Sunday May 05, 2024
Sunday May 05, 2024
Thursday, 26 October 2023 00:30 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
I repose trust in the abiding democratic ethos of Sri Lanka. It has never succumbed to dictatorship of the right or left, despite several civil wars. The endgame has always been electoral. This resilient electoral democracy has demonstrated a proclivity for social welfarism. Savage capitalism has never been sustainable here, nor has a foreign policy alien to the values of Nonalignment.
I have been proudest of my country when it elected a leader from a non-elite background who implemented a rare, successful model of growth with equity (November 1988); defeated a ultraleft-xenophobic insurrection (November 1989); decimated one of the world’s most powerful separatist-terrorist militias, following it up with a clear diplomatic victory in a UN arena (May 2009); and peacefully overthrew an irrational autocrat in a massive uprising of the people (July 2022).
I have been disappointed mainly when we have won the war but lost the peace (post-2009) and won a peaceful revolution (July 9th 2022) but lost the post-revolutionary succession to a counterrevolution (July 20th 2022).
Ranil’s Hamas tunnel
Addressing the UNP Convention Ranil Wickremesinghe committed to the Presidential election on constitutional schedule next year, but his ‘electoral reforms’ could be an escape tunnel a la Hamas:
‘… It is noteworthy that the Commission’s mandate specifically is “effecting changes to the election system and the mode of conducting elections.” No distinction has been made on a single or more election. It is, therefore, fair to assume that it will cover local, provincial, presidential, and parliamentary elections as well as referendums…’
As the ST Politics column goes on to underscore:
“…effecting changes to the election system and the mode of conducting elections of this country with the promulgation of the 1978 Constitution of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka...” This preambular provision seeks to not only change the election system but also the mode of conducting elections. Whilst the parameters set out are broad, it must be borne in mind that the presidential form of governance and the presidential elections were the direct outcome of the 1978 Constitution…’ (ibid)
Still, I remain optimistic because the island’s democratic ethos will reassert itself in 2024 either through the scheduled Presidential election or in a Jacobin or [Hugo] ‘Chavista’ reprise of the Aragalaya, if the election date is elasticised by ‘electoral reform’.
Generational revolution
Sri Lanka has the chance of renewal, of making a fresh start, through a generational change in the country’s leadership.
What Sajith Premadasa and Anura Dissanayake have in common is more significant that what differentiates them. They were born only a year apart and are in their mid-50s. Generational change is one of the biggest shifts a society can experience. So too a polity.
We need renewal, revival, reform, renovation. Sajith and Anura (in whichever order) are vastly preferable to Ranil in that they view reform from the standpoint of someone in their mid-50s. Being two decades younger than Ranil, they are more aware of contemporary Sri Lankan society and its problems. They are more progressive, and bring less baggage, a younger gaze, more compassion, more creativity and more energy to the task of regeneration.
In 2024 we can pick either Sajith or Anura to lead the country. If as President either needs to be hedged against/balanced-off, we can ensure the other as Prime Minister at the parliamentary election.
Sri Lanka and a multipolar world
Sri Lanka needs a world in which both halves of our best self, the self which once enabled us to enjoy a high Human Development and punch above our weight in world affairs, can flourish: (a) electoral democracy and (b) solidarity with the global South and dynamic adherence to Nonalignment.
Competitive electoral democracy is what we get from the West/North and have in common with it.
Our sense of independence, national dignity, sovereign nationhood and collective strength is what we get from the East/South and what we share with it.
Sri Lanka thus stands at the interface of the values of East and West and represents the synthesis of both sets of values.
Sri Lanka needs both West and East, and a balance between them, so that neither has hegemony. It needs what Simon Bolivar and Jose Marti defined as ‘global equilibrium’.
Sri Lanka must pursue a foreign policy that serves its enlightened national interest, i.e., the goal of ‘world equilibrium’ which entails countervailing global hegemonism.
For the global South, the nadir in world affairs were the 20 years 1991-2011: the dissolution of the USSR; the ‘unipolar moment’ (Charles Krauthammer); the neoliberal Washington Consensus on economics; the destruction of Yugoslavia; the invasion of Iraq and bombing of Libya; the lynching of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.
When I served as Ambassador/Permanent Representative (2007-2009) to the UN-Geneva, Sri Lanka was able to buck that trend at the crucial vote in May 2009 and beat R2P by energetically tapping into and channelling the latent dynamic towards multipolarity, signalled by the newly formed BRICS and Putin’s landmark speech at Munich 2008.
