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Western Intellectuals and the Tunisian Revolt: They really don’t seem to get the point…

First Take on Tunisian Uprising (18 January 2011)

See updates and additions at the bottom of the post

The Tunisian revolt of the past few weeks appears to have taken intellectuals that are organically linked to the post-war hegemonic bloc by surprise. One of the key intellectuals, the “realist” scholar Stephen Walt, who tends to be driven more by hubris, self-assuredness than reflexivity or intellectual humility (his blog on the web pages of Foreign Policy magazine is an exercise in rather crude self-dramatisation) and apparently ignoring important anti-hegemonic movements of the past decade or more, asserted that the Tunisian uprising “won’t spread”. As scholars of his ilk are wont, Walt tends to be obsessed with his own powers of prediction and assuredness – not unlike an amusement park trickster or board-walk fortune teller – than drawing any lessons from history.

His analysis of the situation seems, at best, to be shaped by cognitive dissonance – a refusal, in this instance, to consider that the Tunisian uprising may well be part of a global movement against Washington’s continued support for despotic regimes around the world. In his post, Walt seems unable to see where he may be wrong; he speaks of US militarism in terms of “us” and “them”. It is not surprising, then, that he would indulge in cognitive dissonance. As one friend and scholar suggested (when I raised US support for Saddam Hussein over many years, and the probability that the 2003 invasion was, in part, a smokescreen for Washington’s complicity with despots and undemocratic regimes) “we Americans like things to be clean”. Anyway, instead of trying out his powers of prediction, Walt may want to consider the idea that the Tunisian revolt may be the latest in a series of crushing defeats of United States dominance and of the Washington Consensus which have included significant challenges across Latin America. (Readers are urged to read both Walt reports in full).

The protests in Tunisia were inspired by popular opposition to misery, hunger, unemployment, elitism and official corruption. The Tunisian state, as with very many states in Africa and Latin America over the past 30 years, have typically followed the postulates of “the American model” that has been exported to the rest of the world through the World Bank and the US State Department. This model, essentially Neo-Liberalism, has by and large proven to be disastrous for the poor and for rural people it has been destructive. Actually, inequality has increased in the three most prominent countries that have implemented the attendant policies most vigorously; South Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom. The “American model” has been challenged across the so-called developing world. Tunisia may well be the latest of these challenges and not the first.

Resistance Against “the American Model”

We should not fool ourselves about the basis for the Tunisian uprising; it was a popular resistance to their government – which was a darling of the European world. The European world refers, here, not to a cartographic reality, and includes Europe’s offshoots. There are at least two things that can be said about the deposed government. The main reason for the uprising (and its success, so far) of the Tunisian revolt is because that country was, essentially, a classic neo-patrimonial state kept in place mainly by Europeans, especially by Washington – not unlike Zaire over a 30 year period.  Under such a regime, there appears, outwardly at least, to be normal forms of state and of governance including a bureaucracy, government officials (presumably chosen on merit) and perhaps even elections. Indeed, in 2009, the deposed Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was re-elected for a fifth term with close to a 90% majority. In reality, under a neo-patrimonial regime the state is treated like the private property of the ruler, with significant benefits to its retinue. One of the best post-war examples of such a regime was Mobutu Sese Seko, whose rise to and consolidation of power in Zaire was driven from Washington. This brings us to the second point.

As a client of Washington, it is almost always important to adopt “the American model” – in this sense it would include minimalist democracy and liberalisation, both of which were outstandingly explained then undressed by Rita Abrahamsen in Disciplining Democracy. I will urge interested readers to buy a copy of the book from Zed Books. Anyway, in the minimalist conception of democracy promoted through the World Bank and the US State Department, Africans are expected to go to elections intermittently, with little to no continued democratic participation in the way the country is run. After the election, the political economic direction of the country becomes the domain for economist at the World Bank, Western donors, private corporate interests and elites who act as a type of comprador class. Under these conditions, democracy, becomes a vehicle for the maintenance of elite dominance and control.

With specific reference to Tunisia, obeisance to the Washington Consensus led to fiscal, political and social austerity. Under the tutelage of the World Bank, the Tunisian government insisted upon a decrease in subsidies, privatisation, poor convertibility of the country’s currency, vast land sales with foreign ownership of real estate, leasing of tourist resort, patterns of excessive consumerist consumption, special concessions to big business and business monopolies. All of which resulted, inevitably, perhaps, in serious rent-seeking; illegal rewards and concessions to elites.

