The Garden versus the Jungle
The real point is whether we could all live in peace and be tolerant of our differences, as war only begets more war.
TRAVELLING in the deep jungles of Danum Valley in Sabah last month, I had little access to Internet and more time to reflect on why we are in this permacrises mess.
In 2022, the European Union’s (EU) foreign policy chief, Joseph Borrell, made an official speech that “Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build – the three things together.”
“Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden ... The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.”
It is no coincidence that US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan used the term “small yard and high fence” last year in regard to Us-china relations.
It is this deep “garden West versus jungle Rest” that is at the heart of today’s rift.
Joseph Borrell unconsciously revealed the primal fear within the West, Europe being the old West and America the New West, that the Rest will invade and destroy the Garden.
The war drums and continual fighting at the borders of the West and the Rest not only define the line between Western civilization and perceived Rest barbarism but also show that the West’s discovery of science and rationality is really a cloak over its own raw emotions of identity and insecure power status.
Nowhere was this more evident than the Ukraine and Gaza wars.
The West explains both conflicts in terms of standing on principle – the enemy struck the first blow and is therefore the bully – ignoring history and context, why the other side did what they did.
The Ukraine conflict basically pushed Russia out of the Western garden, just as the Gaza conflict revealed that Israelis as a Western outpost can commit what most of the world sees as genocide on Palestinians with impunity.
The West draws its foundational ideas and philosophy from Christian, Greek and Roman culture. The Bible preached that Man lived pristinely in the Garden of Eden, until Eve ate the forbidden apple and they were driven out into the wilderness.
But in the 15th century, Europe emerged out of its Dark Ages largely learning from Arab, Christian and Jewish scholars in Andalucia Greek, Chinese, Indian and Persian philosophy, mathematics and science.
It was the fall of eastern Roman capital of Constantinople in 1453 that cut off European trade to the East, forcing Genoan, Portuguese and Spanish traders to seek access to the East via Africa and Americas.
Thus, the Catholic Papal Bulls or edicts of Dum Diversas (1452), Romanus Pontifex (1455) and Inter Caetera (1493) gave Portugal and Spain the rights of “discovery”, meaning dominion or ownership of terra nullius (empty lands) through the right to invade “infidel” (Saracens) territories and perpetually subjugate “soulless” people, which also meant that non-christians could be sold to slavery.
The discovery doctrine was used in a famous 1823 US case to confirm that land discovered have rights of possession over and above indigenous native rights.
This doctrine was only repudiated last March by the present Pope. It was only in 2007 that the United Nations promulgated the Declaration of Rights for Indigenous People.
The West cannot deny that its rise to hegemony was due to the conquest of colonial lands and seas in which resources were exploited to power its own development.
During colonial history, there are many cases of genocide of indigenous people, a tragedy that is still unfolding today. Decolonisation is a phase in which the Rest is seeking its own path of sustainable growth.
A recent Twitter comment by the former Nambian President Hage Geingob that Germany “committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions,” showed how some of the Rest think about their former colonial masters.
He “expresses deep concern with the shocking decision communicated by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany on Jan 12, 2024, in which it rejected the morally upright indictment brought forward by South Africa before the International Court of Criminal Justice that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza”.
Germany has only formally apologised for its genocide history in Namibia in 2021 and promised aid of one billion euros over 10 years to aid Namibian infrastructure and development.
One could conclude that what the West is doing is to protect its garden, giving it the right to eliminate the weeds and to fight to keep the jungle out.
The trouble with this argument is whether the garden can exist independent of the jungle since both are on the same planet? After all, some in the jungle feel that they are more civilised than those in the garden.
The real point is whether we could all live in peace and be tolerant of our differences, as war only begets more war. Israel can undertake its brutal action on the Palestinians only because it possesses nuclear bombs, whereas its neighbours do not.
This only propels nuclear proliferation, which the West cannot fully control fully without negotiations with the Rest.
The United States can no longer afford forever wars since its military budget (3.5% of gross domestic product or GDP) already exceeds its annual trade deficit (2.6% of GDP).
The €50bil aid given to Ukraine alone this year is equivalent to 26% of the EU budget by commitment or more than a third by payments. War is today financed by printing money or incurring more debt.
Wars will end with messy negotiated peace when both sides become exhausted. In an unthinkable nuclear war but an inevitable outcome in current trajectory, gardens will not survive and all will return to nature.