Sri Lanka and conflagration in West Asia: Need for delinking

A turn towards delinking is necessary to break away from this path of escalating imperial and revanchist violence, starting with the latest round of Israeli aggression in West Asia

For too long, politics and economics, like foreign and domestic affairs, have been viewed as separate. But with Israel’s attack on Iran and ongoing genocide in Gaza—no less than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Rwanda’s proxy war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and China’s likely invasion of Taiwan at an indeterminate point in the future—there can be no question that the multilateral order under US hegemony has collapsed. That system provided the security guarantees for the international financial architecture. Accordingly, its dissolution will have tremendous consequences for trade, aid, and the wider problem of external financing for development for smaller countries like Sri Lanka

With the stunning escalation of Israeli aggression against Iran, the wider world is headed towards disaster. Conflict in the region may be temporarily contained by Iran’s military difficulties in responding. Alternatively, it could explode into a full-scale war of attrition with immediate and bloody consequences. Either way, Israel’s actions are further evidence to regimes all over the globe that the multilateral order under US hegemony has well and truly collapsed. That system was extremely unequal and violent in its own way, to say nothing of its role in the unravelling that is happening today. But aside from US imperial intervention in other countries, it generally inhibited open war between states with the capability of provoking planetary destruction. The contemporary shift to greater interstate conflict creates new existential dangers.

Meanwhile, the current conjuncture of unravelling is incomparable even to the height of the Cold War. Back then, the West had the capacity to manoeuvre the split between the Soviet Union and China while promoting ‘peace’ between regional dictatorships in West Asia and Israel, such as the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty in 1979. In addition, the crisis conditions today do not fall into neat lines of geopolitical division. It is doubtful that countries will organise into clear blocs in the coming conflict, which is likely to deepen in its international ramifications. Regardless, smaller countries like Sri Lanka must prepare themselves for the uncoordinated yet dramatic world war that is likely to be unleashed.

What led to this crisis? There are many factors. Some are recent and others stretch back over decades. In the current moment, an Israeli government, led by right-wing extremists and given carte balance by the US, has taken the opportunity to try and redraw the geopolitical map in the region while pursuing annexation and genocide in occupied Palestine. But these conditions matured with the longer process of global unravelling. Decades of financial and economic crises induced by the spread of neoliberal globalisation since the 1970s have facilitated the rise of increasingly authoritarian regimes, especially in the heart of empire. The situation is rising to fever pitch with the increasing turn to repression of the far-right regime in the US and the resistance likely to follow.

Irreversible crisis

This interplay of events now provokes a maelstrom of political upheaval and violence into which the world is being swallowed. The crisis cannot be reversed. The basic truth is that the old world has been shattered. There is no going back to the previous era, even for the local economic establishment in Sri Lanka that pines for a return to the days of expanding global trade to sustain export-led growth. At the same time, the left, or whatever exists of it in Sri Lanka, also has a choice between abstract demands for peace or unflinching assessment of the situation. There is an important parable in what happened more than one hundred years ago.

Among the predominantly European socialists who organised under the banner of the ‘Second International’ on the eve of World War I, they were split between those who envisioned the continued possibility of peace between the great powers and others who recognised that revolution was the only answer. Jean Jaurès, the titanic French socialist, embodied the contradictions of the first view. As noted by historian James Joll, in 1912, several years before his assassination at the outbreak of World War I, Jaurès gave a speech at the International’s last Congress before the war in Basel, Switzerland. 

He quoted the German poet Schiller, to “call the living to defend themselves against the monster that appears on the horizon” (machine translation). He concluded with the verse’s promise that “I will break the thunderbolts of war that threaten in the clouds.” Jaurès, the magnificent humanist, was later cut down in a Parisian café by a deranged French nationalist before he could act on his oath.

His assassination infused the historical moment with a palpable sense of human tragedy. But for his peers in the International like Lenin, the choice had already been determined by the longer arc of rising militarism in response to capitalist crisis and the resulting antagonisms between imperial powers in Europe. Lenin seized on the cataclysm of World War I to advance the cause of socialist revolution in Russia. Or, to use Lenin’s pithy phrase, to turn “imperialist war into civil war.” Regardless of what one makes of the descent of Bolshevism into dictatorship, at that point in time, it was clear that the stakes involved escalating inter-imperial violence or revolution. 

In contrast, as Angelica Balabanoff, a Russian-Italian communist and fellow delegate to the Second International put it, “Jaurès gave the impression of a man who, having lost all hope of a normal solution of the crisis, relied upon a miracle” (quoted in JP Nettl’s biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 2).