Tunisia May be the Latest in a Series of Events

I would insist, again, that I have no predictive or prophesising powers – apart from associating myself with the general, normative, movement towards greater solidarity among left-wing governments, as has been suggested in Latin America. A distinct pattern has been developing over the past decade which suggests that countries in Latin America and Africa have started to resist the continued imposition of “the American model”. It is worth noting the following praise heaped on the new deposed regime in Tunisia by former US secretary of state Colin Powell:

“Our bilateral relationship is very, very strong… We are great admirers of Tunisia and the progress that has been achieved under president Ben Ali’s leadership.”

Former Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsvelt, whom, we should recall, courted Saddam Hussein for years before Washington sought to purge its own memory (with the invasion of Iraq in 2003) of one chapter of its vile complicity with despots and dictators said:

“We have a very long relationship with Tunisia… Tunisia is a moderate Muslim nation that has been and is today providing very constructive leadership in the world.”

While there is the slight possibility that South Africa’s membership of the BRIC group is a hint at moving away from the neo-liberal orthodoxy adopted late in the Mandela period and successfully implemented under Thabo Mbeki’s government, in Latin America indigenous (and in some places more autochthonous forms of) leadership has emerged in Bolivia, Equador and Venezuela that has challenged World Bank orthodoxy and US dominance in the hemisphere. The high-water mark of Latin American resistance was probably the Cochabamba resistance to privatisation of water. The matter is well documented. It should be said; to the extent that Cochabamba represented a revolution, it is, yet, incomplete.

There have also been movements elsewhere in Latin America where people have stood up against European interventions – in particular the policies that have emanated from Washington over the last three decades of the past century. In Argentina, the former president Nestor Kirchner who died last year, a Peronist (not a socialist, it should be said) defied the Bank and the IMF, and at one stage “forced the renegotiation of over sixty contracts with privatised utilities, and reduced the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to a whimper”. It should be said that Kirchner’s greatest achievement was probably standing up to the Europeans, and starting to address the brutal crimes of Argentina’s past. (See this document for a standard liberal story of Kirschner’s achievements – note the framing of Kirchner, and word association: “left-leaning” and “cohort” which casts aspersions of left-wing politics). Anyway, in Argentina, addressing crimes of the past included dealing with the role that the US played in propping up militarist regimes, despots and dictatorships as much as it was about rolling back the Washington Consensus.

On 13 April 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported that Argentina had renegotiated an estimated $103 billion in defaulted debt. Under the new terms, bondholders, most of whom were Europeans (including the North Americans) received on average one-third of their original investments. At the time, Kirchner argued that “a more generous settlement would have been a burden on Argentine taxpayers”. The key, here, is that not only socialist regimes have stood up against the Wall Street-Washington Axis. In fact, “tax-payers’ money” is one of the great concerns of the Right wing, most notably in the US. It ought, therefore, be fairly tolerable for this “value” to be spread around…

Also in Latin America, increasingly over the past decade, indigenous Bolivians – miners, peasants and workers – have asserted their sovereignty and sought to regain control over their previously privatised water, oil and gas industries and improving political representation and participation. This resistance was correlated with the struggle for re-nationalisation, a wave of discontent over the broad economic reforms carried out at the behest of the Bank-Fund and general opposition to continued interference by Washington in the national politics of sovereign countries in the region. As such, the past decade has seen upheavals in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina and Chiapas, Mexico, where the austerity programmes promoted and implemented by the IMF have bedevilled societies.  This austerity – especially increased inequality, misery and unemployment – were, no doubt, at the centre of the resistance in Tunisia, and provoked the protests of people like Lahseen Naji and Mohamed Bou’azizi, who, it may be said, chose to die because they refused to continue living on their knees.

We should make no bones about the fact that the uprising in Tunisia was against the status quo that underpins liberal capitalist hegemony. We should not be fooled by the protestations from European intellectuals, by wilful obfuscations and/or expressions of Ptolemaic parochialism.

In this respect, to the extent that the Tunisian uprising does represent a “dilemma” for the US, as Time Magazine suggested, it may be only because it represents a surge against Washington’s dominance, abuse of dominance, control and intervention in most of Africa and Latin America. The US should not, automatically be assumed to have a say in how societies are governed. So, it is quite arrogant to assume that the dilemma is about what the US wants in the Arab world. We know, from past experience, what the “American model” has caused in parts of Africa and Latin America.

Ultimately, what happened in Tunisia is primarily about the Tunisians; much the same as what has been happening in Brazil, Bolivia or Venezuela. In deeper global historical terms, it might also be about the receding hegemony of the US.

