Trump’s nationalism seems to mimic anti-colonial times

While Donald Trump was giving a speech in Poland last week depicting a West whose values, heritage and freedoms are threatened by the weakening of borders and a loss of confidence within, I was reading about the last days when European empires ruled the globe.

Those years, the years of decolonization that followed World War II, are the subject of a book by anthropologist and historian Gary Wilder, “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World.” Wilder follows two black intellectuals and politicians, Aimé Césaire, of Martinique, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, of Senegal, who shared a striking combination of anti-imperialist zeal and desire for continued political union with the French Republic.

Césaire’s Martinique did become a French département. But in Senegal and the once-colonized world writ large, their project never had a chance. Once the age of empire ended, political separation became inevitable.

Wilder argues that their vision was complex and potentially prophetic.

They argued for their own race’s civilizational genius, for a negritude that turned a derogatory label into a celebration of African cultural distinctiveness.

And they believed that part of the West’s tradition, the universalist ideals they associated with French republicanism and Marxism, could be used to create a political canopy — a transnational union — beneath which humanity could be (to quote Césaire) “more than ever united and diverse, multiple and harmonious.”

This vision was rejected by both the colonized and the colonizers. But in certain ways it was revived after the Cold War’s end, with the European Union and the Pax Americana taking the place of the pan-ethnic, multicultural French Union envisioned by Césaire and Senghor.

Of late, though, this project has run into some of the same difficulties that made theirs an impossibility. The cultural reality that Césaire and Senghor grasped — that civilizational difference is real and powerful and lasting — has a way of undoing the political unity for which they fondly hoped.

On the evidence of recent European controversies, it is hard enough for a political union to reconcile the different branches of the West — German and Mediterranean, French and AngloSaxon. It becomes harder when that same union is trying to manage a society so multicultural as to lack religious or linguistic or historical common ground. And it becomes harder still when your ruling elite’s cosmopolitanism is essentially superficial, more “eating ethnic food and cheering for Obama” than “celebrating negritude while reading Goethe.”

Thus, the nationalist backlash against cosmopolitanism, embodied in its starkest form by Trump, is somewhat equivalent to the anti-colonial nationalism that rejected Senghor and Césaire’s unionism as hopelessly naive.

Their fantasy of a post-imperial union between north and south, white and black, was in their times just that.

But as a striking sort of African-European hybrid, as prophets of a world where the colonized and the colonizers had no choice but to find a way to live together, the West’s future may belong to them in some altogether unexpected way.