The white man’s burden

When Samuel Huntington first published his thesis of ‘The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order’ in 1996, he was laughed upon.

It was thought that he was making a case for the ‘white world’ to have another enemy as big as Hitler’s Germany or the Communist Soviet Union which could give reason for it to continue to spend money on retaining its military domination of the world. That Islam, which Huntington referred to as the other side of the civilisational divide, could be one such adversary. He failed to indicate the means to such an inevitable clash still quite wrapped in conventional applications.

By 1989, capitalist democracy had vanquished pre-WWI Imperialism, post-WWI Fascism and post-WWII Communism. Towards the end of WWII, the likely victors gathered the world at Bretton Woods to sign them on to a plan to institute a global order which would run on the Western model of a ‘capitalist economy’ and a ‘democratic political system’ ensuring the ‘West’s’ centrality in a reinstituted world order. Having overcome all, it aimed to paint the world in its own colour. Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist, sealed that stage of finality in the political evolution of the world with his book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, published in 1992. It is probable that Huntington countered Fukuyama’s thesis through his ‘Clash of Civilisations’ riposte. Fukuyama seemed exuberant while Huntington, initially dismissed, now seems prophetic.

Soon after, in 1998, a German professor at the University of Bremen, Dieter Senghaas, wrote ‘The Clash within Civilisations’ expanding on what Huntington had proffered and building on how such intercultural conflicts may germinate within civilisations, and the means to manage such conflicts. Keep in mind, the Al-Qaeda by then was a reality and had manifested itself with attacks on some of the US interests in Africa. The years between 1998 and 2008 was a period of an exclusive and entrenched conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere of an ongoing war between those who fought in the name of Islam and the Western civilisation.

Economic depression in 2008 brought home another reality. The capitalist system suddenly seemed to have run its course. Economists like Thomas Piketty and George Soros brought home the inadequacies of capitalism which had engendered another critical divide within societies between the 99 percent ‘have-nots’ and the one percent ‘have-all(s)’. Society stood starkly divided on the upward-mobility and prosperity scale. In the US, such deprivation became more noticeable in ‘non-college going whites’, mostly belonging to rural mid-western communities. These over time became the locales where the Church and white supremacists held sway.

Europe’s societies met another consequence with similar results, with the fragmentation of the family system when fewer people got ‘regularly’ married and even fewer gave birth to children. Soon the aged and the less productive outnumbered those who could sustain them. Retaining economies with required growth inevitably needed labour which had to be imported from where such resource was in abundance. Imperatives of an economy meant inviting people of alien cultures which gave birth to multiculturalism.

The phenomenon was initially enriching but later created a crisis of identity among the natives when their cultural ethos mutated or at the very least co-existed. In the US, meanwhile, urban America moved on gorging on the richness of such multiculturalism, while rural America was left to sulk with a sense of isolation and irrelevance.

People who had migrated not only found jobs for being better qualified and more creative and thus productive, they also replaced lazy locals who neither were equipped for the kind of jobs that the information and technology based economy could offer nor were keen to match their skills to move up the ladder. They had given up on college too even as students from all over the world populated their world class universities. What you got were prosperous, hard-working and productive émigrés establishing their cultures, and natives that were unskilled, uneducated and unemployed – isolated within their own habitats bordering on reverse ghettoisation. In Europe, the migrants populated city centres in massive collectivism. Such disaggregation was only consequential.

A creeping sense of alienation and irrelevance soon became a sentiment of hate. Politicians sensed the opportunity and cashed in on it as they moved for the kill. President Trump recently questioned the right of such naturalised citizens to sit in the US Congress. His exact words were more searing. Undoubtedly then, Brenton Tarrant, the monster of the Christchurch killings, hailed Trump as the leader of a resurgent White Power. White power isn’t new; it has existed before in the shape of the Ku-Klux-Klan in the US and the Skinheads of the UK who employed racial hatred and bigotry as their currency.

Restraints of law and a sense of shared stakes borne out of prosperity in rapidly progressing economies subsumed the white supremacists’ fears into acceptable levels of inclusivity – till free-market and laissez faire economics betrayed its partial gains for a selected few. Jobs went to those who could win those corporate profits, and these weren’t the left-behind natives. This brought up latent hate.

Right-wing politics around nationalism in Western societies became the anchor around which such hate has bloomed. It has since become mutually supportive for both sides as an electorate fired by such racial passion raises a leadership which in turn supports exclusivity. The sentiment is now so pervasive that someone as successful and as emblematic of inclusive and integrated societies like Angela Merkel finds it difficult to continue in politics. Brexit in many ways is an effort to rediscover such exclusionary existence.

What must be the way out of this horrible episode of hate and bigotry as evinced in Christchurch? Or may have the making of it in so many events of similar nature spread all over Western societies? Two fundamental separations will need to be created. One, that crime too has internationalised on the back of globalised politics, economics and multiculturalism spawned by the two. It finds succour from the same protocols of connectivity which gave us an interconnected world. Cooperative mechanisms must monitor such association for timely interdiction.

Two, a sentiment of hate or reprisal must be disaggregated and dealt with remedial interventions for the different stages leading to such an eventuality. Politics may stop using hate as currency. A system of democratic governance needs to be revisited; it must revert to be more inclusive.

An economic order which can address the shortcomings of the present form of capitalism needs immediate attention. What can make the current shape of capitalism more empathetic and inclusive? Is the Chinese order the answer or will the Islamic economic model ultimately tend to the poor and the deprived? It is time to get back to Bretton Woods or Davos or Jeddah and Dubai to seek the answers before we become fodder for the next series of hate wars. It is time to replace the challenge of a clash with a dialogue between civilisations. Jacinda Ardern has showed us the way.

Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com