparent solidity – and rationality – of the economic ‘base’ conceals major flaws. The self-regulating market system (of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation) has turned out to be a myth, while the dynamism of competition derives from greed, whether in the form of consumerism or profit motivation and thus – like politics and foreign policy – rests on shaky psychological foundations. The prophet of the market economy, Adam Smith himself, revealed the great illusion of economic endeavour in a best-selling work, some years before The Wealth of Nations. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments he argued that all the ‘toil and anxiety’ of middle-class striving to accumulate wealth and to achieve greatness is, from the philosophical point of view, merely trifling. The acquisition of wealth, like the acquisition of power, become ends in themselves: the purpose for which wealth (or power) is a means is lost to sight. Nor are the absurd consequences of human endeavour limited to the vagaries of politics and economics, for war, as the great strategist Clausewitz observed, is a trinity ‘composed of the original violence of its elements, hatred and animosity . . . of the play of probabilities and chance . . . and of the subordinate nature of a political instrument’. While social and political behaviour are generally susceptible to rational analysis, to understand the non-rational components of politics and foreign policy requires a different procedure. Thus, it is well to be reminded by James Rosenau, influential advocate of the scientific approach, that ‘At the core of the theorizing process is a creative imagination.’ ‘One must allow one’s mind to run freely,’ so he writes in The Scientific Study of Foreign Policy, ‘to be playful, to toy around with what might seem absurd . . .’

A fatal disease A terrible disease has spread throughout the world: there is no known cure for it. The most we can do, at this stage, is systematically analyse those aspects of which we have some knowledge.

206


Diagnosis of risk It was a German investigator who discovered the main features of the disease. It is the result, he diagnosed, of the ‘play’ of passion and chance, with the addition of a third element, choice. More recent investigators succeeded in singling out three major categories ‘at risk’: those with an unusual pride in ‘manliness’; those who move ‘in the fast lane’ of affairs; and finally the partners or collaborators of the first two. Some scientists have suggested that the two former categories at risk relate to the old ‘aristocratic’ qualities in society: and indeed there is an atavistic strain apparent in present carriers of the disease. Interestingly, few women have been known to initiate the disease: but they do, of course, suffer from it. (Recall the celebrated attempt by the women of Athens, recorded by Aristophanes, collectively to resist its onslaught.) Irregular outbreaks: latency The disease strikes the ‘responsible centres’ of the human organism, which normally provide immunity. But the disease seems to operate in an arbitrary way: some in the high-risk categories, despite continued indulgence, have not been affected; while others succumb to a few isolated encounters. The disease is difficult to catch; but once it takes hold it is deadly. Generally we can count on a fairly extensive period when everything is normal, or seems to be, when the disease is latent. Some scientists insist that the longer the period of latency, the more evident it is that the disease will soon break out – and the more virulent the form it will then take. The normal immune system is destroyed by the disease. Therefore all kinds of aberrant behaviour may be observed in the patient. Whatever the initial disorders, which may be quite minor, eventually the patient reaches the stage of crisis. Very often, experts say, patients are tormented by ‘voices’ and are incapable of what is considered logical thinking. Such people are often extremely fearful – or, at the opposite extreme, convulsed with rage – and cannot be approached easily. One team of therapists observes that unless each case is managed properly, patients may lash out, driven by unconscious fears or anger. Therapy Apart from the views of individual therapists there are three general approaches to possible treatment. The first, advocated by the purists (similar to Aristophanes’ solution) is total abstention. A much larger group of pragmatists argues, on the other hand, that while in principle


207

abstention is laudable, in practice – human nature being what it is – it won’t work. This group favours a policy of damage limitation through safe practices. The last group takes a very different view. Its members are evidently gratified by a feeling of power over others – though some may achieve sublimation – when taking part in dangerous activities. Virulent strain Recently an extremely virulent strain has appeared. Disease has always ravaged the world from time to time, but this new strain threatens the very existence of the human species. Scientists have come to understand the mechanism of the disease – the way it operates and achieves its fatal effect – but as yet they are no closer to understanding its ‘agency’: that is, what causes the disease. It is as if a terrifying game of chance is being played between the ‘agency’ and humankind. Can we master the agency, or will the agency master us?

Wizard of Oz Australia (familiarly known as Oz), where I lived for many years, is widely respected for its attachment to the rule of law and to constitutional practices. So it was with shock – and dismay – that Australians recently learned of a most disturbing development at the highest level of government. It can now be revealed that it all began with the conviction of our hitherto very popular prime minister, a shrewd operator with a folksy manner, that the French were out to do him in. He became obsessed with the idea that the deliberate aim of the French in the Pacific was to undermine small states that were friendly to Australia. Thus, he believed that continued French nuclear testing at Muroroa, despite all his protests, was intimidating the island peoples. It was forcing them to accept the imperialist doctrine of ‘gloire’ along with the so-called benefits of the nuclear umbrella. If these subversive threats were not countered, our leader insisted, the Pacific states would lose all faith in Australia’s ‘credibility’ and would succumb one by one, like falling dominos, to an alien presence. But France had a weak spot – the island of New Caledonia. The native inhabitants of the island were struggling for their independence, and Australian public opinion polls strongly supported them. For some time, however, the French had been transporting their own settlers to appropriate the island’s rich resources, as well as bringing in islanders of a different culture, who came to outnumber the original inhabitants. Frustrated, the native New Caledonians, or Kanaks, stepped up their struggle. As the

208


French authorities resisted, so the Kanaks turned to sabotage of French installations, angry demonstrations and even armed raids against settler property. The growing instability of New Caledonia provided the Australian prime minister with the opportunity he had been looking for. He could not openly aid the Kanaks against a fellow member of the United Nations. But he could establish an unofficial, ‘deniable’ enterprise to help the Kanaks fight for freedom against the ‘evil empire’. The prime minister stumped the country, denouncing imperialist France and unreservedly praising the freedom struggle of the Kanak fighters – without, of course, disclosing his secret plan. At this time, his rival, the foreign minister, a man of caution and constitutional integrity, became uneasy. He knew enough of what was going on behind the scenes to disturb him, but not enough to drive him into open opposition. He was worried about the prime minister’s predilection for adventures but decided he would be in a better position to keep an eye on events by staying on as foreign minister. Besides, he rationalised, if he resigned he would lose all chance of maintaining a ‘moderate’ influence on foreign policy. To the Aussie prime minister, a nod was as good as a wink. While the Kanaks fought on through the jungles of New Caledonia, launching guerilla operations against French military power, so the prime minister plunged deeper into his secret planning. How to help the freedom fighters, without being seen to do so, this was the problem. One holiday, idly watching the kangaroos on his estate, the prime minister’s secretary arrived with a dispatch. Gloomily, our leader realised that it was yet another depressing sales report on the Nomad. The Nomad was a little battler of a plane, built in Australia, with good counter-guerilla capability. Trouble was, the prime minister ruefully reflected, ever since the massacre of communists in Indonesia some years ago the region was running out of guerillas. True the Philippines was always encouraging: but this market was closed to Australia by America’s monopoly. Frustrated, our leader had even contemplated offering Nomads at bargain prices to the Vietnamese for use in Cambodia – but his foreign minister would be sure to object. Then, in a mood of deep despair, the ‘Initiative’ flashed through his mind. ‘Gotcha’, he shouted, scaring the kangaroos. It had to be the French in New Caledonia who really needed Nomad. To be sure, this was officially prohibited by Australia’s embargo on all arms sales to France, ever since the nuclear cold war began. But what if the Nomad was sold ‘unofficially’? In this way the Initiative was born.


209

Rapidly our leader recruited a management team from his intelligence staff. It was headed by a tough and resourceful outback Aussie, formerly a patrol officer in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. This character, known as ‘the Cop’, was a perfect choice, as he had left the service some years before to develop a profitable line of gun-running both to government and opposition forces in the Pacific islands. The prime minister’s undercover plan was to arrange the transfer of Nomads from the defence department to the strategic Initiative, which would then re-sell the planes, as a strictly commercial deal, to the French. The beauty of the Initiative was that profits from the sale were bound to be enormous, as the French were in desperate need. Profits from the deal with the French would be diverted to finance a massive resupply operation for the Kanaks, the very ‘contras’ of the French! ‘A neat idea’, so the Cop congratulated the prime minister. Then there was a hitch. A French undercover team, on their way back from blowing up a ship in New Zealand, had heard rumours from the islands about a secret Australian plan. The French team was swiftly flown to Noumea, capital of New Caledonia, which is also a major tourist attraction only a few hours’ flight from Sydney. Handed highly secret instructions from the French counter-espionage authorities, the team proceeded to snatch two Australian tourists as they were wandering in a seedy district of Noumea. Following the surge of alarm in Australia about the missing tourists, a message purporting to come from ‘Project Democracy’ (a well-known Kanak front) claimed credit for the kidnapping. From his own intelligence sources, however, the Australian prime minister was told that the Kanaks were not involved. Obviously the affair had been engineered by the French. Known for his quick thinking, our prime minister at once called the manager of the Initiative and wrote down on his memo cards what the Cop told him to remember. What the Cop told him was this: he must at all costs get the hostages freed before the next general election in a month’s time. If he did not do so he would be humiliated by his opponents as a wimp who could not guarantee the safety of his compatriots in an island virtually on Australia’s doorstep. Our leader reluctantly agreed. It was no longer a question of free market bargaining over the sale of Nomads, but an urgent matter of national security. The French would demand a quid pro quo (he had recently learned this expression from one of his diplomats) for the release of the hostages. They would never give them up as part of a commercial deal. Therefore, so the Cop was instructed, he must give the Nomads away, for free. Nothing less would satisfy the French.

