Tag Archives: race

A World Shaped by the Anglo Race

20 Sat May 2017

Posted by in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on A World Shaped by the Anglo Race

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

AnglosphereVucetic, Srdjan. The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of Racialized Identity in International Relations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 272 pp.

It has become increasingly difficult since World War II to study race in international relations. After the excesses by Nazi Germany, most Western officials were shamed into at least keeping their thoughts on racial characteristics private. This is not to say that the problem of race in international relations was solved, but, like sex in Victorian England, became something that was not mentioned in polite company. However, there has been a fair amount of scholarship recently that has reintroduced race as a method of analysis in diplomacy with interesting results. In The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of Racialized Identity in International Relations, Srdjan Vucetic takes a look at the most enduring and perhaps only genuinely special relationship in international relations, primarily that between the United States and Britain but also with Australia, Canada, and New Zealand thrown into the mix as junior partners. Vucetic’s contention is that the bond between the Anglo nations of the world was forged not out of realpolitik but along racial lines in the late 19th century. Over the next century, these bonds would be tested by evolving values of state, nation, empire, and liberalism.

It was an English historian and diplomat Edward Carr who wrote in 1939 that the Anglos were consummate international hypocrites, bent on spreading their forms of politics under the guise of morality and neutrality. Vucetic explores this thought through several crises – Venezuela in 1895 and 1902, the Pacific Pact in 1951 binding the United States to the security of the far-flung former British possessions of Australia and New Zealand, the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Vietnam War, and the build up to the Second Gulf War in 2003. In each case, the author finds compelling reasons for the Anglo powers not to have sided with each other as they did and suggests that their behaviour was brought about by a feeling of kinship.

By any yardstick of historical precedence, the United States was almost destined to become Britain’s rival if not enemy in the late 19th century. Yet, a rapprochement took place. The United States sought to secure the Western hemisphere for itself by repelling and expelling all foreign presence in the region. It moved against French, Russian, Danish, and Spanish possessions by coin or by Colt – except for the British. Washington never threatened the territories of its Anglo cousin in Canada, Newfoundland, or the West Indies. In the Venezuelan Crisis of 1895, for example, Venezuela claimed Essequibo and Guayana Esequiba from British Guyana. The United States forced Britain to abjure from the use of force and accept an arbitration (which awarded London 90 percent of the territory anyway). In 1902, the United States did not move against a blockade of Venezuela by Britain and other European powers for the failure to compensate for damages caused during the Venezuelan Civil War (1859-1863).

The general explanation preferred by many Liberals for US behaviour is democratic peace theory which posits that the behaviour of two democracies is always tempered by their institutions such that they never go to war. Realists, however, argue that London’s imperial commitments elsewhere around the globe and distance from the New World meant that it did not pursue a more muscular policy in 1895. Both overlook, however, the human element of diplomacy – the racial statements made by prominent figures on both sides of the Anglo Atlantic. Joseph Chamberlain and Arthur Balfour, for example, who had long called for a “race alliance” between the two carriers of liberal modernity, declared war between America and Britain to be “unnatural,” “fratricidal,” a “horror,” and a “crime against the laws of God and man.” Archibald Primrose and Lewis Harcourt, members of the Opposition, agreed that war must be avoided at all costs. This sentiment was reciprocated on the other side of the Atlantic – Secretary of State Thomas Bayard, for example, asked why “two trustees of civilisation should fight over the mongrel state of Venezuela.”

During the Second Boer War in 1899, the United States stayed neutral and its secretary of state John Hays argued that the “fight of England is the fight of civilisation and progress and all our interests are bound up in her success.” Washington’s neutrality was seen as repayment or gratitude for British neutrality during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Even one of America’s most preeminent strategic thinkers, Alfred Mahan, targeted Germany and Japan but not Britain when he made a case for a strong navy to counterbalance the influence of the United States’ rivals in Europe and the Asia-Pacific. In discussions of foreign policy, it is often forgotten that the 19th century was an era in which race mattered immensely. The American Civil War had ended barely a generation ago and immigration was strictly controlled in favour of Anglo Saxons. It is not clear why international relations scholars would assume, then, that their domain remained unaffected by this prejudice.

