Red Pepper » Jonathan Steele

Revenge of the east – From the Ruins of Empire

admin — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 10:00:53 +0000

Focusing largely on China, Japan, and Egypt, Pankaj Mishra outlines the forms of economic control through which European powers dominated countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries: harsh and unfair loans, curbs on local manufacturing, demands for legal immunity for foreigners, protected enclaves, and a host of other concessions and restrictions on sovereignty imposed on Asian rulers by gunboat diplomacy.
The narrative centres on three key figures who tried to find ideological and cultural ways to resist western power without rejecting modernity: Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a Shia Muslim from Iran (despite his name) whose writings influenced Ayatollah Khomeini; Liang Qichao, a Chinese journalist, politician and intellectual who spent much time in exile in Japan; and Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali who became truly pan‑Asian in terms both of his travel and his intellectual following.
In a fascinating chapter Mishra shows how many young nationalists, like the future Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who came to Paris for the 1919 peace conference expecting support for their anti-imperial demands, were betrayed. Most were not even allowed to attend the conference sessions in the face of the British and French insistence that their empires in India, Indochina and the Middle East were untouchable.
Now the wheel is turning, and Mishra puts aside the long-established western-centric view of the 20th century. ‘It is now clearer that the central event of the last century for the majority of the world’s population was the intellectual and political awakening of Asia,’ he writes.
The thesis is provocative and arresting, not least because globalisation and Chinese expansion has made everyone aware of China’s presence on the world stage. But to lump this largely economy-driven phenomenon together with other trends, such as the Muslim world’s search for an authentic alternative to western materialism, and describe the amalgam as a single notion – ‘the revenge of the East’ – is risky.
The great value of Mishra’s study is that he goes with a fine tooth-comb through the peripatetic dreams and schemes of some of Asia’s most interesting characters, showing how the same man and his followers switched from reform to revolution and back again, dabbling now in fundamentalist primitivism, now in village socialism, now in capitalist modernisation as long as it has an Asian face. From the Ruins of Empire provides a masterly overview of Asian responses to western control of Asia.

Britain’s Empire: ripping up the comfortable myths

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 12:43:05 +0000

Richard Gott describes his fascinating book as ‘not so much a history of the Empire as a history of those who did not wish to participate in the imperial project’. In absorbing detail he catalogues the relentless tide of opposition and resistance that confronted the British effort to extend their sway across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.
Generations of British schoolchildren and adult newspaper readers have been brought up on a diet of complacency about the empire. And as the empire itself recedes into the distance, the tone has become more self-congratulatory rather than less. The BBC and the commissioners of newspaper op-ed pieces routinely turn to historians such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, who praise Britain’s imperial past and distinguish it from that of allegedly less efficient continental rivals like the French and Spanish. Jeremy Paxman produced an affectionate best-seller, Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British, replete with stiff‑upper‑lip generals and public-school notions of duty and quiet resolve.
By contrast, Gott (a former colleague of mine at the Guardian) has written an original book of great scholarship. His 500 closely annotated pages only cover one century of empire, from 1755 (the Black Hole of Calcutta) to 1857 (the Indian Mutiny). But it is more than enough to rip up the comfortable quilt under which this country has covered its long legacy of armed policing, overseas gulags and extermination.
Slave revolts and uprisings by indigenous people were put down with appalling brutality. In India mutineers were tied to the front of cannons and blown apart. Conquered villages were burnt to the ground and their women and children shot. Gott argues that the rulers of the British empire will one day rank with Stalin and Hitler as authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale.
His message is stark but Gott is never shrill. He writes as a scholar, not an accuser.
Rather than look at each part of the empire story separately and by regions, Gott works in batches of time. He takes, for example, the period of Britain’s war against revolutionary France from 1793 to 1802 and shows how it included a great Irish rebellion, the final resistance of Indian forces in Mysore, and fierce efforts by slaves in the French islands of the Caribbean to block their subjugation by the British.
While this approach sometimes makes for a jumpy read as he moves back and forth between different territories, Gott conveys the sense, as seen from London, that every day some crisis was coming to the boil somewhere. Troops and the ships to carry them were needed to help in India but were already on active duty in the Caribbean, or vice versa. Imperial expansion was a matter of constant improvisation and over-stretch (shades of Britain’s involvement in Iraq and the current Afghan war), even as the strategy of seizing foreign land for settlement or to deny it to rival European powers remained firm and unbending.
Some of the book’s most interesting chapters concern the American war. The white settlers of the 13 eastern seaboard colonies wanted independence, not primarily for reasons of democracy and republicanism but because London was thwarting their ambition to occupy the vast territories of Indian tribes in the interior. A royal proclamation of 1763 had decreed that the land rights of native Americans west of a line from Quebec to New Orleans were to be recognised and respected. White settlement was forbidden.
This was compounded a few years later when the British governor of Canada, in a bid to keep the predominantly French Catholic population of Quebec from rebelling, extended the frontiers of British Canada well to the south. The American settlers were not going to allow this, even if it meant breaking with the British crown.
In general, white settler rebellions were more successful than those of indigenous people, Gott points out, in large part because they had the same weaponry as the British. Successful indigenous revolts included Toussaint L’Ouverture’s defeat of the British in Haiti and the Indonesian resistance to Stamford Raffles’ attempt to bring the island of Java under British rule.
Ignored in Britain, some leaders are remembered in their own countries. India and Sri Lanka honour their anti-imperial heroes. South African schools now tell the story of men who tried to keep the Dutch and British out – such as Makana, a Xhosa leader in the Eastern Cape, who led 10,000 fighters against Grahamstown. He was captured in 1819 and sentenced by the British to life imprisonment on Robben Island, the same fate that befell his Xhosa descendant, Nelson Mandela.
Gott’s book brings hundreds of men like Makana back into view. It deserves to be the definitive record that other scholars will build on for years to come, even if, as is likely, the conventional media initially give it a wide berth.

