24 The Nation. June 3, 2013

the isolated houses, even in the towns, of me. That they are aware that I am ade after Bandung, China was fighting India no lights in any windows, except, again passing, whether they follow or not: in the , while Nasser had Egypt on many miles apart, one light, upstairs or one car, torn fender, missing rental an uneasy footing with Algeria and Ghana. down: a solitary insomniac, a worker sticker, bound, they cannot yet know In retrospect, Bandung was not the birth on the night shift, a terrorist, a poet, for where. of the Non-Aligned Movement founded who? But in the long spells of driv- in Belgrade six years later, but rather, as the ing through the dark, there begins Racing along with Kate in her getaway car, anthropologist John Kelly has argued, the to arise in me an exaltation. I cannot the language is free, generous, advancing point where the third world accelerated its see where this will end. I still have the with fluidity and grace. No need to ask whose long march into the US-designed global sys- sense, how to put this, that the land, voice it is. It’s Adler’s. It couldn’t belong to tem predicated on the consolidated nation- even the sleeping country towns, know anyone else. state. What remains of the Non-Aligned Movement’s public ideals is today in tat- ters. Last year, Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi embarrassed Iran by using his speech Empire States at the Non-Aligned Movement conference in Tehran to point to Syria’s growing isola- by THOMAS MEANEY tion. In March, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad upset his own clerics by embracing Hugo n the fun-house mirror of the present, the After Empires Chávez’s grieving mother in public, as if it contours of the twentieth century have European Integration, Decolonization, needed to be underscored that Venezuela assumed a strange symmetry. It begins and the Challenge From the Global South and Iran do not make good partners. and ends with imperialism. The century 1957–1986. opens with the West plundering the Rest, By Giuliano Garavini. or an alternative to globalization Iuntil one Asian nation, Japan, joins the action Oxford. 291 pp. $125. under Anglo-American auspices, there and becomes an empire itself. In the century’s is a less mystical place to look than last decade, the pattern repeats: the forces of The Poorer Nations Bandung. In 1964, the United Na- A Possible History of the Global South. liberal capitalism are again as dominant as By Vijay Prashad. tions General Assembly established ever, only this time China is the apt pupil of Fits Conference on Trade and Development, Verso. 292 pp. Paper $26.95. Western rapacity. The way historians speak which was determined to revise Bretton of the present in terms of “imperialism,” From the Ruins of Empire Woods through the official channels of the “anti-imperialism” and “the rise of Asia” The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. UN. Led by the Argentine economist Raúl makes the burst of decolonization after By Pankaj Mishra. Prebisch and including many members of World War II seem like an interlude in a Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 356 pp. $27. the Non-Aligned Movement, UNCTAD perpetual age of empire. The temptation sought to renegotiate debt, change devel- to see Western colonials still lording it over The Impossible Indian opment policies, reclaim sovereignty over hapless subalterns continues to guide our Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence. natural resources, and reduce the barriers understanding of the relations between the By Faisal Devji. of entry for third world goods on the West- “North” and “South” since the end of formal Harvard. 213 pp. $24.95. ern market. In 1973, the organization an- imperialism in the 1960s. But this perspective nounced plans for the “New International passes over the major structural changes in polarities of the Cold War and ending colo- Economic Order,” taking a stand against the history of the postwar decades, when the nialism and racism. They declared their right the industrialized world’s protectionism and United States reconceived its mission in the to have their voices heard in the UN Security the austerity measures demanded by the world and new nations were no longer will- Council and to pursue collective defense. International Monetary Fund of countries ing to support it on the same terms. Without But there was another agenda at Bandung, to whom it made loans. UNCTAD was grasping how this new configuration of forces less publicized and less savory. Anti-colonial meant to be, in the words of Tanzanian reshaped the world order, we will continue to lions like Jawaharlal Nehru, Achmed Su- President Julius Nyerere, “a trade union of misidentify ways to change it. karno, Zhou Enlai and Gamal Abdel Nasser the poor”—one which understood that, to It does not help that the best-known were also intent on licensing each other’s negotiate effectively with the West, it would attempt in the twentieth century to forge a expansionary initiatives within and around have to bargain collectively. more equitable international arrangement their rapidly modernizing states. Nehru was The New International Economic Order without the blessing of the West remains determined to crush the peoples of highland had a very short day in the sun. The United mired in nostalgia. In 1955, a group of Asian