Sunday Times 2
Planet Earth has gone nuts over nationalism
View(s):In recent months, we witnessed many talking marathons — talkathons — held to help Planet Earth to overcome the natural, economic and political disasters it is engulfed in. There were the biggest of all talkathons — the United Nations annual General Assembly sessions, also the Shanghai Cooperation Council summit, the ASEAN summit, G-7, G 20, the APEC summit and the COP-27 climate change summit.
World leaders, diplomats, scientists and intellectuals made their contributions — optimistic, pessimistic and realistic — but our reading of reports in the media left us with doubts about whether, apart from not finding a way out of the impasse, they did even succeed in pointing out the plausible origins of this global catastrophe.
A refreshing observation made on this issue we read in the Guardian (UK). The headline of the article by Britain’s former Labour Party leader and Prime Minister Gordon Brown (2007-2010) told it all: Nationalism is the ideology. No wonder the world is in crisis.
He says that at the very moment the world needs to work together to address global solutions. It is being pulled apart not just by conflicts but also by rising protectionism. Poor leadership is not only the fault. An outdated geopolitics is threatening a decade of permanent crises. “Pillars of the Cold War order are tumbling down as we leave behind the unipolar, hyper-globalised world neoliberal era. We need new models for growth, national economic management and global cooperation.”
The former British Prime minister, who was also the Chancellor of the Exchequer for quite a while under the three New Labour governments of Prime Minister Tony Blair, discusses various factors that have emerged after the end of the Cold War and are continuing. They include the emergence of new power centres, the impact of new technologies on the older heavy industries and the urgent calls made to meet the challenges of climate change that cannot be ignored. He also suggests changes to the new world economic institutions. All this is of much importance but is beyond the scope of discussion in this column due to lack of space.
Nationalism, however, has been the lifeblood of Sri Lanka’s existence from the very beginning of its history and continues to be so today. Nationalism has taken the form of racism in the country’s internal politics since the mid-fifties while global forces particularly those from the West are resulting in strong pressures being exerted on its current internal politics.
Thus, how nationalism is being played with by world powers has come to bear in our internal politics and is likely to do so in the future.
The most relevant point made by Gordon Brown is: Nationalism has replaced neoliberalism as the dominant ideology of the age. If for the past 30 years, economics drove political decision-making, now politics is determining economic decisions with country after country weaponising trade, technology, industry and competitive politics.
He says: The Win-Win economy is mutually beneficial; commerce is being replaced by zero-sum rivalries — I win you lose. Movements such as America First, China First, India First and Russia First, My Tribe First, threaten to descend on Us-versus-Them geopolitics of My Country First and Only, he contends.
We are all aware that nationalism has been the most dominant force in history — under various labels — in almost all countries until the end of World War II and the emergence of the two nuclear powers with two ideologies — Communism and Capitalism — confronting each other. At that stage the world became divided into two power blocs and for a new national government to emerge it had to be backed by one or the other superpower. Even the Non-Aligned countries were aligned to either power bloc in one way or the other.
The proliferation of nationalism after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union were predicted by Prof. Samuel P Huntington, a Harvard University professor in 1993 in an article titled: ‘The Clash of Civilisations’ which received much acclaim from those involved in geopolitics.
In his book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order, Huntington attempts to find the origin of cultural identity. “In the post-Cold War flags count and so do other symbols of cultural identity, including crosses, crescents and head coverings, because culture counts and cultural identity is what is meaningful to most people.”
The current turmoil in Iran over a young woman allegedly killed by the Iranian moral police appears to be a continuing process of the cultural identity conflict.
Huntington provides one grim Weltanschauung (world view) for the new era quoting Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Doblins novel Dead Lagoon: “There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant….”
The nationalism that was promoted by Sri Lankan leaders for Independence was Ceylonese Nationalism (as Sri Lanka was then called) where all races were united and considered themselves to be equals. But since the mid-fifties, for the vast swathes of the two main communities nationalism has come to mean racism.
Has nationalism of the kinds practised since the mid-1950s been the bane of Sri Lanka? The nationalism of the Nazis or the Japanese till 1945 propelled these countries militarily and in economic development to wage war against the rest of the world, although with disaster at the end.
Where has post-1956 Sri Lankan ‘nationalism’ or racism brought us to in 2022? To bankruptcy, a nation facing starvation with an international begging bowl in hand.
The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is certainly not a democracy. A politician whose party, the oldest and most powerful of political organisations lost all seats at the last general election including his own is now the president of the country propped up by a defeated government party. This president had opposed in his whole political career of 45 years, the party whose interests he now represents and implements. He tolerates no dissent and opponents are classified as terrorists under terrorism laws. Demonstrations are banned. This is not a democracy but a Demo-no-crazy, to use a phrase this writer used to describe the suppression of demonstrations decades ago by a pukka sahib planter who had taken over the job of security chief of the country.
Is it socialist? Not one word about socialism has been sounded by its leaders. And a republic? It is being ruled with police and military power after the people compelled the elected government to resign and the president to flee the country.
Gordon Brown may not have been thinking about the kind of nationalism practised in Sri Lanka when he spoke about the nationalist ideology being the cause of the world to be in crisis.
But we wonder whether this Scotsman who became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is a Scottish nationalist wanting to break away from the United Kingdom. Last month the British Supreme Court ruled that the Scotland government’s proposed bill on an independence referendum is a matter reserved for Westminster — the parliament of the United Kingdom! So much for Scottish nationalism!
As we conclude this article, there are loud roars over the home TV and even TVs in the neighbourhood. A TV commentator in national ecstasy is screaming: Sri Lanka had performed a cricketing miracle scoring some 300 odd runs to win the match against Afghanistan. The screams and roaring are not so much for cricketing prowess of the players but for the Sri Lankan nation’s triumph! It’s for Sri Lankan nationalism!
Cricket may recede into the background but on Sri Lanka TV but there are deafening cheers coming over from Qatar’s World Cup soccer matches. People from 32 nations have gathered in Qatar with overcharged emotions each hoping that they can carry the World Cup home. It’s not so much football that matters but its national pride — nationalism.
The world has gone nuts about nationalism. It may have brought the planet to the brink of economic, political and natural disasters but no country likes to lose its national pride and honour by losing a game of football, cricket, rugger or any other game.
(The writer is a former editor of The Sunday Island, The island, and consultant editor of the Sunday Leader. He can be contacted at gamma.weerakoon@gmail.com)