Illusory ethics

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 21:40:50 +0000

Five years since the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London, which killed 52 people, critics on the right still cite Britain’s failure to ‘clamp down’ on radical Islamist preachers as the main reason for British-born Muslims turning themselves into bombs. Critics on the left point to the anger aroused by British military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and Whitehall’s soft approach to Israel’s repression of Palestinians.

There is a missing link in all this commentary, Mark Curtis writes in his book’s introduction, before setting out its main thesis. ‘British governments, both Labour and Conservative, in pursuing the so-called “national interest abroad”, have colluded for decades with radical Islamic forces, including terrorist organisations,’ he writes. ‘They have connived with them, worked alongside them and sometimes trained and financed them in order to promote specific foreign policy objectives.’

It is a powerful charge, and Curtis has done a service in raising it, just as his two earlier books on British foreign policy (Web of Deceit and Unpeople) were valuable in raising other questions that most analysts avoid.

At a time when right-wing historians like Niall Ferguson are trying to rehabilitate the British empire, books that expose its crimes and injustices are a vital antidote. As for current UK foreign policy, the British left too often ignores it on the grounds that the real target should be the US.

US support for Osama Bin Laden during the 1980s jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is the best-known example of ‘blow-back’, but Curtis complains that Britain’s part in fostering Islamist terrorism has been left out of the account. This collusion, he asserts, has had more impact on the rise of the terrorist threat to the UK than either British tolerance of radical preachers or its recent occupations of Muslim countries.

While Curtis is right to scrutinise UK policy with more scepticism than is usual in the mainstream media, the way he marshals his evidence is often flawed. Random press clippings are cited as fact even when the quoted reporter has no strong proof or no strong reputation for accuracy. Partisan sources are sometimes used unquestioningly.

A case in point is the assertion that around 2,500 Afghan fighters took part on the Azeri side against the Armenians in the war over Nagorno-Karabakh in 1993. Curtis bases this on ‘Russian intelligence’, a notoriously unreliable source. He further claims that this large contingent took high casualties, though one might have thought reporters or others on the ground would have run into at least a few wounded prisoners or dead fighters and thereby found evidence to uphold such an unlikely claim.

On Kosovo he relies heavily on two writers who are passionate supporters of the Serbian side in order to assert that the Bosnian government ‘and its Islamist sponsors’ had been actively preparing to assault the Serbs, this time in Kosovo, as soon as the Bosnian war was over. Curtis is loose in describing the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as having the goal of a Greater Albania. That was the position of some, but not all its leaders.

