Failed States: Globalisation’s Blowback

Failed States: Globalisation’s Blowback
Prabir Purkayastha
Newsclick, 27 January, 2010

Globalisation today has created its blow-back: failed states haunt the world. Why do some states fail and why is it that India in spite of its divisions hangs together? What constitutes third world nationalism?

The 60 years of the Indian Republic raises some important questions for the world. How is it that India with its multiple religious, linguistic and ethnic identities still holds together as a nation state when the prediction after independence was that it would splinter soon and fail as a national entity? Why did India not become a failed state like so many others in the world today? Why do Indians hang together, while many others have failed to do so?

It is now clear that failed nation states are not just the concern of the people of these states or nearby countries. A failed nation state becomes quickly a global issue. In an earlier era, failed states did not bother the big countries who shaped global politics. If various African countries “failed”, the global powers could wash their hands off and blame the people. Now they are of global concern. It is not just Afghanistan and Yemen. Increasingly, Somalia, restricted earlier to only news about piracy is appearing on the radar screen as a failed state. The fear of Pakistan joining the ranks of failed state is even scarier as it is a nuclear weapon state.

The dominant world view is that countries fail because their people are divided by ethnic and tribal identities and cannot create a nation state. The role of the colonial powers or the neo-colonial powers is rarely brought into this issue. The colonial pillage, the policies of setting one ethnic group against the other, consciously aborting any nationalist identity which could turn against neo-colonial plunder, is never the focus. The only concern in this discourse is the question of stability: are the countries stable enough to allow global corporations to strike legal bargains and continue their operations.

The fall of the socialist block and the emergence of a uni-polar world produced a further triumphalist neo-liberal account: finally the obstruction to globalisation of capital was over. Capital could flow anywhere and mould the country’s institution to suit its needs. In this view, the nation state was now passé, its sole role being merely to police the people. Everything else was the domain of the market – from infrastructure to education.

A scant decade of remaking the world in this vision was the first crack. September 11, 2001 showed that not only was capital now truly global, so was “terror”. A motley group, armed with pen knives and box cutters, managed to launch a major strike in heartland of the sole global super power, the US. What started as a game in Afghanistan to suck the Soviet Union into its Vietnam and had come back to haunt the US. Shoe bombs and underwear bombs – both of which failed – have only heightened the sense of siege that the US now feels. That is why the argument that not only has the US to be made a fortress with full-body scanners and a huge security apparatus, but the US now must consider the entire globe as its strategic sphere. If it does not, terror strikes can be launched on it from anywhere.

This is globalisation’s blow back: if the nation state is weak and illegitimate in the eyes of its people, you now have the recipe for a failed state. If the US – and its European allies – want not to police the whole world, it will have to rework its view of nationalism and the nation state. And here a look at Indian Republic’s 60 years might be quite instructive.

Much of the discourse on nation states have been coloured by the template of Western European nations, that too only a handful. A France, England and Germany are the basis of this narrowly constructed template. In this view of the nation state, there is a “national identity” which is shared by its people – largely ethnic and linguistic. It is this “common” identity which is the basis of a nation state.

The problem with this view of the nation state is that then the post colonial states are an anomaly. They do not fit into this picture as most of the states came into being within earlier colonial boundaries. Of course this view of West European nationalism is not historically accurate either. Historians have shown that it was the state that quite often produced the national identity – homogenizing its people. But that is a separate story.

So how do we look at third world nation states, states that were quite often created out of drawing lines by colonial powers on maps? I would suggest that the basis of third world nationalism was first, the anti-colonial struggles and later, the attempt to build self-reliant and relatively independent economies. This was how Indian nationalism was born and this is why the nationalist project continued after independence. This is what Indian republic is all about, apart from also incorporating regional and linguistic identities in a federal structure. It is this economic nationalism that gave the Indian state its devlopmentalist role. The state was not only an instrument of redistribution but also an engine of development. It is abandoning this nationalist role by the Congress that allowed a far more divisive view of India -- a Hindu identity based nationalism -- to gain hegemony.

When we see the third world, we see how country after country, the nationalist project was undermined and aborted. A Mossadeq’s attempt in Iran to take over its oil wealth led to US and British backed coup that brought Shah into power. Mossadeq, a deeply nationalist figure, quite anti-socialist in his views, had to be overthrown in 1953 and spent the rest 14 years of his life in till he died, first in solitary confinement then under house arrest. Patrice Lumamba was killed, again a joint project of the Belgians and the US. Congo was mineral rich, and Joseph Mobutu, who was the CIA Belgian instrument in killing Lumumba, helped convert Congo into a neo-colony and its long plunge to a failed state. The impact of aborting Congo’s nationalism was not restricted to Congo alone. It spread to Rwanda and also to nearby states.

So afraid were the Belgians and the US of Lumumba even after his death, they exhumed his body, cut it up and dissolved it in sulphuric acid. Only a few teeth were left, “proudly” displayed on Belgian television by the Belgian Police Commissioner Gerard Soete, responsible for this act of destroying the body. A CIA officer even bragged that he had carried Lumumba’s body in the trunk of his car. It was very much a US-Belgian joint operation, with authorization from the highest authorities in both countries.

While Iran and Congo bring out the neo-colonial project of destroying third world nationalism most sharply, this was the thrust almost everywhere. The ex-colonial powers wanted only puppets, who would continue their colonial plunder. The US became the leader of this coalition. Not surprisingly, the nationalist forces looked to the Soviet Union for support. The non-aligned movement was not just about remaining outside of military alliances but also about decolonization of the world.

The neo-liberal ideology is continues this adverse view of third world nationalism. It is seen as a barrier to global capital and must be weakened, if not destroyed. What they forget is a state that is illegitimate in the eyes of its people cannot then survive as a successful state. This is why India, with all its problems, still continues to survive. Imagine a Nehru replaced with a pro-western military figure through a British-US coup in India, pursuing aggressively the policy of handing over the Indian economy back to British and US capital. Would the Indian republic have survived or would we now be having a number of failed states within our borders? Yet, this is what the British, the French, the Belgian and the US have done in whole swathes in the world – Africa, West Asia and South East Asia. It is what it seeks to do even today – building a neo-colonial Iraq and believing it will become a viable nation state. It is why Karzai will have legitimacy only if he is seen to confront the US. Puppet states do not become viable nations – they lack the most important ingredient that constitutes a nation, nationalism. And nationalism built out of ethnic identities as the US wanted at one stage to do – Kurd, Shia and Sunni regions – will only fragment such nations and create even more failed states.

Will the US and the coalition of the willing, read ex-colonial powers, understand the dynamic of nations? All evidence is to the contrary. Instead of what makes nations tick, they have the imagery of clash of civilizations, the “other” threatening “their” western values. To interrogate the true meaning of failed states would have to interrogate the current globalisation paradigm and its dominant ideology. It means not seeking just military fixes to political problems but understand the complex process that builds nations. The quick fix, have gun and shoot your way out of trouble, is the more likely immediate response.

History however has a way of catching up: you buck its forces at your peril. So the question is how long can the US build a fortress America and post its troops and navy everywhere? How long can this imperial over-reach continue before it sinks the US economy?