Resisting a broken order

The tragic lesson of Jaurès is clear. In the aftermath of Israel’s assault on Iran, we cannot rely upon miracles to save the world. But at the same time is there a historical force or collective agency on the horizon that embodies the same vision and confidence as Lenin’s revolutionary proletariat? The reality is that the world is entering into a period of anarchic conflict at precisely a moment when there is no clear political successor. The increasingly oligarchic ruling classes in the imperial core led by finance capital have spent the better part of 50 years destroying an effective opposition and leading us to this precipice. 

There will be no mass mobilisation of unions or general strikes to compel regional aggressors like Israel to the negotiating table. At the same time, it would be foolhardy to believe that a muddled coalition led by ideologically diverse and often contradictory regimes under the ‘BRICS’ label can successfully steer the course through the chaos that is likely to come.

We are left, it seems, hoping for peace without an adequate solution to the crisis conditions that have enabled global conflict. Still, like any moment in history in which the global order is being violently remade, we must try and articulate some set of principles or tendencies that represent a progressive impulse. We may not be able to avert the immediate disaster. But smaller countries in the Southern periphery like Sri Lanka face a choice. Will they continue to shield their eyes from the bankruptcy of the global order? Or will they accept that what is dead is dead and demand autonomy to pursue their own strategies for economic recovery and development? In addition to the very real stakes of material survival, it is clearer than ever why Sri Lanka can no longer simply defer to powerful International Financial Institutions (IFIs) like the IMF and World Bank to chart a path out of this intersecting national and global crisis.

For too long, politics and economics, like foreign and domestic affairs, have been viewed as separate. But with Israel’s attack on Iran and ongoing genocide in Gaza—no less than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Rwanda’s proxy war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and China’s likely invasion of Taiwan at an indeterminate point in the future—there can be no question that the multilateral order under US hegemony has collapsed. That system provided the security guarantees for the international financial architecture. Accordingly, its dissolution will have tremendous consequences for trade, aid, and the wider problem of external financing for development for smaller countries like Sri Lanka. 

What funding will even be available in a world consumed by rearmament and conflict? There is a possibility that if the world manages to scrape through another war, it could envision a just compact that includes a set of international institutions committed to freedom and justice. As it stands though, it beggars belief to assume that the working people of any country can place their faith in a broken order. It is already creating so much death and destruction, with even more on the way.

Delinking in the national context

Consequently, a turn towards delinking is necessary to break away from this path of escalating imperial and revanchist violence, starting with the latest round of Israeli aggression in West Asia. The concept of delinking was developed by Egyptian economist Samir Amin. He always insisted that delinking should not be conflated with isolation or autarky. Rather it is a strategy that draws its meaning from resistance to empire. Nevertheless, as Amin also pointed out, it must be defined based on methods and strategies adapted to different national contexts.

In the case of Sri Lanka, the country has a long parliamentary democratic history. Through pressures from below, this system has facilitated the growth of schemes for social welfare and, eventually, experiments in industrial policy and self-sufficiency in food production. Sri Lanka can take confidence in the fact that it has navigated its way through previous bouts of global turbulence, including the Great Depression, malaria epidemic, and World War II during the late colonial era and the crisis of the 1970s. At the same time, we are entering a moment in which, at first sight, it appears that Sri Lanka lacks the previous enabling criteria of capable movements or effective resistance. The country will be compelled to deal with circumstances that in other moments would have catalysed organised parties capable of acting on a far-reaching radical, or even revolutionary, program.

This is not to say extra-parliamentary movements on the left like the People’s Struggle Alliance (PSA) do not exist. But there is far too little work that has been done to articulate the links between theory and practice, specifically in delimiting areas of engagement with the current NPP-led Government while pushing back where needed. Meanwhile, the Government itself may end up never committing to a progressive path of sufficient depth. It appears convinced for now that there are still opportunities for geopolitical manoeuvring and handshake agreements to restore Sri Lanka’s path to stability.

Nevertheless, those among us who consider ourselves realists in the truest sense of the word, regardless of ideological predisposition, must recognise the full scale of the destructive wave that is approaching. We must act with focus and verve to meet the urgency of the moment. Internalising this perspective means reviving and adapting solutions like self-sufficiency, planning, and redistribution. We must work out the details appropriate to the current political and economic context in conjunction with movements and policy makers who are willing to engage.

To construct our own ark to safety, we must begin by exploring our rich history. We can draw inspiration from the examples of previous struggles like the Great Hartal along with analysis produced by technocrats like Gamani Corea and radical economists like GVS de Silva. Sri Lanka can work with countries facing similar challenges by pursuing bold experimentation guided by an intuitive sense of the tradition that first raised important development problems to our attention. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere around the world, people are trying to find their way out of the storm unleashed by unchecked imperial and revanchist aggression. Their efforts, protests, and dissent may not fall neatly into the classical category of working-class internationalism. But the broader principle of solidarity with working people is a start in an increasingly besieged world.