There were, at the same time, perhaps linguistic and religious cleavages with other world powers. The French were an Other because of their Catholicism and the Germans were the impulsive and brutal Teutonic Other. The Anglosphere was thus imagined as a largely white, English-speaking Protestant federation. Such distinction is clear from how the American media, for example, differentiated the German bombardment of San Carlos and the British role in the flattening of Puerto Cabello during the Second Venezuelan Crisis. The former was uncivilised and disproportionate while the other was judicious and restrained. Similarly, the expansion of German imperial domains was seen as threatening to US security interests while Britain continued to add to her colonies without much comment from the United States. Thus, as political scientist Daniel Deudney provocatively states, “the most important and successful interstate alliance of the twentieth century is actually a type of non-state national unification,” one that did not officially achieve even a customs union let alone a dissolution of borders or single polity.

The New Zealand historian James Belich has an interesting observation about the histories of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand independent states: no one knows when they truly began. In 1950, the Australasian territories were more British than independent and the people saw themselves as “neo-Britains” or “better-Britains.” They made sure to always distinguish themselves as part of the Old Commonwealth, the real or original community that included Canada and South Africa while the New Commonwealth comprised of India, Ceylon, and Pakistan. In fact, the Anglosphere was not even stated in the English penal colonies but remained an implicit presence and was most visible during the early years of the Cold War.

In 1950, for example, the Sydney Morning Herald opined on the security arrangements against the Communist bloc by reminding Canberra that “our religious faith, our national philosophy, and our whole way of life are alien to Asia.” Rather than buttressing Asian democracies against communism, what the audience wanted was Canberra to join the Anglo-led West in containing all of Asia. Interestingly, the United States was not interested.

With the Soviet Union playing up the status of blacks and other non-white people in the United States, Washington could not afford to be publicly seen entering into white alliances around the globe. The racist undertones of Australian and New Zealand diplomats was sidestepped by John Foster Dulles by proposing a Pacific Ocean Pact in which ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) would prop up the isalnd states of Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia; the United States also refused British membership in this pact because it did not want to create a “closed club for Anglo Saxons,” Dulles explained to the British ambassador in March 1951. Australian and New Zealand officials were irate, pointing out that an alliance with the Philippines or Indonesia but not Britain was unthinkable and any move to turn Japan from an enemy to a firm ally overnight would have serious political ramifications domestically. As Vucetic shows, Manila’s request to be included was rebuffed by Canberra and Wellington on grounds of shortage of time and money. The final result was ANZUS – “about Asia, but not of Asia,” as historian David Lowe once described.

Vucetic argues that this showed that it was balance of race that was important to the Anglosphere, not balance of power. He writes, the fact that “Washington deliberated with its junior allies during the negotiations and lost, instead of simply overruling them, reveals the operation of collective identity in practice…it is a sense of shared identity that compels friends to accommodate each other, regardless of extant hierarchies and asymmetries.”

The influence of race on the foreign and security policies of the Anglosphere diminished over time but still remains dormant. Furthermore, the shared sense of brotherhood that was forged in the early 20th century is still with us to this day. The first sign of a shift came in Canada’s discomfiture at the British invasion of Egypt in 1956 to seize the Suez Canal. A liberal internationalism and the urge to distinguish itself from its southern cousin motivated Ottawa as was seen in its response to Vietnam as well. Australia, however, contributed boots on the ground in every major engagement the United States found itself in. Even in the Second Gulf War, while Britain and Australia saddled up to go to war in Iraq, New Zealand and Canada stayed on the sidelines though gave ambiguous blessings to their racial cousins by pontificating on the ethics of liberal interventions. Americans did not rename, however, as Vucetic points out, Canadian bacon as they did French fries.