At times he describes the KLA with apparent sympathy as a mixture of nationalist intellectuals, influential local families and radical young people, but then condemns its assassination of Serbian civilians and Albanian collaborators. Virtually every resistance or national liberation movement has done similar things, even if its basic cause was just, which is partly why Britain and the US called the KLA a ‘terrorist organisation’ even as they supported its objective of throwing off Serbian rule.

The moral complexities that arise from expediency and short-term pragmatism are well-explained in Curtis’s account of the debates in the Foreign Office over whether to have contact with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as the main opposition to Mubarak. They are not laid out so clearly when it comes to Britain’s role in Basra after the 2003 invasion. He accuses the British of ‘handing’ southern Iraq to the militias. Others might argue this was good, since the parties that run the militias won the 2005 elections. Was Britain to ignore their popularity, instead of doing what it eventually did in conducting a phased withdrawal to barracks, then to Basra airport, and finally out of Iraq altogether?

The fact that Britain has for decades fostered good relations with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s intelligence service (ISI), two of the major funders of Islamist extremism, including terrorism, in Afghanistan, central Asia and the Middle East, is no secret. Yet it stretches the point to suggest that Britain shares the blame for what these regimes do because it ‘acquiesces’ in it by not breaking contact.

We are right to be angry at the hypocrisy and deception that underlie many of the policies conducted in our name, and it is important that they be exposed so we can judge their wisdom clearly. But to expect any state to conduct an ethical foreign policy is a false hope.

Why won’t Nato die?

admin — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:24:11 +0000

The US never misses a chance to wheel out Nato and revive the old cold war narrative in modern form – the Russian intervention in Georgia after the attack on South Ossetia was only the latest excuse. Jonathan Steele explains why we are still lumbered with a wasteful and dangerous military alliance

A few weeks before Georgia’s fateful bid to storm the breakaway region of South Ossetia, Nato hired a top Coca Cola executive to re-brand the alliance’s image in time for its 60th anniversary in 2009. ‘Brands do go to the basic purpose: what is the point of this organisation?’ Nick Witney, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told the International Herald Tribune. ‘Nato lost its primary rationale on the day the Warsaw Pact closed up business. It has been casting around for a different identity and role so it remains relevant.’

Now, thanks to the Georgian crisis, Nato’s task has become both easier and harder. On the one hand, with the connivance of hundreds of gullible western reporters who rushed to the Caucasus with little understanding of the area’s history, the cold war image of an aggressive tank-happy Russia has been revived. Since Nato’s stated purpose back in 1949 was to block similar tanks from occupying Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris, a narrative of the Russian bear on the move again was easy to project. No need for Nato to invent a new brand. Just trot out the old one.

On the other hand, the Georgian crisis dealt Nato two severe blows. It reminded people that the alliance was always a disproportionately US construct, dominated not just by US military pre-eminence but also by US, rather than European, strategic interests. It also showed the limits of Nato power. As Russian troops moved in to expel the Georgians from South Ossetia, Nato could do nothing to prevent it. It could not even issue a tough unified statement, since France and Germany, two of its key members, were unwilling to blame the hostilities entirely on Moscow. Nato emerged as a paper dinosaur, toothless and irrelevant.

Nato after the cold war

The fact that Nato stumbled on at all once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, rather than quietly lying down and passing out, rests on three factors: British Euro-scepticism, traditional central European fear and hatred of Russia, and Washington’s increasingly frenzied drive to maintain and even expand its global position in the face of rising challenges from Asia. British Euro-scepticism is the least important of the three, but it is not insignificant. By implementing what they assumed the US wanted, first John Major and then New Labour undermined every embryonic effort by the French and Germans to develop a European military capability that could allow Europe to act in crises without requiring US involvement. The mantra was always that ‘enhancing Europe’s defence unity must support Nato, not supplant it’.

Even so, Nato might well have disbanded in the early 1990s had it not been for the Clinton administration. Although Boris Yeltsin’s Russia was seen as friendly and pro-Western, Polish emigré groups in the US pushed hard for Nato to continue and for their former homeland to join it. US officials were divided and a sizeable corps of former US ambassadors to Moscow, as well as some US academic experts on Russia, argued against Nato’s expansion, saying it sent the wrong signal to Russia and would only encourage anti-westernism there (a prediction that turned out to be correct). The pro-Central Europeans won, and Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were admitted to membership in 1999.