Stephen Walt may be right, that there may be no emulation effect resulting from the Tunisian uprising. For his sake we hope there is none. However, for the sake of indigenous people around the world, for workers and peasants, the poor, the marginalised and the weak in those societies who have been under the yoke of US dominance and control, either directly or through local proxies, for most of the past century, we can hope that the emancipatory impulse that may be detected in the Tunisian uprising inspires people around the world. Of course, European intellectuals will nitpick about some traffic light that no longer works or that some rich person has lost money (and they, inevitably, couch it in the moral terms of European sensibilities) but emancipation is much more than that….

What does seem clear enough is that if we look back at the past 10 years or so, there has been a rising tide of resistance against US dominance and control; the exceptions being, of course, Afghanistan and Iraq – but both those cases are shaped more by the brute force of militarism. Actually, war and militarism may, perhaps, be as much as the US has to offer the world in the early 21st century. Surely the Tea Party movement and the surge towards the right (what I would call the Arizona Process*), the increase in hate groups, rise in homophobia, increase in inequality, high levels of unemployment while large corporations are being bailed out and their executives being brought into the inner sanctum of the Presidency and the unproblematic way in which “capitalism” can replace “democracy” as the defining feature of this country, kind of makes a joke of the conditioned identity of superiority, exceptionalism, indispensability and the mantra that “Americans are freedom-loving people”.

With respect to the Arizona Process mentioned above, see the footnote to this essay. What I refer to with this process is the way that the Right took over the state of Arizona (legally, it should be said) and reduced much of the government and social services to rubble. They also initiated pogrom-type actions against immigrants – a tendency that appears to be spreading other states, like Florida and Utah. In terms of Florida, the large Latino population might slow down this process. Anyway, the Arizona process was well laid out in an article by Ken Silverstein, in Harper’s Magazine last October. The following was transcribed from the article:

The general unsightliness of the capitol makes it a fitting home for today’s Arizona legislature, which is composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists, and cranks. Collectively they have bankrupted the state through a combination of ideological fanaticism on the Republican right and acquiescence and timidity on the part of GOP moderates and Democrats. Although dozens of states are facing budget crises, the situation in Arizona is arguably the nation’s worst, graver even than in California. A horrific budget deficit has been papered over with massive borrowing and accounting gimmickry, and the state may yet have to issue IOUs to employees and vendors. All-day kindergarten has been eliminated statewide, and some districts have adopted a four-day school week. Arizona’s state parks, despite bringing in 2 million visitors and $266 million annually, have lost 80 percent of their budget, with up to two thirds of the parks now in danger of closure. The legislature slashed the budget for the Department of Revenue, which required the agency to fire hundreds of state auditors and tax collectors; lawmakers boasted that these measures saved $25 million, but a top official in the department estimated that the state would miss out on $174 million in tax collections as a result.

There are similar trends starting in Texas. This is, however, a different issue that I will address in another post. Writing at about the same time as I posted this, Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts wrote about what he called the “myth of American exceptionalism” in the Guardian. One aspect of “American exceptionalism” was always economic. US workers, so the story went, enjoyed a rising level of real wages that afforded their families a rising standard of living. Ever harder work paid off in rising consumption. The rich got richer faster than the middle and poor, but almost no one got poorer. Nearly all citizens felt “middle class”. A profitable US capitalism kept running ahead of labour supply. So, it kept raising wages to attract waves of immigration and to retain employees, across the 19th century until the 1970s. Then everything changed. Real wages stopped rising, as US capitalists redirected their investments to produce and employ abroad, while replacing millions of workers in the US with computers. The US women’s liberation moved millions of US adult women to seek paid employment. US capitalism no longer faced a shortage of labour. US employers took advantage of the changed situation: they stopped raising wages. When basic labour scarcity became labour excess, not only real wages, but eventually benefits, too, would stop rising. Over the last 30 years, the vast majority of US workers have, in fact, gotten poorer, when you sum up flat real wages, reduced benefits (pensions, medical insurance, etc), reduced public services and raised tax burdens. In economic terms, American “exceptionalism” began to die in the 1970s.

Read his full article, here.

 

17 January 2012 addition

Simon Ortiz: Shocked at banning of Native books in Arizona

TUCSON — Simon Ortiz, world acclaimed poet, author and professor, responded to the banning of books by Chicano and Native American authors. Tucson schools seized the books from students in their classrooms after the board voted to forbid Mexican American Studies on Tuesday.

 

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* See the excellent Harper’s Magazine article by Ken Silverstein, “Tea party in the Sonora: For the future of GOP governance, look to Arizona” at http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/07/0083023. Registration ma… be required. Then see the way this Arizona Process, especially the persecution of immigrants, is spreading to the rest of the US, at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/01/us/01immig.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2. Accessed on 17 January 2008.

January 17, 2011  Leave a comment