210


Anguished at the sudden blow to profits – and to patriotism – the Cop complied. The two hostages were released – but there was now no money for the Kanak resupply operation. A disgruntled faction of the Kanaks, feeling betrayed, voiced its suspicions of the deal to the prime minister’s rival, the foreign minister. ‘We’ve been taken to the cleaners!’ the foreign affairs chief exploded. He correctly insisted on a parliamentary commission of enquiry. In the course of tedious proceedings the whole sorry story emerged. (This is fabulous. The true story is below.)

Takes two to tango (Note: this is a verbatim report from authoritative US sources – including misspellings and abbreviations – of very sensitive negotiations. Deletions have been made on national security grounds. Subheadings have, however, been inserted to provide names and aliases, etc.) [The story so far: American hostages have been seized in the Lebanon by an Iran-based organisation. The Reagan administration is negotiating secretly with the Iranians to sell them (forbidden) arms in return for the release of the hostages. A Marine colonel (Oliver North) has a bright idea: the Iranian arms deal will not only free the hostages but also provide profits which can be used (illegally) to fund the war by the ‘Contras’ against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas had come to power after overthrowing the former dictatorship in Nicaragua, which was backed by the United States . . . Read on.] VADM (aka JP, a senior official) I am beginning to think that we need to seriously think about a rescue effort for the hostages. Is there any way that we can get a spy into the . . . area? See Charlie’s weekly report. Over a period of time we could probably move covertly some . . . people into. . . GOODE, WILLIAM P. (aka North, a Marine) You will recall that we have not had much success with this kind of endeavor in the past, however. After CIA took so long to organize and then botched the . . . effort, Copp (aka Secord, head of the ‘Enterprise’) undertook to see what could be done thru one of the earlier DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) developed . . . contacts. Dick (Copp) has been working with Nir (Adviser on Counter-Terrorism to the Prime Minister of Israel) on this and now has three people in Beirut and a 40 man . . . force working ‘for’ us. O’NEIL (aka Cave, a CIA official, aka Sam) We should first meet in Europe to make sure there were no misunderstandings as happened before. Then our gorup [sic] would go to Dubai (cover term for Tehran) at an


211

agreed upon date. Upon arrival in Dubai the four boxes (hostages) would be turned over, then the rest of the spares would arrive and later dependeing [sic] on timeing [sic] the two Quties (cover term for Hawk radars) would arrive. B (an Iranian official) The meeting in Germany was not necessary and that deal was unacceptable . . . (you) arrive with the remaining 240 spares, then two hostages would be truned [sic] over. O’N B said that he did not know if their delegation was still in Lebanon. (B – hesitated to answer k . . . this [sic] one.) O’N Then they are in your hands. B They were. There are many people that oppose dealing with us. O’N We were very much interested in the deal and a long term relationship between the two companies, but the chief of our company (aka RR) was insisting on the release of our embargoed 4,000,000 dollars (cover term for hostages) before we delivered the remainder of 240 (Hawks) spares and then the two large boxes (radars). (Intercept: CANADIAN ARMS DEALER Iranians would not pay for anything until they received and inspected the goods, because I’ve heard on previous transactions involving even foodstuffs and stuff they would pay in advance and they opened up the crates and there were rocks in it. So they became very shell-shocked about paying in advance for anything.) B Some formula [sic] must be worked out whereby (the Enterprise) can deliver what (was) promised . . . (in Dubai). They have a serious problem with the 4 million in explaining why it is that they need it. O’N Can they gain control of the 4 million (?) B This was within (Iran’s) capabilities. If U.S. delegation (bearing a chocolate cake from a kosher bakery in Tel Aviv) had stayed in Dubai (Tehran) a few days longer (we) could have delivered 2 million immediately . . . contact the merchant (Gorba, aka Nicholas Kralis, arms dealer) to get all the details. (Intercept: RMC (former senior official, cake-bearer of US delegation) Gorba is basically a self-serving mischief-maker. CIA CONSULTANT Gorba is a wonderful man . . . almost too good to be true. But in Gorba’s polygraph test he showed deception on virtually all of the relevant questions.) GOODE Our other effort seems to be at a standstill w/ Ashgari [sic] (Gorba) and the (Tehran contact) screaming at each other about prices and Geo. Cave (O’N) telling that we are fed up w/ the whole thing.

212


O’N The president (RR) said this, McFarlane (RMC, former national security adviser) said this, Poindexter (VADM, national security adviser) said this, and making a lot of confuse [sic] for Iranians. B The United States charged six times the 1985 price for the weapons at issue. MERCHANT Financial problems had forced (me) into hiding . . . needed $5 million to avoid ruin. SAM (aka O’N) We had sent a copy of the prices to the merchant [sic]. B Superiors are shocked that the USG (US government) would sell [sic] them parts at black market prices. (Intercept: CHARLIE I was very troubled in September that the operation was to spin out of control . . . perhaps because Secord (Copp) and Hakim (Copp’s partner) were directly involved in supplying the contras and I could not understand this incredible price markup that we were seeing – the complaints were coming from Ghorbanifar, from the Special Assistant to the Prime Minister of Israel . . . Bill (Director of Central Intelligence, aka Casey) agrees Secord is a patriot.) SAM Something must break soon as the chief of our company (RR) is fed up with the whole deal. He was must [sic] disturbed at the way our delegation was handled in Dubai (Tehran) and is on the verge of corking off the while [sic] deal. (O’N ) and Goode (North) are in deep trouble for recommended [sic] the deal in the first place. B We were in no more trouble than he was. MERCHANT My dear and esteemed brother (B). After greetings, I feel it is necessary to state the following points with respect to the American issue, which for a year has taken up everyone’s time and has become very unpleasant . . . the essence of a (good) policy is to identify the moment, exploit the occasion . . . there was going to be a very elaborate celebration titled ‘Liberty Day’ in New York at the foot of the Statue of Liberty . . . If we could mediate for the release of the American hostage clergyman . . . and he could attend these celebrations – as he is clergy – we could exploit it and benefit from it a great deal: we could get the Americans to accept many of our demands. Naturally, as usual, nobody paid any attention to my suggestions. They (Goode, Copp and co.) have taken the following constructive steps as a sign of goodwill and utmost respect . . . Arrival of a very high-ranking delegation from the White House . . . they brought more than one-fifth of the spare parts for missile systems; further, some complete military, technical and intelligence data with regard to Soviet threats against Iran, and the military and political – [sic] of that government (USSR) with full details on (plan for) invasion of Iran. . .


213

(Intercept: GOODE We believe that a mix of factual and bogus information can be provided at this meeting which will satisfy their concerns about ‘good faith’.) MERCHANT (continues) I must (at this point) remind you that in 1985 there were 45,703 deaths on US highways, and that during the same year, 1301 Americans died as a result of choking on their food (gluttons). Thus, we must not put the Americans under such pressure that they end up including these four (hostages) as part of the above statistics . . . I personally and on my honor – whatever way you deem it proper – would guarantee and make commitment that . . . I shall deliver in Tehran 3000 TOW missiles . . . plus 200 Sidewinder missiles . . . Naturally (only) if you make the money available to me – not like this (last) time when you did not leave anything for me. Since I have tried to be a mediator for good, I do not wish to be a cause of misdeeds . . . Thus if you do not find either of the above-mentioned solutions advisable, return immediately the exact items . . . and we can pretend nothing happened, as if ‘no camel arrived and no camel left’ (old Persian saying) . . . I mean should not ‘put a bone inside a wound’ (another old Persian saying, meaning not to make things worse) . . . I have encountered great difficulties and many material, spiritual and prestige problems solely due to friendship, good intentions, honesty, belief and trust. . . VADM Thank you. It is directly related to your trip out there . . . Gorba either on his own or as Nir’s agent is out a lot of money that he put up front for the parts . . . Gorga [sic] has cooked up a story that if Iran could make a humanitarian gesture then the U.S. would deliver the rest of the parts and then Iran would release the rest of the hostages. Of course we have not agreed to any such plan. Nir and Gorba are in London. (The Iranian official) is enroute [sic]. I am trying to decide whether to send Ollie (Goode) and George Cave (O’N or Sam). RCM (cake-bearer) Will [the Iranian official] have the courage and influence in Tehran to be able to recommend the release of allwithout [sic] something coming from us. I tend to doubt it. He is a simple (person) way over his head and afraid of his own shadow . . . to do otherwise will lead to a thousand reoccurrences [sic] of this scenario in the months ahead as they see that we really can be strung out. GOODE It is entirely possible that if nothing is received (the Iranian official) will be killed by his opponents in Tehran. (Gorba) will be killed by his creditors. NIR The radical group (in Tehran) was the group that could deliver . . . there are serious struggles now within the Iran power groups. Three

214


leaders share the view that we should go ahead but each wants to prove his own toughness. GOODE Three long meetings . . . with Iranian gp visiting Brussels . . . Our side included me – true name – Abe (Hakim, Copp’s business partner) in true name, and (Iranian expatriate) our agent . . . (The Relative of a powerful Iranian politician) is very sharp, well educated youngman . . . I told them all things negotiable if we can clear the hostage matter quickly . . . (The Relative) knows all about (Iranian official), Gorba, Israeli connection, and this gps financial greed. Gorba was nastily classified as a crook . . . My judgment is that we have opened up new and probably much better channel into Iran. RELATIVE Iranians were trying to buy TOWs in Madrid at a cost of $13,000 each. COPP A big steal. GOODE Have now undertaken to have Casey (Bill) raise same w/JMP (VADM) tomorrow at thr weekly mtg. The things one must do to get action . . . The basic problem, as you know, is that we dither so long on these things that by the time we’re ready to go to bat, the rules have changed again. I agree w/yr assessment that the next mtg in Tango (cover name for Tehran) is unlikely to be for some time . . . We have told Nir that you and RR (company chief) are very concerned about the two new hostages. . . (From The Tower Commission Report: New York Times special with Bantam Books, 1987: excerpted, in sequence, from pages 351–61, 363, 365–6, 373–4, 382, 385, 387, 392–3, 396, 410. ‘Intercepts’ from pages 135; 262, 203, 206; 428, 404; 417).