By then the Kosovo crisis was at its height. Nato was wheeled out as the instrument to deal with Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic and prevent his ethnic cleansing in Serbia’s largely Albanian province. Although required by its charter to act with unanimity, Nato turned out to be nothing more than a ‘coalition of the willing’. Its new members were shocked by the Nato attack on Serbia. They pleaded unpreparedness and took no part. It was especially shocking for the Czechs and Poles, as Serbs were fellow-Slavs and Yugoslavia had been admired during the cold war for Marshal Tito’s anti-Russian and anti-Stalinist stance within the international communist movement.

As the Russian elite’s brief enchantment with the west faded, it became the turn of the Baltic states to join the clamour for Nato membership. Getting into the European Union took a long time, but getting into Nato was an easy option for joining the western club, with the added benefit of being seen as a friend of Washington.

For the US it was not only flattering. It gave Washington real political and economic rewards – the chance for its diplomacy to develop a powerful new presence in regions that used to be off limits, as well as scope for US arms manufacturers to sell advanced weaponry to a host of new customers. Under Bush this neo-imperial drive accelerated, backed by hard-nosed ‘realists’ such as Dick Cheney, a former defence secretary in the cold war period, as well as the neo-cons with their missionary zeal to push western corporate power and economic liberalism into every corner of the globe.

Nato after 9/11

Nato was not the primary tool, as the post-9/11 events showed. Days after the attacks on New York and Washington, Nato’s European members eagerly announced that they were invoking Article V, which says an attack on one member will be considered an attack on all. But, in an almost farcical humiliation, Bush ignored them. Unilateralism was his preferred option: the US decided to go after Osama bin Laden and the Taliban without its willing allies.

‘Alone if you can, with Nato if you must’ became the watchword of Bush’s presidency. Nevertheless, Nato was useful as a secondary option in the Pentagon toolbox. So once the Taliban were toppled, Nato was brought back into the game in Afghanistan. A hybrid operation was created, which still continues. There is a unilateral US presence, focused mainly in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border, and a Nato presence in Helmand, Kabul and other provinces.

Meanwhile, Cheney and the neo-cons also had their eyes on the Black Sea and the Caspian as stepping-stones to Asia. Ukraine and Georgia were the targets. Prising those two countries out of the Russian orbit would not only give Washington pressure points against Moscow, it would offer the US military basing rights and airfields in an arc that would stretch to central Asia, where the US was already developing ‘assets’ in the ‘war on terror’. Dictatorships with worries about Islamist insurgencies within their own populations could be enlisted on the US side. In central Asia you play on the Islamic fundamentalist scare; in Ukraine and the Caucasus you play on the Russian scare. Either way, the policy answer is the same: let the United States protect you.

Nato after Georgia

Back then to Georgia. Has the crisis provoked by Mikheil Saakashvili’s stupidity over South Ossetia helped or harmed US interests in the region? Has it boosted or weakened Nato? The alliance is due to hold a summit in December. Long before this summer’s unexpected war, the top item on the agenda was whether to invite Georgia and Ukraine to start the process of joining Nato.

Unless the mood changes, the best guess is that France and Germany will say no. The reason is not that they are cowards, or that they have been bought off by the Russians because they purchase so much oil and gas from Moscow. Paris and Berlin have other concerns. They do not say it in public, but they are furious with Georgia’s president for his recklessness. Why should a tiny country endanger the entire balance of EU-Russian relations, and why should Europe be put at risk by lame-duck hawks in Washington? Far better to wait and see who wins in the US in November. If Obama comes out on top, as the French and Germans hope, then the Nato expansion drive may come to a welcome halt.

Or it may not. The corporate imperatives behind the drive for US global dominance are more powerful than the private views of the incumbent in the White House. Nato costs the US relatively little while providing a great deal in terms of prestige, influence, and well-positioned real estate. Writing Nato’s obituary has always been a risky exercise, and that is as true now as it was before this summer’s war erupted.