The end of white-only immigration policies – in 1967 in Canada and in 1973 in Australia – catalysed the emergence of multiculturalism in the Anglosphere, especially as the number of non-white immigrants surpassed white immigration after the mid-1990s. Yet the reinvention of the Anglosphere as a community of (still English-speaking) liberal, democratic, capitalist states still carried undercurrents of a racial bond. The conflict in Afghanistan, wherein the Anglo powers bore the brunt of the warfare, fed the conservative and Hochromantik imagery of a small band of Anglo states preserving civilisation and standing against the tides of barbarians. Picking up from where Chamberlain and Churchill had left off, the British historian Robert Conquest proposed a political association of English-speaking states and American businessman James Bennett argued modern technology had finally allowed Anglophone societies to create a globe-spanning network commonwealth of liberal democracy, free trade, and labour movement. As Duncan Bell wrote in his 2007 The Idea of Greater Britain,

“Grandiose fantasies of Anglo-Saxon unity and superiority continue to exert their mesmeric power, shaping visions of a future world order, and drawing people back into the dangerous orbit of empire.”

There are several narratives of the rise of the English-speaking powers – rags-to-riches, revolution-to-rapprochement, autocracy-to-democracy, racism-to-multiculturalism, colony-to-nation, or imperial-war-to-international-law. The Anglosphere contains many of these frameworks, though undergirded by bonds between settler colonies – even penal ones – that have so far been overlooked. Vucetic notes that today, “all core Anglosphere states and societies define their liberal identities, not simply against present authoritarian Others but also against their own racial past. The mainstreaming of antiracism…has had a paradoxical effect of reifying racialized structures of meaning. Instead of reducing race talk, national census-style racial categories have contributed to it.”

Is it possible that Vucetic has been oversensitive to the race angle? After all, critics may point to the idea of a bill of rights, trial by jury, habeas corpus, the centrality of private property, a man’s word of honour and several other aspects of Anglo culture other than race and sect that bind together the people of the English-speaking first world countries. This, however, is a Churchillian view, premised on the belief that other cultures did not understand property rights or other social and political liberties. Furthermore, the notion that race and religion, two of the most powerful categories in the Age of Imperialism, did not play a role in foreign relations is rather farcical.

Talk of race these days is meant to get our hackles up. However, it is difficult to deny that there exists a sense of kinship that can be forged from racial, linguistic, ethnic, or religious identities. What makes the racial identity of the Anglosphere any more pernicious than the religious bonds of the ummah? Such natural commonality does not banish acrimony in relations but it does create a greater willingness to compromise and maintain ties. Wise or not, the inherent appeal of such bonds should be clear to most of us who meet a fellow countryman when travelling abroad.

Regardless of one’s views on the role of race and religion in foreign affairs, The Anglosphere is an intriguing book whose central thesis asks us to open our minds enough to consider yet another framework to international relations and alliance politics. Vucetic’s argument is not necessarily novel but charts new territory in the direction earlier scholars such as Michael Hunt and WIlliam Inboden had already suggested. In that, it stands firmly on the shoulders of excellent historical research and explores further the implications of what has only recently fallen out of fashion.

The Anglosphere is a valuable addition to foreign relations scholarship that is a must-read for anyone looking to equip their intellectual toolkit to the fullest.

Baltipuram In Flames

28 Tue Apr 2015

Posted by in Satire, Society, United States

≈ Comments Off on Baltipuram In Flames

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Mayhem descended upon Baltipuram after Firdous Ghani died last week of injuries sustained during his arrest. Protestors gathered in the streets to pelt police stations with bricks and bottles and several objects were hurled at law enforcement officials as well. The state has cracked down heavily, using teargas and pepper balls; hundreds of arrests over the week and a few injuries. However, passersby and reporters were also injured in the police retaliation; one policeman was seen throwing bricks back at the protestors. Curfew has been announced and over 2,000 National Guardsmen and a thousand police officers have been deployed to quell the disturbance though looting and arson has been limited so far.