Story of O Remember the story of O? Her lover one day takes O to a nearby château. He tells her that she is to be available to anyone, even the valets, who desire her. Because O loves him, she agrees. Further, she will be flogged every day; and for the least infringement of rules she will be even more savagely punished. Humiliated and suffering, at the disposal of men whose faces she is not allowed to see, O loves her lover all the more. O returns to her lover’s house. He introduces her to his half-brother, an English aristocrat. O submits to the strange love and the brutality of the Englishman, that ‘stern master’ which her lover could not bring himself to be. At the same time O pursues a model, Jacqueline, at the agency where she works. The Englishman urges O to seduce Jacqueline and thus lure her


215

to the château to become, like O, a slave to the pleasure of himself and his friends. O consents to bear the rings and the insignia of the Englishman on her lower lips and is branded with his mark. O’s lover has now fallen for Jacqueline, who accepts him, but without submission or passion. One day O ‘committed an error’ and her friend informs the Englishman. O, naked, is made to wear an owl’s mask of tawny feathers, which fits her perfectly. She appears like an Egyptian statue, or primitive goddess. Chained like a dog from the rings in her body she is paraded before a monstrous ‘Commander’. Later, after elegant revellers have regarded her, O is possessed by the Commander and the Englishman in turn. The story ends in this way. The final chapter, the author tells us, has been suppressed. O returned to the château, where she was abandoned by the Englishman. There exists a second ending, according to which O, seeing that the Englishman was about to leave her, said she would prefer to die. ‘Sir Stephen gave her his consent.’ This enigmatic tale, as fascinating as it is horrifying, can be readily understood as an allegory of the subjection of woman. The tortures and indignities that women have experienced throughout the centuries are only too well known. Compelled to play a role of man’s devising, women of the gentry and nobility in China had their feet painfully bound since childhood; in India widows were thrown on their husbands’ funeral pyres; and in Europe, as late as last century, wives were subordinate to their husbands, socially, economically, and legally. The severity of the obligations imposed on women by men has been matched only by the obedient acceptance of their servility by women. This is one way of understanding the story of O. I shall come back to it later. It could also be argued that the story of O is a religious allegory. Suffering, flagellation, dedication and renunciation are, or have been, prominent features of religious life. Indeed, there are a number of passages in the story that refer explicitly to the religious experience. The implicit evidence is even more impressive. How else can we interpret passages like these? Her lover tells O that the harsh treatment she receives is not just to make her suffer, ‘but make you feel, through this suffering, that you are not free but fettered, and to teach you that you are totally dedicated to something outside yourself’. Again we are told that beneath the hands, the sexes that defiled her, the whips that rent her, O lost herself in a delirious absence from herself which restored her to love and, perhaps, brought her to the edge of death. One further passage is as applicable to the allegory of women’s subjection as it is to the religious mystery and passion. Her lover tells O that

216


she should not think she is now free, with one exception, and this is that she is free not to love him any longer, and to leave him immediately. But if she does love him, then she is in no way free. O has consented to obey the will of another and in that consent, which she is always free to renounce, finds fulfilment. This suggests a third allegory: the allegory of politics, with its concepts of authority and obedience, freedom and consent. O stands for (submission to) Order, the precondition, so it has been argued, for the realisation of other values. Without a grounding of stability and security, and hence a reasonable expectation that conditions will continue as they are, it is impossible to ensure either democracy, or liberty, or justice, or welfare. Order in this sense acquires an almost mystical authority. Order is the foundation, the rock on which all else is built. Therefore we should submit – willingly submit – to the demands of order if we are to find fulfilment in society. Order is a ‘stern master’. Infringement of the rules, however trivial they may seem, deserves punishment; for without effective sanctions order cannot be sustained. (O, in the end, made the supreme sacrifice. That, perhaps, is the supreme allegory of the story of O: like Kafka’s The Trial, it is an allegory of the human condition, from whose ‘arbitrary’ sentence no one escapes.) And yet Order is challenged in the story of O. Jacqueline (or J for short) does not submit to O’s former lover. She makes love but retains her ‘coldness’, her independence. Although O shudders (but is later happy) at the thought of the tortures awaiting J, whom she is to recruit to serve the guests at the château, we are not told if J ever did go to the château. We can assume that she did not. If O stands for Order in the allegory of politics why not let J represent Justice? J refuses to accept the fate of O, resists enticement, rebels against subjection. Taking up the feminist allegory once more, it is precisely the struggle for justice, for equal rights, for an end to discrimination, that has characterised the women’s movement from the days of the suffragettes on. It is a sad commentary on our society that reason alone could not persuade those in authority to recognise the justice of the feminist cause. Instead, it required from women a determined struggle; withstanding scorn, ridicule and abuse, the violation of laws, imprisonment and even death, before the movement could prevail. Here we find the cause of justice diametrically opposed to the demands of order. The dialectic of order and justice characterises both modern and traditional politics. It is no less a feature of international politics: the ‘Anarchical Society’ of Hedley Bull’s major work, subtitled ‘a study of order in world politics’. His conclusion, nevertheless, is that justice, in any of


217

its forms, can only be realised in the context of order. To pursue world justice in the context of the existing ‘anarchical’ society is to enter into conflict with the very devices through which order is sustained. He goes so far as to assert that ‘in a situation in which there is no agreement as to what human rights are or in what order of priorities they should be arranged, the result could only be to undermine world order’. (I would assert, to the contrary, that there is agreement on basic human rights, codified in international conventions.) In any case, Bull’s argument is a counsel of cynicism – or despair. To follow his advice, there would be no point in pursuing justice of any kind – since there is unlikely to be general agreement. My own approach can be seen in the allegory that began this piece. The story of O is the fate of an individual (all individuals) seduced by authority and subjected to violence (war or ‘structural’ violence) who yet comes, not just to accept her fate, but to find fulfilment in it: a triumph of socialisation, the power of order! Here we have an illustration of what Gramsci calls ‘hegemony’: the way in which the dominant ideas of society, expressing the interests, it is true, of the economically powerful, but also transcending those interests, have become accepted even by the subordinate classes and have gained their consent. There is a dialectical relationship, however, between domination (force) and hegemony (consent). Even where hegemony is exercised, the ‘apparatus of state coercive power’ enforces discipline on groups which do not consent; and it is ready to act on the whole of society at moments of crisis for the state, when spontaneous consent has failed. It is this ‘dual perspective’ of force (underlying order) and law (reasonable rules of conduct to which citizens consent) that is symbolised for Machiavelli, and then Gramsci, by the Centaur, half animal and half human. (O, too, in the end was symbolically transformed.) Force/order and law/consent: or in Hedley Bull’s terms the relationship between states’ rights and human rights. But while Bull allows the balance to be tilted pragmatically by the merits of the particular case, Gramsci takes a more socially-oriented stance. He considers domination to be derived from the primitiveness or immaturity of the social structure, with a weak civil society, while hegemony by contrast arises on the basis of civil complexity and advanced culturalhistorical development. Gramsci draws a remarkable distinction between social groups, classes and institutions in the advanced countries of the West, where consent is possible, and the primitive state of society in the ‘East’ (as in Tsarist Russia) where autocracy ruled and could only be overthrown by force.

218


But even in countries where hegemony prevails, establishing a consensual order, Gramsci argues that an ‘alternative hegemony’ can and should be created, which more truly represents and expresses the interests and ideals of the subordinate classes. Thus, their allegiance can be won over from the ‘old order’ to the new ‘just society’ (Réage, 1965; Bull, 1977; Gramsci, 1971).

