NITIN DESAI ON NATIONALISM AND INTERDEPENDENCE
The rise of narrow nationalism in countries across the world has affected humanity in profound, and largely negative, ways. Nitin Desai offers a prescription to pull ourselves back from the brink
A NATIONALISM THAT DETERIORATES INTO NATIVISM WILL END UP REINFORCING SUB-NATIONAL IDENTITIES
WE MUST RESTORE THE PRINCIPLE OF CIVIC NATIONALISM, THAT CONSIDERS ALL WHO ARE DOMICILED LEGITIMATELY IN A TERRITORY
At the outset let me draw a distinction between nationalism and patriotism. Nationalism privileges my country over others and slips into chauvinism that says other countries are always wrong. Patriotism, on the other hand, in the words of George Orwell means “... devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.”
The idea of the nation as the source of political legitimacy emerges only when the sovereignty of princes gives way to the sovereignty of people. There were two rebellions against princes which came about the same time — the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Soon thereafter, early in the 19th century, the Spanish diaspora in Latin America rose against the imperial power to establish creole states, formed and led by people who shared a common language and common descent with those against whom they fought.
Nationalism based on differentiation by language and religion emerged in Europe after the French Revolution. The early emergence of a sense of nationality based on shared language came in India as a reaction to the central power of the Mughals. One can see the rise of the Marathas and the assertion of Dravidian and Bengali identity in these terms. The North Indian Hindi belt has never had this incipient sense of political unity and has always been split into many separate political communities.
Geographically defined nations will have a sense of community which may rest on religion or language. But every community defined by a shared language or religion does not necessarily have a defined territory. The most conspicuous example of this are the Parsis of India. I point this out to emphasise that the desire to connect with others with whom one shares a religion or language does not have to translate into territoriality. But when a sense of community leads to a demand for territory, as it did in the case of Israel, then violence is inevitable.
An individual’s sense of community will depend on their universe of contact, the village or locality where they live and work, the individuals with whom they are socially connected by birth, marriage or friendship. It will be wider when it extends to the universe of concern — the people and places that affect their well-being. The nation or country is just one in a hierarchy of loyalties.
The universe of concern in today’s world cannot be limited to the political jurisdictions that we call nation-states. It has to look above and look below, and what I now wish to elaborate is what this broader universe of concern should be. Today the economy on which we depend and the ecological system in which we survive cuts across political jurisdictions, local and national. Our challenge is to devise a governance regime that reflects this. But this will not happen if we do not segment our political loyalties so that some rest at the local level, some at the national level and some at the global level.
Yet today, in country after country, we are seeing the revival of a narrow nationalism that focuses on ethnic and cultural purity, privileges some ancient past and denies the contribution of other cultures to the sense of national identity. It is a dehumanised nationalism that treats some national residents as second-class citizens. A nationalism that deteriorates into nativism will end up reinforcing sub-national identities. Attack Biharis in Mumbai and you reinforce Bihari nationalism. The same is true of majoritarianism that privileges the religion and language of a dominant but not universal group. That is the sorry spot we are in as far as nationalism is concerned.
What about the countervailing force of globalisation, a force that actually predates nationalism? Historians are always fond of looking for origins of trends and events that shift the paths of history and pushing them further and further back. Now they place the beginning of globalisation to somewhere around the year 1000 AD. A vibrant and dynamic Islamic world in West Asia became very active as a trade intermediary between the two largest economies in the world, China and India, and the Mediterranean countries that were the remnants of the Roman Empire. Arab traders spread through Eurasia all the way from Spain to Guangzhou in Southern China.
The lead actors in the story of globalisation change after the middle of the second millennium. The European nations, invigorated by the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment, become major global players with their voyages of discovery and the big trading companies that competed with and soon displaced the Arabs and the other indigenous Asian traders.
The next big change comes with the industrial revolution and colonial expansion that decimated Asian manufacturing and plundered its treasuries. This is a story that we know all too well in India. Fast forward to the end of the Second World War, decolonisation, the 30-year boom to the mid-seventies, the failure of the socialist experiment in Russia, and we end with the triumphalist declaration about the end of history and the victory of a liberal, globalising capitalist system.
Then in 1980 China entered the global trading game in a spectacular fashion. A decade later India did so as well, though less dramatically than its northern neighbour. This is what has changed the game as the West now pleads for fair trade and the Asians argue even more vigorously for free trade.
The rise of protectionism in the West and the make-in-america demand is also a threat to the outsourcing of manufacturing to locations with low labour costs and a disciplined work force. But mercantilism in the West is not the only threat to export-led industrialisation in the emerging economies. Technological developments are making outsourcing less attractive and global value chains are shrinking as Western companies pull back to their home countries. Foreign capital flows will now be driven more by the attraction of rising demand in the emerging economies.