Founded in 1729, Baltipuram is a large urban centre in eastern Shvetadesam. Once upon a time, its port and location close to markets inland made it a leading centre of manufacturing and immigration to the country. Baltipuram was historically a vibrant centre of culture with writers, jazz musicians, singers, and sport stars all contributing to the city’s charm at one time or another. With such wealth and fame came the usual vices and by the late 19th century, Baltipuram earned the sobriquet of ‘Mobtown.’ With the decline of manufacturing, industrialisation, and railways in the early 1950s, Baltipuram has turned into a collection of depressed neighbourhoods where inequality and crime have been on the rise. Nonetheless, the city remains a centre of health and science research owing to several institutions of research and higher learning based in the area.

BaltipuramThe latest riots in the city began on the 5th of Vaishaka in response to the death of a young man of 25 years from an underprivileged community a week earlier, on the 29th of Chaitra. Ghani had been in a coma since 22nd Chaitra due to injuries to his spine and larynx sustained during his arrest after a long chase by police officers for “catching their eye.” Such arbitrary profiling is a common law enforcement technique in Shvetadesam, one anybody passing through any form of security barrier in the country might be subjected to. Civil rights advocates have decried this discriminatory practice but the government argues that it is a vital tool in the mission to protect its citizens.

Analysts have questioned whether the violence and the heavy-handedness have anything to do with the religious beliefs of the various groups in a country that hyphenates its identities. The majority of Shwetadeshans follow a complicated and centuries-old belief system wherein the universe is controlled by an all-powerful family…well, at least a father and a son. It is believed that unquestioned obedience to this family will result in salvation in the afterlife. Furthermore, the myth continues, that the son was born some 2,000 years ago in the Middle East and was put to death prematurely by the government of those times. As a result, one of the key rituals includes weekly cannibalism by way of transubstantiation. The several variations to this story have spawned a multitude of cults that have oftentimes found themselves at war with each other.

Though this is a plausible scenario, Tina Selvaggio, the executive director of Shvetadesam operations at For the People, an international NGO, argues that religion has nothing to do with the events over the past couple of weeks. “It is true,” she says, “that the founder of Baltipuram was of a sect that is now in the minority in Shvetadesam, a sect that has been targeted several times in the past; it is also true that immigration from across Shvetadesam’s southern borders has affected the demographic composition of the various groups in the country. But the victims of state brutality in Baltipuram are not discriminated against based on those divisions.” Shvetadesam also has segregation and stratification based on race, Selvaggio explained, “that goes back hundreds of years.” Although relations have greatly improved between different races over the past four or five decades, there is a “strong undercurrent of suspicion, hatred, and parochialism if you know where to look.”

Race is a concept brought over from Europe to Shvetadesam in the 18th century. According to this idea, the moral, intellectual, and social superiority of a person is directly proportional to the paleness of his skin. The fairer one was, the more claim one had to property, rights, wealth, and status. Shvetadesamologists believe that the first migration of white people that resulted in permanent settlement in Shvetadesam depended heavily on agriculture, particularly of tobacco and cotton. As these were labour intensive crops, black people were also brought over as slaves to work in the plantations. Interestingly, there was another group of people in Shvetadesam when the white people arrived. Renowned historian of early Shvetadesam Ramona Tapper, of White Invasion Theory fame, has argued that the arrival of Europeans – white people – to Shvetadesam saw a large-scale culling and dislocation of the original inhabitants of the land. A few descendents of these original people still remain but have been completely marginalised by the dominant group. Though the original inhabitants were also darker than the invaders, they were not enslaved as black people were.