On reflection To consider the state as a juridical entity, expressed in the concept of sovereignty, is inadequate. It gives rise to the abstract state of the ‘system of states’ of conventional theory. The latter is doubly deficient. It dismisses or ignores the fundamental relationship between economic organisation, political power and civil society that constitutes ‘domestic structure’; and by restricting the scope of enquiry to the juridical, or at most the political, character of the state, it fails to integrate domestic structures and systemic constraints in a comprehensive theory. This double deficiency – for the inadequacy of domestic analysis devalues the international conspectus – results in the further debasement of the common currency of peace, deterrence, anti-terrorism, balance of power and order: concepts that are taken for granted, assumed, ‘felt’ to be right and proper as part of a well-established structure of thought. If international relations is a suitable case for treatment – for analysis – so, too, are the concepts from which theory is formed. For example, there was and still is a real – but unspoken – contradiction to deterrence. Nuclear weapons must at some stage be used – the enemy must believe they will be used – so that they need not be used. How long the world can survive these frightful conditions of bluff/ threat in an age of overkill is a nice question. There is no contradiction with regard to terrorism. Terrorism is horrifying: the more we (the public) are horrified, the more terrorists achieve their purpose, and the more terrorism will be carried out . . . Terrorism is thus both myth and reality. Acts of terror forcibly remind us of what we do not want to be reminded of: of Palestine, Islamic extremism, the context of ‘friendly’ despotic governments. Such problems are painful, because the solution is not without pain. But the more we try to avoid these problems, the more terrorism forces us to be aware of them. This is not the establishment view of terrorism which, focusing on the pain and misery of the act, obscures the purposes of the act and the context in which it occurs. Terrorism – and this aspect, too, tends to be unspoken – proclaims the ugliness of the ‘real world’ where the use of reason and persuasion is not


219

always effective in remedying grievances. Then other means come to be used. Machiavelli’s advice to the Prince, we recall, was that observance of ‘law’ was preferable to the use of force; but as the first may prove inadequate, ‘one must needs have recourse to the second’. A Prince must know how to act according to the nature of both, for he cannot survive otherwise. Terrorism belongs to the real world of power, although it may be the power of the desperate or the fanatic. But if a moral calculus is applied to the response of states, as I believe it should, no less should it apply to the acts of individuals. It must apply even to the citizens of a repressive state, where no ‘alternative’ means of redress – either through the courts, the media or political parties – are available. The calculus is that of ‘proportionality’: the means to attain a desirable end should not be grossly disproportionate to that end. As in the question of nuclear war – the supreme act of terrorism – ‘what injury or injustice would be so great that it would be reasonable to avert it in such a way [that is, by war] and at such a cost?’ – Church of England working party, The Church and the Bomb. Hence my conclusion: the state of terrorism, including the terrorist state, cannot be restrained without a proper balance of power on the one hand, and a just order on the other. But how can the powers be ‘balanced’ without first weighing all the components of power? And what else is ‘order’ – to paraphrase Saint Augustine – than the harmonious disposition of the parts to the whole? In both cases the task is first that of analysis – breaking down the subject of analysis into its component parts – and, second, of recombining the parts into a comprehensive whole. The investigation of order is the order of investigation; and the power of explanation is the explanation of power.

Bibliography Achebe, C., Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). Adam, B., ‘Running out of Time . . .’, in M. Redclift and T. Benton (eds), Social Theory and Global Environment (London: Routledge, 1994). Albistur, M. and D. Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français (Paris: Des femmes, 1977). Allen, G.C., A Short Economic History of Modern Japan (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962). Aron, R., Peace and War, trans. A. Fox (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). Artaud, A., Le théâtre et son double (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, Chinese Paintings (2000). Asquith, P. and A. Kalland (eds), Japanese Images of Nature (Richmond: Curzon, 1997). Balzac, H., Illusions Perdues (Paris: Flammarion, 1990). Balzac, H., La Cousine Bette (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). Barbalet, J., Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Bardèche, M., (1964), cited by Philippe Berthier, Introduction to H. Balzac, Illusions Perdues (Paris: Flammarion, 1990). Bauman, Z., Le coût humain de la mondialisation, trans. from English by A. Abensour (Paris: Hachette, 1999). Beauoir, S. de, Le deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). Becker, J.-J., Crises et alternances (Paris: Seuil, 1998). Bendelow, G. and S. Williams (eds), Emotions in Social Life (London: Routledge, 1998). Borges, J.L., Labyrinths, ed. D.A. Yates and J.E. Irby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). Borges, J.L., The Book of Imaginary Beings, trans. N.T. di Giovani (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). Bourdieu, P., Méditations pascaliennes (Paris: Seuil, 1997). Bourdieu, P., La domination masculine (Paris: Seuil, 1998). Bowra, C.M., Landmarks in Greek Literature (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1968). Bracher, K.D., The German Dictatorship, trans. Jean Steinberg (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Bull, H., The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977). Bullock, A., Hitler: a Study in Tyranny (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Bunnag, T., The Provincial Administration of Siam (London: Oxford University Press, 1978). Calvino, I., If on a Winter’s Night, trans. William Weaver (London: Picador, 1982). Camus, A., Le Mythe de Sisyphe (Paris: Gallimard, 1942). Castells, M., ‘Information Technology and Global Capitalism’, in W. Hutton and A. Giddens (eds), On the Edge (London: Vintage, 2001). Chen, A., Histoire de la pensée chinoise (Paris: Seuil, 1997). Clausewitz, C. von, On War, ed. Anatol Rapoport (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). 220

Bibliography

221

Cochran, T.G. and W. Miller, The Age of Enterprise (New York: Macmillan, 1947). Commoner, B., The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Knopf, 1971). Conrad, J., Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). Cromer, Earl of (Baring), Modern Egypt (London: Macmillan, 1908). Crossley, N., ‘Emotion and Communicative Action’, in G. Bendelow and S. Williams (eds), Emotions in Social Life (London: Routledge, 1998). Cudworth, E., Environment and Society (London: Routledge, 2003). Dahrendorf, R., Society and Democracy in Germany (New York: Anchor Books, 1969). DeLillo, D., Underworld (London: Picador, 1999). Doneys, P., ‘. . .Women’s Groups’ in Duncan McCargo (ed.), Reforming Thai Politics (Copenhagen: NIAS, 2002). Dostoevsky, F., ‘Memoirs from a Dark Cellar’ and ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, from A Gentle Creature, trans. David Magarshack (London: John Lehman, 1950). Drabble, M. (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Ellsberg, D., ‘The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine’, Public Policy (Spring 1971). Elster, J., Political Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Elster, J., Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999; paperback, 2000). Eulau, H., The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics (New York: Random House, 1967). Fanon, F., The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Faulkner, H.U., American Economic History (New York: Harper, 1960). Fischer, W., ‘Impact of Globalization on European Economic and Social Institutions’, Wilson Center European Alumni conference, Sagaro (15–17 September 2000). Fishel, W., ‘Vietnam’s Democratic One-Man Rule’, in E. Gettleman (ed.), Viet Nam (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1965). Foucault, M., Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980). Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1979). Fowles, J., The Magus (New York: Vintage, 1997). Fraisse, G., Les deux gouvernements: la famille et la Cité (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954). Freud, S., Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961). Freud, S., Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1974). Freund, P., ‘Social Performances and their Discontents’, in G. Bendelow and S. Williams (eds), Emotions in Social Life (London: Routledge, 1998). Fromm, E., The Fear of Freedom (London: Art Paperbacks, 1948). Galbraith, J.K., American Capitalism (New York: New American Library, 1952). Galbraith, J.K., The New Industrial State (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). Garcia Marquez, G., One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (London: Picador, 1978). Garcia Marquez, G., Living to Tell the Tale, trans. Edith Grossman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004).

222


Gaspard, F., A. Le Gall and C. Servan-Schreiber, Au pouvoir citoyennes! (Paris: Seuil, 1992). Geertz, C., The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Gelb, L., ‘Vietnam: the System Worked’, Foreign Policy (Summer 1971). Gelb, L., The Irony of Vietnam (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1979). Gettleman, E. (ed.), Viet Nam (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1965). Gide, A., Dostoevsky, trans. c/o Dent (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1967). Girling, J., People’s War (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969). Girling, J., America and the Third World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). Girling, J., Thailand: Society and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). Girling, J., Capital and Power (Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm, 1987). Girling, J., Myths and Politics in Western Societies (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993). Girling, J., Interpreting Development (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1996). Girling, J., Corruption, Capitalism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 1997). Girling, J., Social Movements and Symbolic Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). Girling, J. (ed.), Human Rights in the Asia-Pacific Region (Canberra: Dept. International Relations, Australian National University, 1991). Goethe, J., Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor, 1961). Goldberg, S.L., The Classical Temper: a Study of James Joyce’s Ulysses (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961). Gramsci, A., Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Grass, G., The Tin Drum, trans. R. Manheim (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). ‘Greenhouse Effect: Climatic Change and Ecosystems’, 1985 report, Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, Backgrounder (March 1989). Guigou, E., Etre femme en politique (Paris: Plon, 1997). Gurr, T., Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). Halberstam, D., The Making of a Quagmire (London: Bodley Head, 1965). Harrod, R., The Life of John Maynard Keynes (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1972). Hewison, K., Bankers and Bureaucrats (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian monographs, 1989). Hibbett, H.S., ‘Natsume Soseki and the Psychological Novel’, in D.H. Shively (ed.), Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Hitler, A., Mein Kampf (Munich: Zentralverlag des NSDAP, 1936 ed.), trans. R. Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). Hochhuth, R., Soldiers, trans. R.D. MacDonald (New York: Grove Press, 1968). Hudson, R. (ed.), Coleridge among the Lakes and Mountains (London: Folio Society, 1991). Hutton, W. and A. Giddens (eds), On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism (London: Vintage, 2001). Issawi, C., Egypt: an Economic and Social Analysis (London: RIIA, 1947). Jacobs, M., ‘Towards an Institutional Environmental Economics’, in M. Redclift and T. Benton (eds), Social Theory and Global Environment (London: Routledge, 1994). Jameson, F., The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981). Janouch, G., Conversations with Kafka, intro. Hugh Haughton, trans. Goronwy Rees (London: Quartet, 1985).