Southeast Asia and absorb them into India; States and West Germany angled to break and African leaders met in the city of Bandung Nasser sought to extend the influence of the alliance between OPEC countries and in West Java, with the aim of strengthening Egypt into Syria and Yemen; Zhou Enlai poorer nations that wanted to create similar economic and cultural cooperation. Though wanted all parties to accept that Tibet, con- cartels for raw materials. The oil crises of the many of the participating states were aligned quered six years before Bandung, was Chi- 1970s ended up doing that work for them. with the United States or the Soviet Union, nese; and everyone agreed that West Papua By the time the Reagan administration went their leaders made a show of rejecting the belonged to Sukarno, who later declared that to war against domestic inflation in the early Greater Indonesia would “gobble Malaysia 1980s, debtor nations, which also had to pay Thomas Meaney, a doctoral candidate in history at raw.” But the third world’s designs for inter- higher prices for crude oil, were choking on Columbia University, is an editor of The Utopian. nal harmony faltered quickly. Less than a dec- stratospheric borrowing costs. (“The high- June 3, 2013 The Nation. 25 est rates of interest since the birth of Jesus of intransigents gathered around Algeria’s travelogue of midsize cities in the country. Christ,” as the West German chancellor put Houari Boumediene and El Jefe. As Vijay The result remains Mishra’s most winning it at the time.) Meanwhile, OPEC countries, Prashad shows in The Poorer Nations, which book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, in which which might have channeled some of their covers the same territory as Garavini in a he confronts his own pretensions and dreams cash surpluses into poorer countries or built polemical key, the real turning point came along with those of India’s fast-emerging mid- up burgeoning Islamic banks, instead fun- when Western-trained economists in the dle class. It’s a world of automatic-flush toi- neled their dollars through New York and Global South started calling for austerity in lets, cramped buses, radical students, furtive London, in effect handing back the keys of the place of Nyerere’s “growth with equity.” lovers, sentimental novels and ham-handed the global economy to the United States. From the same quarters that gave rise to the pornography. Poor Mishra can barely find In After Empires, his granular new history New International Economic Order came anyone to discuss Thomas Mann with him. of UNCTAD, Giuliano Garavini, a histo- third world technocrats willing to draft their But for the most part, his sense of wonder rian at the University of Padua, recovers a own structural adjustment programs. keeps his studied rancor in check, and the golden opportunity in this ill-fated attempt uncertain scribbler who began the journey by the third world to recalibrate stands before us as a writer at its end. world trade. In the 1970s, European Amid the economic and religious officials, emboldened by their first upheaval of India in the 1990s, Mishra steps toward economic integration, began asking a question that still started looking to the Global South pre occupies him: How can a people as a “most favored [trading] partner” become authentically modern and in an effort to reorient the global selectively take on the best of the economy in a new direction, against West without becoming culturally un- Anglo-American wishes. Two Dutch moored? Mishra has come to find new socialists—Sicco Mansholt, the areas of darkness concealed behind president of the European Com- the glitter of Indian modernity: the mission, and Jan Tinbergen, the wealthy Indian elites who have exiled Nobel Prize–winning economist— themselves from participation in civil led the charge to pin the political society and live in gated colonies; the identity of the European Union on Naxalite movement that has raged for improving the lot of its southern the last forty years against govern- neighbors. Their program was swept ment policy; the massive influx of rural away by the oil crisis, but Garavini’s people into the cities, whose sense of superbly researched history shows drift is exploited by Hindu national- how determined Europeans were ist parties; the corrupt development in honoring the interests of the schemes that seem to have made slums South—to the point of considering a permanent feature of the urban land- LIBRARY OF CONGRESS LIBRARY radical plans for the nationalization Rabindranath Tagore, circa 1917 scape. For all the talk of India as of Western industries and global the next great global power, what has financial redistribution. ankaj Mishra is a writer who has made passed for political imagination there since Nixon and Kissinger may have fretted, a mixed career of reporting from the independence seems to betray an intellectual but few American economists viewed the shadow line of the North/South divide. failure, especially if one takes as a starting New International Economic Order as a Born in 1969 to a down-at-the-heel point Gandhi’s call for India to become a threat to the basic structure of the liberal Brahmin family in the city of Jhansi in spiritual example to the world. world order. If anything, it signaled that the PUttar Pradesh, where his father worked as a From the Ruins of Empire is Mishra’s inves- third world was prepared