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Empire States: on Pankaj Mishra

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Empire States: on Pankaj Mishra 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 Himalayas, 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.
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