Bibliography

223

Jansen, M.B., The Making of Modern Japan (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000). Jardin, A. and A.-J. Tudesq, La France des notables (Paris: Seuil, 1973). Jessua, C., Le Capitalisme (Paris: PUF, 2001). Joyce, J., Ulysses (New York: Vintage International, 1990). Joyce, J., Finnegans Wake (London: Minerva, 1992). Jünger, E., Auf den Marmorklippen (Berlin: Ullstein, 1990). Kafka, F., The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953). Kafka, F., The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957). Kafka, F., America, trans. Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Kahin, G., Intervention: How America became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1986). Katona, G., The Mass Consumption Society (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964). Kattenburg, P.M., The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1980). Kaufmann, W., Nietzsche (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). Khan, Yoshimitsu, ‘. . . in the Dual Image’, Pacific Affairs (Summer 1998). Kohn, H., The Mind of Germany (New York: Scribners, 1960). Lagercrantz, O., August Strindberg, trans. Anselm Hollo (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1984). Landes, D.S., Bankers and Pashas (London: Heinemann, 1958). Leavis, F.R., The Common Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1962). Lenin, V., ‘Left-wing’ Communism: an Infantile Disorder (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950). Levi, P., If this is a Man, trans. Stuart Wolf (London: Sphere Books, 1979). Liberatore, A., ‘Facing Global Warming’, in M. Redclift and T. Benton (eds), Social Theory and Global Environment (London: Routledge, 1994). Lyon, M., ‘The Limitations of Cultural Constructionism in the Study of Emotion’, in G. Bendelow and S. Williams (eds), Emotions in Social Life (London: Routledge, 1998). Machiavelli, N., The Prince [1513], trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961). Marr, D., Vietnamese Tradition on Trial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Marx, K. and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848], in David Fernbach (ed.), The Revolutions of 1848 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Matthias, P., The First Industrial Nation (London: Methuen, 1969). Meinecke, F., The German Catastrophe, trans. Sydney Fay (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950). Millikan, M.F. and D.L.M. Blackmer (eds), The Emerging Nations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961). Moore, C.A. (ed.), The Japanese Mind: Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and Culture (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1973). Morley, J., The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London: Macmillan, 1903). Morley, W. (ed.), Driven by Growth: Political Change in the Asia-Pacific Region (New York: M.E. Sharpe and Columbia University Press, 1993). Napier, S.J., ‘Oe Kenzaburo and the Search for the Sublime’, in Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel (eds), Oe and Beyond (Honolulu: Hawai University Press, 1999). Neher, C.D., Southeast Asia in the New International Era (Boulder: Westview, 1991).

224


Neidjie, B., Story about Feeling, ed. Keith Taylor (Kimberley, Australia: Magabala Books, 1989). Nietzsche, F., Zur Genealogie der Moral, trans. F. Golffing, The Genealogy of Morals (New York: Anchor Books, 1956). Nietzsche, F., Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966). Nietzsche, F., Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollindale (New York: Vintage, 1968). Oe Kenzaburo, The Silent Cry, trans. John Baster (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1981). Oe Kenzaburo, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness [Four short novels], trans. John Nathan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1989). Oe Kenzaburo, Nostalgies et autres labyrinthes, conversations with A. Siganos and P. Forest (Paris: Cécile Defaut, 2005). Outhwaite, W., Habermas: a Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). Peake, C.H., James Joyce: Citizen and Artist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977). Pentagon Papers, The Senator Gravel edn (Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1971). Perkin, H., The Origins of Modern English Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). Picq, F., ‘Le féminisme . . .’, Cités 9 (Paris, 2002). Polanyi, K., The Great Transformation, 1944 (London: retitled by Gollancz, Origins of Our Time, 1945). Réage, P., Story of O, trans. Sabine d’Estrée (New York: Grove Press, 1965). Redclift, M. and T. Benton (eds), Social Theory and Global Environment (London: Routledge, 1994). Reischauer, E.O. and A.M. Craig, Japan: Tradition and Transformation (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1978). Ricoeur, P., Fallible Man: Philosophy of the Will, trans. Charles Kebley (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965). Ricoeur, P., The Rule of Metaphor, trans. R. Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). Riggs, F., Thailand: the Modernization of a Bureaucratic Polity (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 1966). Robinson, R. and J. Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: the Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961). Robinson, R. and J. Gallagher, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review (August 1953). Rosenau, J., The Scientific Study of Foreign Policy ( New York: Free Press, 1971). Rosenberg, A., Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1937 edn). Roy, A., The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1998). Rushdie, S., Midnight’s Children (London: Picador, 1982). Rushdie, S., Shame (London: Picador, 1984). Said, E., Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). Sansom, G.B., Japan: a Short Cultural History (London: Cresset, 1952). Scheff, T., Emotions, the Social Bond, and Human Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Schelling, T., Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). Schlesinger, A., The Bitter Heritage (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1968).

Bibliography

225

Schoenbaum, D., Hitler’s Social Revolution (New York: Norton, 1980). Schumpeter, J.A., Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1947). Schurrmann, F. and O. Schell (eds), Communist China (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Seager, J., Atlas of Women (London: The Women’s Press, 2003). Simon, W.M. (ed.), Germany in the Age of Bismarck (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968). Smith, A., The Wealth of Nations, ed. A. Skinner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Smith, A., The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). Soviak, E., ‘. . . the Iwakura Embassy’, in D.H. Shively (ed.), Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971; paperback, 1976). Soyinka, W., The Interpreters (London: Deutsch, 1996). Steiner, G., In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes towards the Re-definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1971). Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir [1830]. Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme [1839]. Strindberg, A., The Father and Miss Julie, intro. and trans. Michael Meyer (London: Methuen, 1996). Storry, R., A History of Modern Japan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, rev. edn 1965). Sunkel, O., ‘Transnational Capitalism’, in Social and Economic Studies (March 1973). Sze Mai-mai, The Way of Chinese Painting (New York: Vintage, 1959). Tanizaki J., Naomi, trans. Anthony Chambers (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986). Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954). Tocqueville, A. de, De la démocratie en Amérique [1835–40], in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). Tolstoy, L., War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (London: Macmillan and Oxford University Press, 1943). Touraine, A., Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble? (Paris: Fayard, 1997). Touraine, A., Comment sortir du libéralisme? (Paris: Fayard, 1999). Tower Commission Report (New York: New York Times with Bantam Books, 1987). Turnell, M., The Novel in France (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1962). Turner, J. and J. Stets, The Sociology of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Vargas Llosa, M., The War of the End of the World, trans. c/o Farrar, Strauss & Giroux (London: Faber & Faber, 1986). Vargas Llosa, M., Death in the Andes (London: Faber & Faber, 1997). Volcker, P.A., ‘The Sea of Global Finance’, in W. Hutton and A. Giddens (eds), On The Edge (London: Vintage, 2001). Waltz, K., Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979). Weber, M., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948). Williams, S., Emotion and Social Theory (London: Sage, 2001). Willetts, W., Chinese Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958). Wordsworth, W., The Prelude [1805], ed. E. De Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

Index

Achebe, C., 71–7: Things Fall Apart, 71–7 Adam, B., 159 administration, see bureaucracy affect, see emotion Afghanistan, 179–80, 205 Africa, 62–4, 67, 77, 79, 82, 89, 137, 175, 178, 180, 184, 204 Aids, 66–7, 138, 176, 192, 203 Albistur, M., 186 Algeria, 45, 47, 62, 137, 176–7, 181 Allen, G., 33–4, 36, 38 America, see United States of America Amnesty International, 179 Amsterdam, 199 ancien régime, 7 Angola, 62, 204 anthropology, 10, 16, 23 Arab, 82, 142, 177, 180–1 Arabi, Colonel, 83, 85–6 Argy, F., 59 Aristophanes, 206 Armogathe, D., 186 Artaud, A., 4 Asia, 82, 87–9, 137–8, 141, 175–6, 182 Asquith, P., 147 Athens, 9, 206 Augustine, Saint, 219 Australia, 59, 148, 207–10 Austria, 114 automobile industry, 154–5, 163 Bach, J.S., 29 Balzac, xi, 12, 17, 44–51, 54, 59: La Cousine Bette, 44–9; Illusions perdues, 49 Bangladesh, 177 Barbalet, J., 21 Bardèche, M., 49 Baring, see Cromer Bao Dai, 91 Bauman, Z., 62–3 Beauvoir, S., 185, 187

Becker, J.-J., 56 Bell, Bishop of Chichester, 196–200 Belpomme, D., 163 Benton, T., 159, 161 Biafra, see Nigeria Bismarck, O., 13, 18–19, 106–7, 110, 114 Blackett, P., 197 Blackmer, D., 91 Blair, T., 66 Blake, W., 19, 21 Bolshevism, see Soviet Union Bond, E., 4 Borges, J., 5 Bourdieu, P., 174, 185 Bowra, M., xi, 4 Boyd, W., 16 Bracher, K., 109, 111, 115–18 Brazil, 64, 67, 184 Britain, 7, 8, 11, 19, 34, 52, 54, 55, 66, 78–9, 82, 83–8, 91, 115, 128, 148–9, 158, 162, 171, 193–4, 199 Brod, M., 134 Buddhism, 5, 7, 13, 28, 32, 88, 147 Bull, H., 216–18 Bullock, A., 109, 115–17 Bundy, McG., 94 Bundy, W., 88–9 bureaucracy, 1–2, 17, 23, 34, 39, 40–1, 45, 52, 86, 91, 106, 110, 115, 119–20, 123–4, 128, 131, 140, 182, 196 Bush, G.W., 66–7, 91, 98, 135–6, 138–9, 149, 151–2, 193 Bushido, 9 Calvino, I., 5 Cambodia, 208 Camus, A., 203–4 Canada, 152 capitalism: Balzac’s insight: 44–9; conclusion: 201–2, 205, 218; 226