Postwar Sri Lanka dissipated that achievement by displacing our successful coalition-building project with swings between ultranationalist unilateralism (2010-2015, 2019-2022) and abject capitulation to the West (2015-2019).
In 2023, the global struggle between multipolarity and unipolar (Western) hegemony has reached a crucial crossroads. A turbulent transition with ‘storm-centers’ in Gaza and Ukraine, points to a more multipolar world. A multipolar world is pluralist and democratic—not necessarily in terms of its individual members, but in terms of its representative and diverse character as a world order. It also enables equilibrium, which unipolarity does not.
Imperial irrationality
The current churning will accelerate the trend towards multipolarity and weaken the hegemony of the collective West, not because of military or economic blows aimed by the West’s enemies but because the West itself has nihilistically destroyed the structures, norms and practices of the world order while being unable build a credible, viable, consensual alternative model.
There is a reason: a viable new global model would be democratic, consensually reflecting the changed strengths among world powers, while the Western hegemonic project is precisely to reverse or contain those changes, not reflect them.
The world order was being managed in a relatively rational and stable manner in the post-Cold War years, so long as George HW Bush was US President with James Baker III as Secretary of State, because they operated within the paradigm of Realism. This was also the case, for the most part, on President Barack Obama’s watch (2008-2016) which saw the Iran nuclear deal and normalisation with Cuba.
The Libyan lynching 2011 and Ukraine 2014 in the Obama years were exceptions emanating from the hawkish neoliberal-interventionist quartet Hillary Clinton-Samantha Power-Susan Rice-Victoria Nuland.
Successors Trump and Biden abandoned Barack Obama’s basically balanced outlook. ‘The Coming Anarchy’ that Robert Kaplan (Victoria Nuland’s spouse) warned about, has come ironically from the USA itself and its unilateral reordering of the global system. This unilateralism resulted from the victory of two ideologies, which initially competed and then commingled. These were neoliberalism with its high-tide in the Clinton-Blair period and illustrated by the destruction of former Yugoslavia (1999) and neoconservatism as exemplified in the administration of George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq under the pretext of ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
Under the spell of hubristic ideological unreason, the USA attacked and dismantled existing states—not merely terrorist militias—and pulled out of a number of nuclear arms control agreements with Russia. These actions demolished crucial pillars of the architecture of the world order.
As reality dawned slowly on Russia and China, they began reasserting themselves, which led the West to double-down. In so doing it abandoned one of the basics of Kissinger’s foreign policy: keeping China and Russia apart while carefully managing relations with both, avoiding frontal confrontation with either. Today, the West has driven China and Russia back together.
On Ukraine, the West deviated in three senses from its Realist policy paradigm.
i.Desisting from moving the de facto borders of NATO up to Russia (especially through the Nuland-driven US political intervention in the Ukrainian events of 2014). Moving NATO eastwards towards Russia, especially Ukraine, had been warned against by George Kennan, Henry Kissinger and Ambassador William Burns.
ii.Abandonment of the policy of ‘containment’ of Russia in favour of an aggressive strategy involving warfare by proxy aimed at the defeat of Russia and the victory of Ukraine. Providing Ukraine not merely with defensive weaponry but offensive ATACMS rocketry now striking into Russia is a major deviation from traditional US policy.
iii.Keeping the ‘central theatre’, the West/North (and Europe in particular) free of the danger of ‘hot war’ with nuclear superpower Russia by limiting the armed confrontations of nuclear powers to the periphery of the world system (e.g., Korea, Vietnam).
In eschewing a peace-settlement in Ukraine and escalating wildly instead, the West abandoned its traditional means of managing Moscow: expanding or at least maintaining economic and educational-cultural ties so as to enmesh Russia and cultivate a pro-western Russian elite. This policy which served the West well during the détente decade starting 1975, now lies wrecked by the West.
Kissinger’s tripolar grand-strategy was to draw in Russia and China to co-manage and ensure the economic-financial and political stability of the capitalist world system. This strategy of co-optation worked well during the economic meltdown of 2008. But now the US has tried to evict Russia from and contain China in the economic field.
The West’s new Russia policy smacks of economic and cultural apartheid. With the Middle East hotting up, the USA will find that Russia, with significant political assets in the theatre, won’t be there as a quasi-partner to help tamp things down.
The savage arbitrariness of economic sanctions against Russia and the confiscation (theft) of its funds, has meant greater resilience and self-sufficiency on the part of Russia which will not trust the West again, for generations.