Slavery is an inherent part of Shvetadesam culture. As late as the mid-19th century, the northern half of the country – which had no slaves – went to war with the southern half – which had all the slaves – over the issue. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were huge demonstrations demanding equality, desegregation, and voter registration. While Shvetadesam has now fulfilled most of the legal obligations for equality among its people, there are still horrific crimes against “darker coloured” people. In the early 1990s, the beating of a black taxi driver in western Shvetadesam set off major riots across the country; in 1998, a gruesome assault saw a black man chained to the back of a jeep and dragged until his death. The state penitentiary system holds a disproportionate number of darker complexioned people and the judiciary routinely hands down harsher sentences to people of a displeasing coloration. “Accidental” police shootings inexplicably occur more when people of African descent are present – names like Timotheus Tomas, Mickaël Brunn, and Travitz Märkt are seared into the collective narrative of “African-Shvetadesans.”

The incident in Baltipuram is just the latest in a series of state brutality against its oppressed and underprivileged class. Witnesses claim that Ghani was dragged into a police van while screaming in pain and despite a broken leg. According to records, Ghani was not provided with medical attention despite repeated pleas and he was handcuffed though not secured by seatbelt. Past prisoners have described this as a deliberate tactic on the part of the state officials to injure passengers “accidentally” by driving erratically.

With the primaries for the presidential elections in 2016 about to start, a couple of Shvetadesam’s likely political candidates have appealed for calm and the safety of all in Baltipuram. In response to a question during the ongoing IBSA summit, Prime Minister Modi urged the Shvetadeshans to find equitable solutions to their internal difference in a peaceful manner. “We are confident,” Modi said, “that the spirit of the Shvetadesam’s founding fathers lives on and its people will learn to live as brothers.” However, the Ministry of External Affairs has announced that the prime minister’s trip to Shvetadesam, scheduled for June this year, has now been pushed back indefinitely.

Authoress Vimala Devgan, whose recent and controversial book, Shvetadesam: An Alternative History, caused much unrest and was temporarily pulled from print, is not as hopeful as the prime minister. Devgan’s thesis, which has earned the ire of several far-right nationalists, is that Shvetadesans partake in a national erotica of violence and blood – purification of the soul occurs through aggression that reinforces tropes of white exceptionalism and superiority. “There are several regressive groups still prevalent in the country,” she replied to us by email, “that see the weak enforcement of the law by the state in such cases as countenance. It is shameful that they have not been cleared of such beliefs. If Shvetadesam wants to join a progressive comity of nations, it must learn that such flagrant violations of the rights of minorities, children, and those already in detention are unacceptable.”

With inputs from Mara Karga from Shvetadesam.

Nested Colonialism

11 Mon Jun 2012

Posted by in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Nested Colonialism

Tags

, , , , , ,

ColonialismPowell, Eve Trout. A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003. 260 pp.

Eve Powell’s controversial book, A Different Shade of Colonialism, addresses the position of Egypt as both, the subject and the object of imperialism, and challenges many of our common perceptions about imperialism and nationalism. Using the framework of race, Powell shows how the highly politicised writings of Egyptian bureaucrats such as Muhammad al-Tunisi, Selim Qapudan, Rifa‘ah Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi, and ‘Ali Mubarak shaped Egyptian views and policies about the Sudan as far back as Muhammad ‘Ali’s reign (1805-1848)1. Powell also reads in juxtaposition to these texts the works of Egyptian intellectuals like Ya‘qub Sanu‘a, ‘Abdallah all-Nadim and Islamic thinkers such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. What is refreshing about Powell’s work is that it sets itself apart from recent historiography and canonical texts of imperial studies such as Laura Ann Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power and Edward Said’s Orientalism by focussing on not European creation of the category of race but instead on the racial thoughts and policies of a non-European political entity. In fact, Powell explicitly criticises Said for reinforcing the Self-Other binary despite attempting to bring nuance the Other. Drawing from a wide range of materials ranging from literary texts, newspapers, and travelogues, Powell identifies a distinctly imperialist tone in Egyptian nationalist rhetoric. Admittedly, the thoughts of early Egyptian intellectuals were influenced heavily by the Europeans, but most historiography of decolonisation has chosen to analyse anti-imperial activities of the colonies rather than the adoption of European imperial practices.