Index democracy: 129–30; emotional factors: 131–3; environment: 150–9, 161–3; informal empire: 84–5; irrationality: 59–61; in Japan: 3, 33–4, 38–40, 41–2; national context and global extension: 51–7; Nazis: 108; political–social nexus: 1–2, 5, 16, 20; science: 191–2; social implications: 61–7; system: xi, 7, 11–12, 17–18, 21, 23; women: 186–8 carbon dioxide emissions, see environment Caribbean, 67 Carter, J., 204 Casey, W., 212, 214 Castells, M., 58, 62 Chang Tso-lin, 36 change (social change), 1, 7, 13, 15, 20, 22, 33, 39, 40, 44, 60, 84, 106, 112–14, 159, 201–2 Chen, A., 2 Cheney, D., 136 Chiang Kai-shek, 96 China, Chinese, 2, 7, 10, 17, 27–8, 30, 32, 35–7, 41, 43, 55, 59, 63–4, 67, 82, 83, 91–3, 96–7, 138, 145–8, 152–3, 157, 171, 176, 183–4, 195, 204, 215 Chirac, J., 153 Christianity, 4: see also religion Churchill, W., 133–4, 196–200 CIA, 210–14 civil society, xi, 12, 15, 39, 42, 52, 54, 133–4, 140, 162, 181–2, 184, 217 class (notably rise of bourgeoisie and middle class), 6, 11, 15–16, 19, 23, 40–2, 44–5, 47, 50, 53, 55–7, 62, 64, 80–1, 106, 108, 112, 127, 139, 157, 183, 189, 205, 217–8: see also elites; workers Clausewitz, C., 18, 19, 127, 205 climate change, see environment Clinton, B., 135 Cochran, T., 55 Cohn-Bendit, D., 153 cold war, 3, 18, 38, 83, 85, 98, 191, 203 Coleridge, S., 148 Colmou, A.-M., 188 Colombia, 10

227

Commoner, B., 154–6 communism, 44, 83, 87–9, 93–5, 98, 111, 116, 140, 204, 208: see also cold war Confucius, 35 Congo (Zaire), 137 Conrad, J., 99 constructive outcomes, 1, 6, 8, 11, 13, 15, 20, 22, 51–2, 77, 91, 127, 133, 192, 201–2 contraception, 174 cooperation, 1, 3, 14, 127, 135–6 corruption, xi, 4, 15, 17, 18, 37, 41, 42, 45, 49, 52, 57, 59, 62, 77, 82–3, 136 Craig, A., see Reischauer Cromer (Baring), 85–7 Crossley, N., 21, 22 Cudworth, E., 157–9 culture, 8, 14, 21–3, 32, 40, 42–3, 62, 71, 77–8, 82, 84, 106, 109–11, 115, 131, 137, 142, 147, 150, 159, 161, 196, 217 Czech Republic, 134–5 Dahrendorf, R., 117 De Quincy, 12 Delattre, L., 192–3 Delilah, 165 DeLillo, D., 16 democracy, 16–19, 23, 51, 202: democratic deficit: 127–35; and development: 39–42; environment: 153; France: 185; Germany: 106–8, 111, 113–14; and human rights: 140–2; and Japan: 34–6; and order: 216; science: 192; Vietnam: 87, 90; women: 182–3 Denmark, 163 Depression, Great (slump), 54–5, 108, 110, 132, 134 destructive outcomes, 1, 3, 6, 8–11, 13, 15, 20, 22, 51–2, 54, 77, 127, 133, 191–2, 201–2 developing countries, see third world Diem, N., 87, 90–1, 94–5 Disraeli, B., 82 ‘domino theory’, 83–4, 89, 94, 127 Doneys, P., 182–3

228

Index

Dostoevsky, F., 138, 191, 194–5, 200 Drabble, M., 5 dreams, 5, 8, 9–10, 12, 16, 60–1, 104, 145, 147, 153, 167, 169, 171, 196, 200 Dresden, 197 Durant, Professor, 193 Durkheim, E., 157 ecology, eco-systems, see environment economy, see capitalism Edelman, B., 195 education, 33, 35, 40, 63, 86, 107, 155, 165, 171, 174–5, 181, 183, 188, 202 Egypt, 63, 83–7, 88, 91 Einstein, A., 190, 197 Eisenhower, D., 89, 204 elites, 1, 16, 18, 19, 40, 49, 55, 62, 77, 81–4, 106–7, 126, 129–30, 133, 140 Ellsberg, D., 95–7 Elster, J., 14, 15, 22–3 emotions, xi–xii, 1, 3, 5, 8–17, 19, 130–1: and capitalism: 45, 48–9, 52, 54; concerning women: 164, 169–70; conclusion: 201–2, 206; Germany: 100, 106–7, 112–13, 115–17; imperialism: 84, 127; in Japan: 27, 28, 31, 37; and nature: 145–8, 153; sociology of emotions: 20–3 Engels, F., 44 England, see Britain Enlightenment, 1–3, 32, 109, 111, 118, 193 Enron, 61 environment, xi, 3, 16, 19, 23, 39, 62, 63, 136: conclusion: 202, 204–5; degradation: 148–56, 174; governmental response: 156–63, 193; sublime in painting, poetry: 145–6 equality, 8, 15–17, 19, 42, 128, 141, 164–5, 168, 173, 180, 182, 187–8, 193, 202 Ethiopia, 204 Eulau, H., 14 Europe, 3, 5, 6, 45, 52, 56, 65, 85–6, 110, 114, 115, 117, 142, 155–6, 159–60, 188, 204, 215

existential, 1–2, 5–6, 13, 119 ExxonMobil, 151 Fanon, F., 80–3 Faulkner, H., 55 Faust, 8 feeling, see emotion feminists, see women fiction, xi–xii, 1–2, 4–5, 6, 8, 10, 13, 15, 16, 22, 201: specific insights: see Oe, Balzac (Part I: Possession); Achebe, Woyinka, Jünger, Kafka (Part II: Power); Strindberg, Roy, Hochhuth (Part III: Society) Fischer, W., 53–4 Fishel, W., 87–8, 90 Fitoussi, J.-P., 58, 60 Flam, H., 21 force, see violence Ford, President, 204 foreign policy, see international relations Foucault, M., 1, 191 Fowles, J., 5 Fox News, 139 Fraisse, G., 174 France, French, 8, 11, 15, 19, 27, 34, 45, 50, 52, 55–6, 83, 85, 91–2, 115, 118, 135, 141, 149, 153, 158, 161–3, 164–5, 185–9, 202, 207–9 freedom (liberty), 8, 17, 19, 39, 53, 82, 84, 86, 87, 100, 103, 106, 112, 128, 130, 139–42, 165, 181–2, 187, 191, 193–4, 216 Freud, S., 5–6, 7, 9, 109, 112, 186, 188 Freund, P., 21 Friends of the Earth, 139 Fromm, E., 112–13 Galbraith, J.K., 55 Gallagher, J., see Robinson Gandhi, S., 134 Garcia Marquez, G., 5, 10 Gaspard, F., 164 Geertz, C., 21 Gelb, L., 95–6 Geneva Accords, 92 Geneva Convention, 196 Génisson, C., 187

Index German Marshall Fund, 155 Germany, German, 8–10, 13, 18–19, 27, 34, 55–6, 101, 106–18, 135, 153, 158, 195–9, 206 Gettleman, M., 87, 90 Giddens, A., 53 Gide, A., 194 Gladstone, W., 85–6 global warming, see environment Godelier, M., 164 Goethe, J., 8, 110–11, 117 Goldberg, S., 5, 201 Gouges, O., 165 grace, 19, 119–20, 126–8 Gramsci, A., 130, 217–18 Grass, G., xii, 5, 10 Greece, Greek, xi, 2, 3, 4, 9, 107–8, 129 greenhouse effect, see environment Greenpeace, 159 Greens, see environment Greenspan, A., 52, 60 Guigou, E., 165 Guizot, F., 49–50 Gurr, T., 204 Habermas, J., 191 Hahn, K., 154 Halberstam, D., 95 Hamburg, 199–200 Hardenberg, K., 106 Hare, B., 150 Harris, ‘Bomber’, 198–9 Harrod, R., 67 Haughton, H., 120, 128 Havel, V., 134–5 Hewison, K., 57 Hibbett, H. 13 Hindenburg, President, 111 Hirohito, Emperor, 27, 29 Hiroshima, 197 history, 8, 10–11, 16, 22, 23, 28, 31, 109, 112–13 Hitler, A., 107–8, 110–11, 113–17, 197 Ho Chi Minh, 23, 92 Hochhuth, R., 20, 195–200: Soldiers, 195–200 Holocaust, 5, 10, 106, 117 Hulot, N., 153

229

human rights, 39, 88, 129, 135–42, 158, 175, 182, 217 humanitarian intervention, 136–8, 142: see also human rights; international relations Hutton, W., 53, 59 identity, 4, 5, 6, 8, 31, 37, 42, 107, 120, 131, 147, 189 ideology, 6–7 Igbo (Ibo) 77: see also Nigeria illusion, 5–6, 7, 20, 49, 50, 119, 127, 201, 205 imperialism, xi, 7, 9–10, 13, 17–19, 28, 35, 37, 55, 73–7, 81–5, 90, 98 India, 5, 7, 10, 55, 59, 63–4, 67, 82, 83, 134, 137–8, 153, 170–3, 176–8, 183, 204, 215 Indochina, 92 Indonesia, 39, 57–8, 89, 176, 180, 208 inspiration(al), 1, 10, 14, 127–30, 140–1, 187 intellect(ual), see rational International Labour Organisation (ILO), 67 international relations, 135–40, 203–5, 206–7, 216–19 Iran, 63, 136, 180, 204, 210–14 Iran-Contra affair, 203, 210–14: see also Nicaragua; Reagan, R. Iraq, 84, 98, 135–6, 140, 193, 204 Ireland, 137 irrationality, 1–2, 3, 52, 57–60, 109, 111, 119, 131, 165, 196, 201 Islam, 4, 5, 77, 82, 137, 140, 142, 177, 179–81, 218 Israel, 133, 137, 210, 212–14 Issawi, C., 85 Iwakura mission, 32–3 Jacobs, M., 161 Jameson, F., 13 Jansen, M., 32, 34–9 Japan, Japanese, 7, 9, 10, 13, 17, 27–39, 42–3, 52, 56–7, 147–8, 156–7, 191, 197 Jardin, A., 50