It has also generated several major thrusts towards economic cooperation and autonomy on the part of the BRICS Plus. Hillary Clinton recently said Putin’s adventurism brought NATO right up to its borders. The flipside is that NATO’s adventurism has made important economic players take their distance from the West, enhance their collective economic and financial autonomy and thereby provide Russia greater economic space and options than it had before.
In ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR’ (1950) Stalin envisioned the economic potentialities of an axis of the world’s largest and most populous countries, Russia and China: a parallel world market, a parallel world economy, constricting the West-led sphere. With its Russophobic offensive the West may make Stalin’s dream come true.
Exemplified by President Biden’s speech in which he equated Putin with Hamas and called for the US Congress to vote through US $ 100 billion to Israel and Ukraine, the West has decided to go on the offensive at one and the same time, in two theatres and two types of conflicts, against two categories of foes: a terrorist militia and a state which is a nuclear peer-power. This is classic imperial overstretch born of imperial irrationality.
Neoconservatism and neoliberalism are on a continuum. President Trump shattered global norms by assassinating Iran’s iconic commander Qassem Suleimani when Iran and the USA weren’t at war. President Biden has just put the USA in a position it hasn’t been in for decades—in a combat role in a war that isn’t its own, in support of a nuclear-armed ally that can handle itself. The US Navy’s shootdown of homemade rockets out of Yemen, is the symbolic precursor.
Hamas, terrorism, resistance
Terrorism must be condemned and combated—but must also be comprehended. I was with my father Mervyn de Silva in Baghdad (1975) when he conducted his exclusive interview with Abu Nidal, who evolved in a decade into what a US Dept of Justice publication (1986) called a “master terrorist…considered the most dangerous terrorist in the world”.
By contrast, Hamas is not purely or primarily a terrorist movement. It is an organic, armed movement of people’s resistance and national liberation, which to its discredit and detriment also engages in terrorism. Hamas has a terrorist aspect: it fights the IDF (killing 350, including elite unit commanders on Oct 7th) but targets civilians too.
One cannot grasp the tragic, horrific dualism (IDF and civilian targets) of Hamas and the history-making incursion on October 7th, without understanding Frantz Fanon:
“ The native is always on the alert…He is overpowered but not tamed; he is treated as an inferior but he is not convinced of his inferiority. He is patiently waiting until the settler is off his guard to fly at him. The native’s muscles are always tensed. You can’t say that he is terrorised, even apprehensive. He is in fact ready at a moment’s notice to exchange the role of the quarry for that of the hunter.” (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth)
Israel has killed civilians in much vaster numbers and for four decades longer than Hamas. Israel’s ravaging of Gaza and unending massacre of children will turn many bereaved parents into resistance fighters.
As someone whose book on Fidel’s Ethics of Violence has been reviewed in quarters as diverse as International Affairs (the Chatham House journal) and Radical Philosophy, and regarded a contribution to the Marxist debate on violence by Emeritus Prof Nick Hewlett in his book Blood and Progress: Violence in Pursuit of Emancipation (2016), I remain committed to my idea that liberation movements should (at least in their own strategic interests) occupy the moral high ground as did Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Che Guevara, an exemplary ethicist, was so taken by Fanon’s writings that he gave an interview to his widow Josie (Revolution Africaine, December 1964). Answering Josie Fanon’s question on Africa, Che said:
“The positive aspects include…the hate which colonialism has left in the minds of the people, the very clear consciousness which the peoples possess of the profound differences existing between an African man and the colonizer, the conviction that there can never be sincere friendship between them except after the definitive departure of the colonizer…” (Che Guevara Speaks, New York, 1967, p 102)
There was no contradiction between Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon on colonialism and emancipatory violence.
Fidel Castro eschewed the terrorist tactics of the Algerian FLN but he was a passionate, uncritical partisan of its liberation war. Immediately after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution (1959) Fidel shipped weapons to the FLN which was still at war, and later (1961) to Ahmed Ben Bella’s newly-independent Algeria.
Palestine is the oldest issue on the agenda of the global South; the last decolonisation and apartheid problem, already noted in Bandung 1955 and Belgrade 1961 (at the founding of the Nonaligned Movement).
Politics means decision. Today, the concrete historical and political choice is between settler-colonial, apartheid Israel’s war of extermination and expansionism, and the ‘Axis of Resistance’ spearheaded by Hamas and Hezbollah. One cannot remain disengaged until an unsullied liberation struggle/movement (or the next Buddha) happens along.