In earlier times trade contacts flourished because the rulers saw in them a source of revenue for themselves. In our times globalisation rests on a type of market fundamentalism — the belief that the outcome of market forces is morally acceptable. The market organises relations between persons in terms of the equality of the worth of the goods and services exchanged. Even fundamentalists would recognise that in some cases the underlying conditions for the efficient operation of markets do not hold, for instance when there are externalities, or the goods exchanged are public goods. But even here the fundamentalist would seek procedures that simulate a relationship that mimics the market. A contrary view would argue that there must be space for altruism and solidarity, for loyalty and responsibility, and for custom and tradition, in relations between persons — not just in familial relations but also in social and political relations and in the exchange of goods and services. That contrary view was lost and the net consequence of globalisation was a sharp rise in inequality, particularly in the developed world. A part of the reason for the backlash that we see now is a rise in inequality and, in some countries, the rise of a virulent, nativist nationalism.
Basically, the triumphalist vision has been lost. A liberal capitalist economy run by a benevolent West is not the future that we see. The West and Japan are struggling to recover even a decade after the 2008 crisis. Their technological lead is under threat in areas like artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. Yet the global economic governance system shows no signs of reform. That is the spot we are in on the globalisation front.
Let me now bring in a third element which is much more disturbing — the growth of ecological interdependence and ecological threats that all countries face and that an obsession with national sovereignty cannot resolve.
The roots of this emerging ecological crisis lie in the rapid growth of energy and material consumption after the industrial revolution, first in the West and now all over the world. The lifestyles of upper classes that were only sustainable in an unequal society are becoming the consumerist model with democratisation, growth and a reduction in inequalities. Yesterday's luxuries have become today's necessities.
In the final analysis these demands have to be met from what nature regenerates every year and from exhaustible fossil resources of energy and materials. One measure of the growth in demand is the shift in what has been called “Earth Overshoot Day”. This marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year. We meet this deficit by liquidating stocks of ecological resources and accumulating waste, primarily carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In 1970 Earth Overshoot Day was December 29. This year it was July 29.
This means that humanity has increased the ecological debt that it is leaving for future generations by 40 per cent or so of its consumption this year.
Take the threat of climate change. The negotiating process aimed at securing commitments for mitigating the emission of greenhouse gases is caught in a battle between the West (including Japan) arguing for more vigorous action by those who will be responsible for future emissions and the Rest, more particularly China and India, arguing for more substantial commitments by those responsible for past emissions. The climate negotiations started in 1990 when the developed countries accounted for 85 per cent of the cumulative emissions of CO2 since the Industrial Revolution. By 2017 that share came down to 71 per cent with a corresponding rise in the share of developing countries driven by a large increase in China's share from 5 per cent of the global total in 1990 to nearly 13 per cent in 2017. But what is most alarming is that the cumulative emission of carbon dioxide since 1990, when we had accepted that there is a problem, is as large as the cumulative emissions from the start of the industrial revolution to 1990.
The main difficulty in the climate negotiations is that a negotiating culture founded on the classical model of reciprocal quid pro quo concessions, which proved useful when we were dealing with potential benefits, as in the trade negotiations, does not work as well when we are dealing with the sharing of costs.
We do not have a political process that allows us to take into account the rights and obligations that arise because of cross-border externalities. Decisions taken in one political jurisdiction may affect the life chances of citizens in another political jurisdiction. Should they not have the right of participation in these decisions? Within a country constitutional arrangements allow such external effects to be taken into account in different ways in the legislative, executive and judicial processes. However, the practice of democracy today stops at the national level. But there are many decisions taken at the national level which affect citizens of other countries. In the absence of a global constitution and a global government this has to be handled through cooperation in a multilateral framework. The spirit of democracy requires that any such global framework must be based not on the oligarchy of power but the right of any country, big or small, rich or poor, powerful or weak, to participate and influence the decision-making that addresses the problem of interdependence. This is the real challenge of a multinational democracy, when we get one.
The ideals of what a nation should pursue have never been better expressed than in the French Revolution slogan of “liberty, equality and fraternity”. They are also the ideals that should drive our search for effective global governance.
Democracy is the expression of the first ideal. But electoral compulsions drive governments towards short-term solutions for long-term problems.
When it comes to equality, the crucial test is the political rights of all residents. We must restore the principle of civic nationalism, that considers all who are domiciled legitimately in a territory, regardless of their religion or ethnic origin as citizens of that territory. It is under threat in our country and even in the United States, that standard bearer of civic nationalism. Beyond that guaranteeing effective equality of opportunity, if necessary, through affirmative action is as important.
Liberty and legal equality are not enough. We live in societies with a long inheritance of injustice. That is what the ideal of fraternity should address and go beyond procedural equality to provide positive support to those who have fallen behind in the journey of social and economic progress.
We have all grown up as nationalists and some of us as believers in the virtues of the market. Every day when we open the newspaper or watch television, we have been persuaded to become consumerists. We need an epistemic change in the way we view ourselves and our place in the world, so that we look:
■ beyond interdependence and accept that our obligations to each other cannot be defined solely by mutual interests but require mutual responsibility or solidarity;
■ beyond a rampant consumerism towards a style of living that protects the natural systems so essential for our survival;
■ beyond market fundamentalism into creating space for unrequited transfers of goods and services and valuebased bounds on the outcome of marketbased relations;
■ beyond cultural chauvinism into cultivating a culture of diversity that relishes differences, not just tolerates them;
■ beyond individualism that looks at progress not just as individual advancement but as the advancement of the common good of the community; but above all,
■ beyond nationalism and recognise the realities of interdependence and the need to reflect this in partnerships within and between nations.