230

Index

Jessua, C., 53, 63 Jews, Jewish, Judaism, 4, 106, 108–9, 115–17, 120, 196–7: see also Holocaust Johnson, L.B., 90, 96–7 Jordan, W., 95, 179 Jospin, L., 187 Joyce, J., 1, 2, 4, 5, 201 Jünger, E., 19, 99–106, 108–9: On The Marble Cliffs, 99–105 justice, 4, 16, 51, 104, 119, 126, 128, 133, 141, 202, 216–17 Kafka, F., 19: The Castle, 119–31, 133–4, 216 Kahin, G., 89–90, 93–4, 96 Kalland, A., 147 Kant, I., 1–2, 5–6, 117, 133, 202 karma, 7 Kashmir, 137 Katona, G., 55 Kattenburg, P., 92–3, 95–6 Kaufmann, W., 108 Kennedy, J.F., 92, 94–6, 204 Kenya, 176 Kenyatta, 71 Kerala, 170–3 Keynes, J.M., 3, 67 Khader, A., 179 Khosrokhavar, F., 139 Khrushchev, N., 93 King, D., 149 Kissinger, H., 91, 204 Klaus, V., 134–5 knowledge, 6, 11–12, 13, 20, 35, 80, 117, 130, 174, 194, 200, 201–2 Kofi Annan, 137–8, 140, 176 Kohn, H., 19, 114 Kolakowski, L., 195–6 Korea, 29, 35, 39, 57 Kosovo, 137 Kouchner, B., 137 Krebs, J., 193 Kroto, H., 191–2 Kuomintang, 36 Kuwait, 181 Ky, Air Vice-Marshal, 90 Kyoto Protocol, see environment

Lagercrantz, O., 166–7 Lamchichi, A., 180 Laos, 204 Latin America, 5, 64, 89, 175 Law, 16, 18, 19, 33, 47, 49, 53, 63, 85, 102, 108, 126–8, 133–5, 141, 147, 178, 181–2, 207, 217, 219 Le Than Khoi, 92 Leavis, F.R., 3 Lebanon, 210 legitimacy, 6, 17, 18, 32, 51, 83, 85, 129–30, 138, 182 Lenin, V., 15–16, 23 Levi, P., 117 Liberatore, A., 160 Lindemann, F. (Lord Cherwell), 197–9 Locke, J., 18, 128 Louis-Philippe, 48, 50 Lowi, M., 119 Lyon, M., 21 Machiavelli, N., 217, 219 magic realism, 4–5, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 32, 49, 191 Mai-Mai Sze, 146 Maila, J., 140 Malaysia, 39, 57–8 Mali, 176, 180 Manchuria, 36 ‘manifest destiny’, 9, 131 Mao Tse-tung, 23, 96, 183 Marr, D., 92 Marti, S., 63 Marx, Marxist, 44, 82, 109, 111, 171, 186, 188 masculine domination, see women material improvement, 33, 38, 41–3, 50–1, 53–6, 63 Matthias, A., 54 McFarlane, R., 211–13 McNamara, R., 89–90, 93, 97 McNaughton, J., 88, 97 Médecins sans frontières, 67, 137 Mégie, G., 157 Meiji, 7–8, 27, 32–3, 35, 38 Meinecke, F., 109–10 Mexico, 63 Meyer, M., 166–8

Index

231

North, O., 203, 210–14 nuclear (atomic) weapons, 3, 10, 112, 136, 140, 149, 191, 195, 204, 207, 218–19

militarism, 16, 32–7, 40, 42, 110, 114, 136–7, 140, 202 Mill, J.S., 128 Miller, W., 55 Millikan, M., 91 modernisation (modernity), xi, 1, 3, 17, 27, 32–5, 42, 139 Moore, C., 37 Morley, J., 86 Morocco, 85, 180, 184 motivation, 15, 23, 33, 50–2, 58, 112, 127, 131–3, 139, 205 Mozambique, 204 Muir, E., 119, 120–7 Muslim, see Islam Mussolini, B., 130 myths, xi, 2–6, 9–10, 16, 27, 28, 77, 107–9, 113, 115–17, 120, 131–2, 165, 168, 201–3, 205, 218

Oe, K., 10–11, 17, 27–32, 37–8: The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, 27–32 Olympus, 3: see also Greece Oppenheimer, R., 197 order, social order, 6–8, 13, 17, 18, 46, 62, 86, 100, 120, 128, 131, 135, 140, 174, 202, 216–19 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 66 ‘Orientalism’, 71, 80–1, 84, 86: see also Said, E. Orwell, G., 130 Outhwaite,W., 191

Naomi, 42–3 Napier, S., 32 Napoleon, 16, 44–5, 48, 106 Nasser, 83 National Rifle Association (US), 193 nationalism, xi, 33, 36, 77, 80–2, 83, 91–2, 101, 106–14, 116–18, 131 NATO, 137 nature, 145–8: see also emotions; romantic movement Nazi, 8–10, 37, 103, 107–9, 111–12, 114–15, 117, 196–7 Neher, C., 56–7 Neidjie, B., 145 neo-liberalism, see capitalism Netherlands, 149 New Caledonia, 207–10 New Guinea, 164, 209 New Zealand, 209 Nicaragua, 204, 210 Nietzsche, F., 107–9, 112, 133, 195 Nigeria, 62; Achebe’s story, 71–7; Soyinka’s story, 77–80, 81, 83 Nixon, R., 91, 204 Nobel prize, 28, 63, 77, 191, 193, 197 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 155, 178, 192: see also Amnesty International; Friends of the Earth; Greenpeace

Pacific, 207, 209 Paillard, D., 145 Pakistan, 5, 10, 63, 137, 171, 179–80 Palestine, 137, 218 Palmerston, Lord, 85 Pappalardo, M., 150 patriarchy, see women Peake, C., 4 Pentagon Papers, 88, passim Perkin, H., 54 Perry, Commodore, 7 Peru, 10 Pew Center, 155 Philippines, 39, 57, 208 Picq, F., 186 Piot, P., 67 Poindexter, Vice-Admiral, 203, 210, 212–14 Poland, 195–6, 204 Polanyi, K., 205 politics, 3, 7, 13–15, 17–20, 23: and capitalism: 44, 49, 50–4, 57, 59, 63, 65; conclusion: 201–2, 205, 216, 218–19; democracy: 116, 119, 128–34, 141–2; environment: 150, 153, 157–9, 162–3; Germany: 106, 108; in Japan: 32, 34–5, 39, 41–2; science: 191–3; third world: 18, 77, 80–1, 84, 98; women: 164, 182–3, 188

232

Index

pollution, see environment Pope, A., 12 possession, see capitalism poverty, 37, 39, 63–6, 81, 91, 132, 134, 138, 140, 174–5, 178, 184, 202 power, 1, 5–6, 7, 9, 11–14, 16, 19: conclusion: 201–2, 205, 207, 219; environment: 148; Germany: 101–2, 104, 106, 110, 113; imperialism: 77, 81–2, 84, 87, 91; in Japan: 32–3, 40–2, 48, 62, 71; Kafka’s insights: 119–20, 126–7, 130–1, 133; superpower: 135–6; third world: 140–1; women: 177 Prussia, 106, 114; see Germany psychic energy, see emotions

Robinson, M. (human rights), 175 Robinson, R., 85–6 romantic (movement), 19, 49, 82, 99, 106–7, 113, 116, 118, 148 Roosevelt, F., 134 Rosenau, J., 205 Rosenberg, A., 115–16 Rostow, W., 96 Rotterdam, 196–7 Rousseau, J.-J., 49, 128, 165 Roy, A., 20, 170–3; The God of Small Things, 170–3 Rushdie, S., xii, 5, 10, 15 Rusk, D., 89 Russia, 16, 27, 35, 67, 91, 96, 151, 217 Rwanda, 137, 142

racism, 107–9, 112–13, 115–17 Raffarin, J.-P., 162 Randall, D., 150 rape, see women rationality, see reason Reagan, R., 204, 210–12 Réage, P., 218; Story of O, 214–18 reason (rationality), xi, 1–5, 8–14, 16, 22–3: capitalism: 48, 50–1, 58; conclusion: 203, 205, 216, 218–19; environment: 145; Germany: 107, 109, 111–12, 116; in Japan: 27, 37; politics: 119, 127, 130–1, 135; science: 191; women: 165 Redclift, M., 159, 161 reform, 17, 38, 39, 42, 63, 83, 86, 87–8, 95, 107, 133, 159–60, 181–3, 185 Reischauer, E., and Craig, A., 7, 32, 33–5, 37 religion, 3, 4, 6, 23, 33, 44, 48, 62, 71, 74–6, 77, 79–80, 91, 108, 137, 139, 142, 157, 178–81, 194–5, 215, 219; see also Buddhism; Islam repression, 17–18, 20, 41, 62, 77, 82–3, 88, 112, 126, 133, 137–8, 140, 174, 202, 219 responsibility, 3–4, 16, 62, 86, 206 revolution, 15, 16, 18, 22, 23, 44, 83, 110, 118, 185, 187 Ricoeur, P., xii, 6, 133 Ridgeway, C., 20 Rio summit, 156