to accept the ben- trade unionist in Indian Railways, he came of tigation of that failure, which he sees as not efits of mutual trade and foreign investment age just before India’s headlong rush into the confined to India but including Asia as a whole and put aside dreams of world revolution. global economy. During the magical years of and reaching far back in history. His book does When a socialist like Nyerere called for the his childhood, Mishra subscribed to Soviet not revisit the possibilities of any postwar revi- third world to develop its own multi national magazines (commonly found in India at the sions of the Western world system, but instead corporations and insurance firms, these time), owned a framed picture of Lenin and plunges into the last decades of the nineteenth economists could only smile with approval. took Brezhnev’s death personally. His intel- century. This is the age of formal empires, There is an additional phenomenon that has lectual epiphany, recounted repeatedly in his when for the first time intellectuals in Asia thwarted any revision of the world order: the books, centered on an unexpected encoun- were faced with breakneck modernization, but push for economic liberalization that began ter with the works of Edmund Wilson in a before any of the standard forms of resistance in the early 1970s, first in Chile under Pino- termite-infested library in —which were established. The dramatic rupture was chet, followed by Anwar el-Sadat’s and Hafez might be about the most irresistible thing the Russo-Japanese War of 1905—“World al-Assad’s programs of Infitah in Egypt and that an editor in Manhattan could ever want War Zero”—where, for the first time, an Asian Syria. By the end of the decade, China under to hear. In Wilson, Mishra found not only an power defeated a Western one and seemed to Deng Xiaoping and Pakistan under Moham- attractive confidence of judgment, but also a signal a turning of the tide. As Mishra stresses, mad Zia ul-Haq were experimenting with writer willing to examine critically the ideo- this was a triumphal global moment for non- foreign investment—not exactly an incentive logical passions of his youth. In 1993, Mishra Westerners. Indian parents named their sons for Western leaders to sit down with the band was asked by an Indian publisher to write a after Japanese admirals; Chinese revolutionar- 26 The Nation. June 3, 2013 ies went to organize in Tokyo; shortly after the adopt everything else Westerners packaged it the Manchu empire in favor of a modern Russian defeat, the Chinese revolutionary Sun with. He was one of the first Middle Eastern state. Mishra has better sources for Liang Yat-sen found himself being cheered by Arab thinkers to recognize the potential power of and draws a good picture of him moving in dockworkers at the Suez Canal who mistook Islam as an international anti-Western politi- the constellation of other Chinese reform- him for Japanese. At this charged historical cal force. Through his tireless networking of ers like Kang Youwei. Again like al-Afghani, moment, the major political ideologies of the Muslim leaders across the Ottoman lands, he Liang wanted to retrofit his country’s classics twentieth century had yet to congeal. Ideas became an anathema to Whitehall officials, to suit modern needs. He attributed some moved through Asia like free radicals, still yet who linked him to uprisings across the em- of the most un-Confucian ideas imaginable to be assembled in practice. As Mishra sees pire. Yet at least al-Afghani obliged future to the sage: mass education, the emancipa- it, there were three main postures available historians by taking time out to debate West- tion of women and popular elections. But for those pitted against the West: outright ern intellectuals. In 1883, in what Mishra bills Liang seems to have changed his mind about embrace of Western methods and moderniza- as the first modern debate between a Mus- everything every few years, finally settling tion (the course followed by Japan); outright lim thinker and a European one, al-Afghani on enlightened despotism as the best way rejection (the course followed by Muhammad sparred with Ernest Renan. In his response to forward for China. It’s fascinating to learn Ahmad, “the Mahdi,” who tried to restore an article by Renan that condemned Islam for that Liang inspired the young Mao Zedong, the caliphate in the Sudan); or the various at- being an impediment to science and progress, who in Mishra’s account comes off as an ideo- tempts to synthesize Asian and Western tradi- al-Afghani tore through Renan’s prejudices. logical taste-tester with Lenin’s and Liang’s tions that can be found across the spectrum of But the riposte is not quite as triumphant as pronouncements swirling before him. Asian thinkers. Mishra makes it out to be. Al-Afghani’s syl- Mishra’s third figure is the best known It’s this third, syncretic attitude that most logisms are almost equally facile: if modern among Westerners: the poet and novelist interests Mishra. His book is a triptych of science is the product of Christian society, he Rabindranath Tagore. He is a bit of the odd three Asian intellectuals who each experi- argues, and Islam was founded as a religion man out among the three. Like al-Afghani enced the onslaught of Western moderniza- after Christianity, then shouldn’t modern sci- and Liang, Tagore was happy to denounce tion and saw