Pankaj Mishra, Foreign Affairs, 00157120, Nov/Dec2016, Vol. 95, Issue 6

Pankaj Mishra, Foreign Affairs, 00157120, Nov/Dec2016, Vol. 95, Issue 6 The Globalization of Rage Why Today’s Extremism Looks Familiar In September 1919, the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio gathered a Iforce of 2,000 mutinous troops from the Royal Italian Army, along with hundreds of other volunteers, and stormed the city of Fiume, on the Adriatic coast, which had been contested territory since the end of World War I. D’Annunzio had served as a fighter pilot in the war, and his daring feats had turned him into one of the most famous people in Europe. An ultranationalist, he had long wanted “Mother Italy” to seize all the territories that he believed rightly belonged to her. In 1911, he had zealously supported Italy’s invasion of Libya, an imperialist adventure whose savagery stoked outrage across the Muslim world. In Fiume, he saw a chance to realize his dream of rejuvenating Italy through war. D’Annunzio’s forces were met with no resistance; British, French, and U.S. forces withdrew to avoid a confrontation. After installing himself as il duce of the “Italian Regency of Carnaro,” D’Annunzio established a fiefdom shaped by outrageous political rhetoric and gestures. He introduced the stiff-armed salute that Adolf Hitler would later adopt. D’Annunzio and his cadres dressed in black uniforms adorned with a skulland-crossbones insignia. They spoke obsessively of martyrdom, sacrifice, and death. Hitler and Benito Mussolini, obscure figures at the time, were keen students of the pseudo-religious speeches that D’Annunzio delivered daily from his balcony before retiring to the company of a large, rotating group of sexual partners. D’Annunzio constructed an elaborate cult of personality around himself and cast his occupation in mythic terms. A group claiming to represent the women of Fiume presented him with a dagger, declaring, “To you … chosen by God to radiate the light of renewed liberty through the world … [we] offer this holy dagger … so you may carve the word ‘victory’ in the living flesh of our enemies.” His so-called foreign minister proclaimed Fiume to be a “magic crucible in which the magma boils” and that might “produce the finest gold.” Thousands of eager volunteers— anarchists, socialists, testosterone-crazed teenagers, and others—came from as far away as Egypt, India, and Ireland to join Fiume’s carnival of erotic militarism. For them, life seemed to be beginning all over again, this time devoid of the old rules. A purer, more beautiful and honest existence was on the horizon. As the months passed and his sexual indulgences and megalomania deepened, D’Annunzio began to see himself as the leader of an international insurrection of all oppressed peoples. In reality, he remained little more than a two-bit opportunist, one of the many in Europe who had risen to prominence exploiting the rage of people who saw themselves as wholly dispensable in societies where economic growth had enriched only a minority and democracy appeared to be a game rigged by the powerful. In France in the 1880s, General Georges Boulanger, a trash-talking demagogue, took advantage of public disgust over scandals, economic setbacks, and military defeats and came perilously close to seizing power. In 1895, during Austria-Hungary’s traumatic transition to industrial capitalism, Vienna elected a vicious anti-Semite as mayor. Meanwhile, Germany, although successfully industrialized and wealthy, was busy fostering two generations of malcontents and proto-imperialists. At the dawn of the twentieth century, as the world experienced global capitalism’s first major crises and the greatest international migration in history, anarchists and nihilists seeking liberation from old and new shackles burst into terroristic violence. They murdered countless civilians and assassinated numerous heads of state, including U.S. President William McKinley. In Italy, the relatively young state’s invasive bureaucracy and servility to a rich minority had produced particularly fertile conditions for fantasies of vengeful violence against the establishment. As The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, produced in 1909 by Italian admirers of D’Annunzio, proclaimed: We want to glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas for which one dies, and contempt for women. We want to destroy museums, libraries, and academies of all kinds, and to fight against moralism, feminism, and every utilitarian or opportunistic cowardice. For 15 months, D’Annunzio carried out a bizarre experiment in utopia in contemptuous defiance of all of the world’s great military powers. His occupation ended tamely, after the Italian navy bombarded Fiume in December 1920, forcing D’Annunzio and his forces to evacuate the city, which today belongs to Croatia and is known as Rijeka. But a mass movement—Mussolini’s fascism— soon carried on where D’Annunzio had left off. The poet-imperialist died in 1938, a few years after Italy invaded Ethiopia— a ferocious assault that D’Annunzio predictably applauded. Today, D’Annunzio’s moral, intellectual, and military secession from what he and his followers saw as an irredeemable society continues to echo. Alienated radicals from all over the world have once again flocked to a contested territory to join a violent, extremist, misogynist, sexually transgressive movement: the self-proclaimed Islamic State (or isis). Meanwhile, countries across the world are again suffering an onslaught of demagogues, many of them preening buffoons who have recast themselves as visionary strongmen—much as D’Annunzio did. The world is once again mired in what the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, touring the United States in 1916, called a “dense poisonous atmosphere of worldwide suspicion and greed and panic.” Pundits and scholars alike have struggled to explain the chaos, disorder, and anxiety that have come to define the contemporary political moment. Many blame evidently pathological antimodernisms that have emerged from places outside the West—especially the Muslim world. Having proclaimed “the end of history” in 1989, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama was not alone in wondering, soon after the 9/11 attacks, whether there is “something about Islam” that has made “Muslim societies particularly resistant to modernity.” In reality, today’s malignancies are rooted in distinctly modern reactions to the profound social and economic shifts of recent decades, which have been obscured by the optimistic visions of globalization that took hold in the aftermath of the Cold War. HIGH ANXIETY In the hopeful period that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, the universal triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy seemed assured. A combination of free markets and representative government appeared to be the right formula for the billions trying to overcome degrading poverty and political oppression. Many economies grew rapidly; new nation-states appeared across a broad swath of Africa, Asia, and Europe; the European Union took shape; peace was declared in Northern Ireland; apartheid ended in South Africa; and it seemed only a matter of time before Tibet, too, might be free. Even in the early and mid-1990s, however, there were warning signs of trouble ahead. Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and genocide in Rwanda, as well as the resurgence of far-right, antiimmigrant, and neo-Nazi groups in Europe, showed that authoritarian politics, vicious ethnic prejudice, and exclusionary nationalism had hardly vanished. A decade or so of liberal triumphalism gave way to a new era of crises: the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the acceleration of climate change, the global financial meltdown and the subsequent Great Recession, the euro crisis, the rise of isis, and the spread of a pervasive sense of anxiety and even terror. Behind all these developments lies the fact that globalization—characterized by the mobility of people, capital, and ideas and accelerated by the rapid development of communications and information technology—has weakened traditional forms of authority everywhere, from Europe’s social democracies to the despotic states of the Arab world. It has also produced an array of unpredictable new international actors that have seized on the sense of alienation and dashed expectations that defines the political mood in many places. The extremists of isis have exploited these changes with devious skill, partly by turning the Internet into a devastatingly effective propaganda tool for global jihad. And demagogues of all kinds—from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to France’s right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, to the gop candidate in the current U.S. presidential race, Donald Trump—have tapped into the simmering reservoirs of discontent. For almost three decades, elites in many societies have upheld an ideal of cosmopolitan liberalism: the universal commercial society of self-interested rational individuals that was originally advocated in the eighteenth century by such Enlightenment thinkers as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Kant. But in reality, globalization has engendered a myriad of identity-based political formations, including Hindu majoritarianism in India, settler Zionism in Israel, and xenophobic nationalism in Austria, China, Japan, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and the United States. Hatemongering against immigrants, refugees, minorities, and various

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