Sachs, J., 64 Saddam Hussein, 135–6, 204 Said, E., 71, 81–2, 84, 86 Salisbury, Lord, 86 Samson, 165 Samurai, 32–3 Sandinistas, see Nicaragua Sansom, G., 32 Sarit, T., 41 Saudi Arabia, 181 Scheff, T., 21–2 Schlesinger, A., 95–6 Schumpeter, J., 13, 51–4, 132 Schwartz, P., 150 science, 17, 20, 27, 42, 158, 160, 190–5, 206–7 Seager, J., 175, 177, 184 security, 13, 17, 83–5, 87–90, 94, 112, 127, 136, 158, 161, 195, 204, 209, 216 Sen, A., 63 Senegal, 180 Shogun, 27, 33 Sieyès, abbé, 164 Simon, W., 114 Singapore, 57 Smith, A., 53, 205 social sciences, xi–xii, 1, 11, 91, 191 socialism, social democracy, 108, 110–11, 116, 128–9, 133, 153, 187 society, vision and division, xi–xii, 2, 6: capitalism: 44, 47, 49–50, 61, 63, 67, 131–2; conclusion: 200, 201–2,

Index 206, 216–17; division resulting from hierarchical authority, economic penetration, power politics: 12, 17, 20, 21–2, 23, 33; environment: 139–40; Germany: 112, 118; Japan: 33, 40; science: 191–5; third world: 80, 82, 91–2; vision of (positive) emotion: 3, 5, 8, 9, 14, 15, 22; and values: 19, 134–5, 140–2, 153, 158; women: 165, 185 sociology, 8, 82, 114, 117, 157: sociology of emotions: 20–3 Solidarity, see Poland South Africa, 66, 137, 176 Southeast Asia, 39–40, 87, 89, 93–4, 176, 182, 204 Soviak, E., 32–3 Soviet Union, 83, 91–3, 96, 106, 195–6, 204, 212 Soyinka, W., 77–80: The Interpreters, 77–80 Spain, 134 specificity, 18, 84 Srebrenica, 137 Stalin, J., 195 state, in social and historical context, 8, 17, 34, 37, 39, 45, 49, 52, 53, 62, 63, 106–7, 109–12, 115, 118, 120, 132, 137–8, 140, 149, 157, 162, 185, 217–19 Steiner, G., 142 Stendhal, 12 Stern, N., 65–6 Stets, J., 20–1 Storry, R., 7, 34–7 Strindberg, A., 20, 165–70: The Father, 166–7; Miss Julie, 168–70 structural conditions, 6, 8, 11–13, 15, 21, 127, 131, 201 Suez, 84–5 Sunkel, O., 55 Sweden, 77, 163 Sugawara no Michizane, 148 symbols, xi, 4, 9, 13, 146, 189 Taiwan, 39, 57 Tanizaki, J., 42–3, 148: see also Naomi ‘Tao’ (the ‘Way’), 145–6 Taylor, M., 88–90, 93–5

233

terror (terrorism), 18, 59, 62, 65, 85, 98, 100, 116, 120, 136, 138–40, 149–50, 197, 210, 218–19 Thailand, 39–42, 56–8, 182–4 Thatcher, M., 61, 133 theatre, 4, 22, 166–70, 195–200 theory, 1, 8, 14–20, 21, 205, 218–19 Thiers, A., 50 Thieu, General, 90 third world, 18, 51–2, 56, 58–9, 61–7, 81–2, 87, 140–1, 150, 156–7, 174–84, 186, 193, 205 Thucydides, 9 Time-Warner, 59–60 Tizard, 197 tobacco industry, 153–4 Tocqueville, A., 193 Tokyo, 197 Tolstoy, L., 14, 16 Topfer, K., 157 Toronto conference, 160 Touraine, A., 185 Tower commission, 214 trauma, 1, 9, 10, 14: see also change ‘trilogy of passions’, 1–2, 5, 6, 8, 133, 202 Truman, H., 91, 98, 204 Tubiana, L., 155 Tudesq, A.-J., 50 Tunisia, 180 Turkey, 180–1, 184 Turnell, M., xi, 12 Turner, J., 20–1 Ukraine, 16 Unesco, 175 Unicef, 65 United Nations (UN), 28, 64, 66–7, 135, 137–8, 140, 149, 151, 157, 174, 176–7, 181, 210 United States of America (USA), xi, 8, 9, 17, 52, 54–6, 59, 64–7, 83–5, 128, 131–6, 139–41, 149, 151–6, 188, 195, 203–5, 208, 210–14: see also Vietnam war ‘untouchable’ (India), 172–3 values, 1–7, 9, 14, 17, 23, 30, 32, 33: and capitalism: 48–9, 51, 53–4, 62, 132;

234

Index

conclusion: 201–2, 203, 216; democracy: 134–6; environment: 145–8; human rights: 140–2; politics: 125, 128–31, 139; science: 193–4, 199; in third world: 71, 82–3, 84, 87 Vargas Llosa, M., 10 Vichit-Vadakan, J., 183 Viet Cong (National Liberation Front), 88–9, 93 Viet Minh, 91 Vietnam, 39, 83–4, 136, 204: see also Vietnam war Vietnam, north (Democratic Republic of Vietnam), 89–94, 96–7 Vietnam war, US involvement: internal context, 90–3; international context, 93–5; interventionism, 95–8, 204–5; push/pull factors, 87–90 violence, xi, 3, 18, 27, 31, 36–7, 40: against women: 174, 177–9; international relations: 120, 135, 137, 139, 205, 217–19; origins of Nazi power: 99–118; in third world: 72, 77, 85 Vo Nguyen Giap, 92 Volcker, P., 58–9 Voltaire, F., 49, 142 war, 1, 7, 9, 16, 18–21, 27, 28, 30, 31, 44, 54–5, 107–8, 111–12, 117–18, 127, 131, 135–9, 150, 171, 174–5, 177, 195–202, 205, 217

Weber, M., 2–3, 5, 8, 23, 114, 128, 132 Weimar republic, 107, 111, 114, 118 welfare, 52, 61, 132–3, 216 Willetts, W., 146 Williams, S., 21, 22 Wolfensohn, J., 65 Wolpert, L., 194 women, xi, 16, 19–20, 23, 63, 66, 142, 157: Arundhati Roy’s tragic story, 170–3; discrimination: 164–5, 180, 186–8; factors for progress: 181–4, 185–9; ‘honour’ killings: 178–9; ill-health: 175–6; illiteracy: 175, 178, 183; inequality: 173–4, 202; mutilation: 178; poverty: 175; punishment: 168, 172–3, 178, 202, 215; Strindberg’s theatre: 66–70; women’s movement: 206, 216 Wordsworth, W., 12, 147 workers, 6, 9, 17, 19, 20, 38, 40, 52–4, 59, 65, 88, 108, 132, 162, 174, 181–2, 186–8, 197–8, 200, 204, 219 World Bank, 65–6 world order, see international relations World Trade Organisation, 66–7 Yamagata, A., 35 yin/yang, 2, 146–7 Yoruba, 77: see also Nigeria Zaibatsu, 34, 38 Zen Buddhism, 32

Emotion and Reason in Social Change: Insights from Fiction

Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior

Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior

Social Structure and Emotion

War and Reconciliation: Reason and Emotion in Conflict Resolution

Emotion, Social Relationships, and Health

Structures of Social Action (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Gender and Emotion: Social Psychological Perspectives (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Nursing and Social Change

Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Social Change and Modernity

Self and Social Change

Discourse and social change

Young People and Social Change (Sociology and Social Change)

Social Defense: Social Change

Social Issues in Television Fiction

Ethics and the Market: Insights from Social Economics (Advances in Social Economics)

Communicating Emotion: Social, Moral, and Cultural Processes

Emotions and Multilingualism (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Volume 26 (Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change)

Social Justice and the Experience of Emotion

Social Change and Health in Sweden

Emotion in Memory and Development: Biological, Cognitive, and Social Considerations

Complexity Perspectives in Innovation and Social Change

Leading change in health and social care

Longevity and Social Change in Australia

Emotions and Multilingualism (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Identity and Emotion: Development Through Self-Organization (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Islam, Gender, and Social Change

Religion, Ethnicity and Social Change

Emotion and Reason in Social Change: Insights from Fiction

Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior

Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior

Social Structure and Emotion

War and Reconciliation: Reason and Emotion in Conflict Resolution

Emotion, Social Relationships, and Health

Structures of Social Action (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Gender and Emotion: Social Psychological Perspectives (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Nursing and Social Change

Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Social Change and Modernity

Self and Social Change

Discourse and social change

Young People and Social Change (Sociology and Social Change)

Social Defense: Social Change

Social Issues in Television Fiction

Ethics and the Market: Insights from Social Economics (Advances in Social Economics)

Communicating Emotion: Social, Moral, and Cultural Processes

Emotions and Multilingualism (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Volume 26 (Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change)

Social Justice and the Experience of Emotion

Social Change and Health in Sweden

Emotion in Memory and Development: Biological, Cognitive, and Social Considerations

Complexity Perspectives in Innovation and Social Change

Leading change in health and social care

Longevity and Social Change in Australia

Emotions and Multilingualism (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Identity and Emotion: Development Through Self-Organization (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Islam, Gender, and Social Change

Religion, Ethnicity and Social Change

Recommend Documents