himself as a political reformer. ence also issue eventually from Islam? Western materialism at every opportunity, The first of the group is the mysterious But it’s al-Afghani’s status as an intellectual but he also thought that following its im- Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who was born in a hustler that makes him intriguing. He tried to perial tendencies would be a catastrophe for Persian village in 1838 and died in Istanbul persuade Muslim leaders of the necessity of Asia. “You have been infected by the virus of in 1897. Early on, al-Afghani argued that protective modernization and the compat- European imperialism!” he told his Japanese while Muslims would have to adopt Western ibility of nationalism and pan-Islamism, and contact, Toyama Mitsuru. For Tagore, the science, this did not mean they would need to to interpret Sharia according to the needs of a nation-state was a tragedy in the making for modern Middle East. Al-Afghani appealed to Asian peoples. “Now after [the Great War],” the scriptural principle of ijtihad—which he told a Japanese audience, “do you not hear Ways of Rebelling holds that analogical reasoning could be ap- everywhere the denunciation of this spirit plied to the law as new circumstances arise— of the Nation, this collective egoism of the in an attempt to convince the clerics of his day people, which is universally hardening their Who needs to be at peace in the world? to make Sharia speak to the present. That al- hearts?” At first glance, Tagore seems more It helps to be between wars, to die a Afghani was almost certainly a theological op- contemporary than a figure like Gandhi, few times each day to understand your portunist—a Shiite-born Muslim who passed whom he took to be insufficiently rational. But as a Sunni—only sweetens the irony that he is it was Gandhi who was able to mobilize Indi- father’s sky, as you take it apart piece by now a revered figure among Islamists. Mishra ans on a massive scale with an idea that India piece and can’t feel anything, can’t feel reports that he was an inspiration for the was something greater than a mere nation, the tree growing under your feet, the Iranian intellectuals who plotted the downfall which Tagore could never convince them of. eyes poking night only to find another of the shah in Parisian cafes in the 1960s. The ultimate aims of the mahatma’s revo- In 2002, the US ambassador to Afghanistan lution are only more startling at a distance. night to compare it to. Whoever heard pledged a donation of $25,000 for the restora- Gandhi took his bearings for an ideal world of turning pain into hummingbirds or tion of al-Afghani’s tomb outside Kabul—ap- order from the British Empire. But in his red birds—haven’t we grown? What parently under the impression that he was view, Indians should not aspire to the rights does it mean to be older? Maybe a house some sort of wholesome Muslim liberal. of Englishmen or to becoming an indepen- dent commonwealth like Canada. Instead, without doors can still survive a storm. ishra’s second shadow man is bet- Gandhi envisioned Indians guiding the entire Maybe I can’t find the proper way to ter known. The Chinese anti- world into a giant commonwealth, where all rebel or damn it, I can’t leave. I want colonialist Liang Qichao was born parts would be equal and goods and peoples a generation after al-Afghani, but would move freely. “A reformed empire,” to, but you grow inside of me. And as he offers Mishra a parallel life both writes Faisal Devji in his rich and provocative I watch you, before I know it, I’m too Min his aims and frustrations. Like al-Afghani, book, The Impossible Indian, “could become heavy, too full of you to move. Maybe Liang was a man who paid court everywhere, an ideal arena for a purely moral and indeed that’s what they meant when they said working under the assumption that if he pros- rational politics, since neither the facts of na- elytized hard enough, whoever was in charge tionality nor those of demography would be you shouldn’t love a country too much. of China would listen to his ideas. At first this able to determine popular opinion and thus was the empress dowager, whom, unsurpris- political decision-making there.” This ver- NATHALIE HANDAL ingly, Liang failed to convince to unravel sion of Gandhi is considerably different from June 3, 2013 The Nation. 27 those of recent accounts that have focused on science, so their descendants seem to have the religious sources of his thought. The in- settled on one-track Western-style economic novation of Devji’s book is to treat Gandhi as development. “The Graduate Students Who HUMAN RIGHTS a revolutionary on par with the major ideolo- Remade Asia” could be the subtitle for the gists of his time—Stalin, Roosevelt, Mao and yet-to-be-written history of those US- and FOR ALL Hitler—rather than as a moralist outside the UK-trained economists who undertook the Required Reading mainstream of twentieth-century politics. In market-centered reforms of the 1980s. For on Immigration one sense, Devji shows Gandhi was a good Mishra, “the revenge of the East” only means