Powell argues that her actors, the bureaucrats and the intellectuals, all served to create and emphasise a colonial discourse between the Sudan and Egypt that was similar to the one between Egypt and Great Britain. A literary analysis of some of the contemporary plays, pamphlets, and poetry, argues Powell, demonstrate the paternalist attitude of Egyptians to the Sudanese. The latter are portrayed as fearful, docile, and simple, while the former usually play the role of benign masters. However, the Sudanese are seen as the doorkeepers of Egypt against foreigners. Sudan was thus the internal Other, as memoirs of Egyptians from the Sudan clarify. Citing the memoirs of Ibrahim Fawzi, an Egyptian soldier responsible for the administration of the Sudan under the British but captured and imprisoned for fourteen years after the Mahdi Revolt of 1884, Powell tries to show how Egyptians saw themselves as white in comparison to the black Sudanese. In the case of Fawzi, this was an implicit reference to hierarchy, an acceptance by the Sudanese of his superiority as blackness was associated with slavery. Thus, Powell also points to the ways that the intellectual and political elite distinguished themselves as racially and ethnically superior to the Sudanese, in much the same way that the British colonials distanced themselves from their Egyptian subjects. Thus, Powell brings into discussion racism and slavery without an imperial referent into decolonisation discourse, presenting a complicated mosaic of a “colonized colonizer” that challenges our understanding of imperial power structures.

As Powell reveals, the Sudanese people were portrayed by Egyptians at once docile domestic servants and barbarians who had to be enslaved to be civilised. This view gained strength towards the dawn of the twentieth century. Egyptian Islamic scholars attempted to explain to British abolitionists the nature of slavery under Islam. According to Islamic law, slaves had rights and were not subject to the brutalities experienced by American slaves. Thus, Egypt’s relationship with the Sudan, a relationship projected back to Ramses II was historically a civilising mission3. In the literature of the period, the Sudanese were portrayed as a people requiring Egypt’s benevolent guidance. The British rejected the Egyptian claims, partly influenced by the abolitionists and partly by their greed for expanding their empire into the Sudan. British officials chose to emphasise the differences between the Egyptians and the Sudanese, thus, stirring up nationalist sentiments amongst the Sudanese against the Egyptians. In response, some Egyptian nationalists changed their rhetoric. Most famously, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid began to argue through his newspaper, al-Jarida, that the Sudan was not an Egyptian colony but an integral part of it. This idea gained strength in many quarters in the immediate aftermath of World War I when the British dismantled the Ottoman Empire and tightened their grip on Egypt and Sudan as two separate political entities.

Powell thus explains the critical role Sudan played in Egyptian nationalism. Although the Egyptian views of Great Britain and of themselves had changed over the nineteenth century, their image of the Sudanese had barely changed. Powell argues that this image had persisted from before Muhammad ‘Ali’s invasion of the Sudan due to the odd relationship that characterised the Egyptian-Sudanese power discourse. Powell’s study shows that while on one hand Egyptian nationalists projected an image of Sudan a part of the One Nile Valley community, on the other, they sought the annexation of Sudan and the continuation of Sudanese slavery. Powell’s important contribution to the historiography of nationalism, imperialism, and Middle East Studies is therefore a problematisation of the concept of race, the consideration of the issue apart from its European incarnation, and its regional associations, the application of which would be fruitful to the study of other colonised regions.

1: Egypt invaded the Sudan in 1820 and ruled it until 1882, when Egypt itself fell to the British. During this period, Egypt occupied a curious space as a province of the Ottoman Empire while acting like an independent nation.

2: This included the Ottomans as well as the British. It also included the Egyptians in service of the Sultan, the rulers of Egypt.

3: Although the Egyptian Pharaohs had conquered the Sudan during the reign of the XVIII Dynasty, ironically, Egypt’s XXV Dynasty was Nubian. Egyptian nationalists interpreted this as further proof of the closeness of Egyptian and Sudanese cultures, and therefore the inseparability of Egypt from the Sudan.