“This should be required reading for everyone—from President deal more radical than these contemporaries: it will repeat the West’s mistakes on a larger Obama . . . to migrant rights activists. . . . It gave me inspiration.” —SANDRA CISNEROS, author of The House on Mango Street his doctrine of “nonviolence” not only re- scale. This already appears to be happening: quired violence but openly invited it, because in March, the BRICS announced the creation THE DEATH OF violence afforded opportunities for redemp- of a development fund meant to be their JOSSELINE tive suffering. Here Gandhi was inspired by answer to the World Bank and the IMF. It is IMMIGRATION STORIES FROM the cries of Boer women in British concen- unlikely to be a gentler civilizer of nations. THE ARIZONA BORDERLANDS tration camps in South Africa, who elicited For all the fresh revelations of From the MARGARET REGAN such a change of heart in the British press. Ruins of Empire, Mishra ends up trudging The great irony is that Gandhi’s vision of a over familiar ground. Like Francis Fukuyama,

“There may be no better way to understand the muddle that is U.S. deterritorialized world commonwealth seems he sees liberal capitalism as the last ideology immigration policy than to read The Death of Josseline. It helps explain, on a human level, the ebb and flow of human labor across political boundaries.” closer to something like the Muslim ummah still capable of attracting adherents, and like —TED ROBBINS, Southwest correspondent, National Public Radio today than anything his followers took up. his nemesis , he still clings “There may be no better way to under- to the constraints of East-West polarities. stand the muddle that is U.S. immigra- agore was more right than he knew What separates him is less his perspective tion policy than to read The Death of about the allure of the nation-state. on the present than his orientation toward Josseline.” —Ted Robbins, Southwest In the wake of World War I, inde- it—which is resolutely against any forward correspondent, National Public Radio pendence movements throughout the lurch of “development.” Here Mishra is at his world sent delegates to Paris in 1919 most sympathetic. He is acutely aware that toT make their claims before Woodrow Wil- the stunning advances of the middle classes son and the European powers. What Erez of India and China have not only left mil- Manela has called “The Wilsonian Moment” lions of peasants in worse conditions, but also has come to seem like a wasted chance for the added new psychological dimensions to their West to start the process of decolonization resentments. He recognizes well enough that early. The problem, however, is that we al- the greatest beneficiaries of globalization are ready know how the story of decolonization those most determined to defend it. ends. This makes it easy to forget that Asians But more than a touch of the romantic also and Africans took from Wilson’s promise colors Mishra’s arguments. Must he invoke of “self-determination” what they wanted the hopes of Mao’s revolution to castigate to- to hear. Japanese imperialists thrilled to his day’s Chinese elite? Are the pre-globalization “Makes a powerful case for the central- words as much as Algerians hoping for a days of India in the 1970s in any way worth ity of ‘illegals’—of all nationalities—in the global struggle for economic justice.” closer association with the French Republic. returning to? And what does Mishra want us —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel The ideal of “self-determination” was at the to glean from the lives of three interesting but and Dimed service of social and political reformations ineffectual intellectuals who lived more than already under way, which somewhat relieves a century ago? That Asia too had its share of the historical burden Manela and others sages who were just as troubled by the march have placed on Wilson’s shoulders. But it of modernity as the Slavophiles and German is also undeniable that the hopes dashed at Romantics? There are times when talk of Versailles—recall Ho Chi Minh renting tails gauzy historical “alternatives” to the nation- in Paris to meet with the US delegation, only state and liberal capitalism and modernity to be turned away—sharpened the demands becomes a cover for complacency. Garavini’s of new nations at the next attempt to reach a and Prashad’s books show that many of the settlement after World War II. finishing touches of our world order are only From the Ruins of Empire ends on a pro- thirty or forty years old. They hardly obeyed longed note of despair. “No convincingly any ineluctable logic. The notion that intel- universalist response exists today to Western lectuals today should perhaps start cobbling “An indispensable guide . . . If you are ideas of politics and economy,” Mishra writes, together new world-embracing ideologies, at all uncertain about how to deal with “even though these seem increasingly febrile rather than try to reclaim democratic politi- anti-immigrant arguments, you will find and dangerously unsuitable in large parts of cal decisions from the spurious overseers of Chomsky’s book a perfect response.” the world.” He sees everywhere an ascendant economics in our institutions, seems to be —Howard Zinn, author of You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train Asia capable of challenging the West for re- another one of Mishra’s exercises in nostalgia. sources, territory and market share. Where The choice is never between an ideal future www.beacon.org Mishra’s ur-generation of Asian intellectuals and a bad one, but between a better future and www.beaconbroadside.com seemed to agree on the necessity of Western a worse one.