Self-Determination, Seen from Another Side

I was recently involved in an online discussion about self-determination and nationalism, the legacy of Western colonialism, the bullies and the bullied. It got a little hot, with some participants speaking theoretically, some spiritually, some talking about political realities -- but only one or two speaking from the experience of actually living in former colonies -- and it was fascinating to explore our present feelings about monarchies, the Commonwealth, the differences between America and Canada's own versions of "self-determination", and the spectres of racism, slavery, and human suffering that shadow the history of all peoples and their occupiers. And then, of course, there was the resignation of Fidel Castro and speculation about what might happen now in the multi-colored experiment that is present-day Cuba.

So I was happy to read Pankaj Mishra's timely article, Ordained as a Nation, in the most recent London Review of Books: a review and discussion of The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism by Erez Manela. Whether you read Manela's book or not, you owe it to yourself to read Mishra's fine and lucid article. I learned a lot. Wilson, for example, encouraged Egypt's nationalist movement, only to be seen as a double-crosser when he was squelched by the British and French -- and even at his best, Wilson's idealistic internationalism combined with the same condescending white superiority that marked western colonialism.Of course we do know how European and American victors carved up the non-western world in the wake of two world wars, eviscerated nationalistic movements in many non-European countries, and rendered permanently bitter, alienated and suspicious numerous others in Asia,  Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. However, as Mishra convincingly shows, a direct line of thinking connects Wilson both to the current occupants of the White House and to dangerously earnest liberal intellectuals like Thomas Friedman: proponents of interventions as ill-conceived and unworkable today as they were nearly a hundred years ago.

The victories of the Cold War – and the giddy speculation that history had reached the ideological terminus of liberal democracy – revived illusions of omnipotence among an Anglo-American political and media elite that has always known very little about the modern world it claims to have made. Consequently, almost every event since the end of the Cold War – the rise of radical Islam, of India and China, the assertiveness of oil-rich Russia, Iran and Venezuela – has come as a shock, a rude reminder that the natives of Delhi, Cairo and Beijing have geopolitical ambitions of their own, not to mention a sense of history marked by resentment and suspicion of the metropolitan West. The liberal internationalists persist, trying to revive the Wilsonian moment in places where Anglo-American liberalism has been seen as an especially aggressive form of hypocrisy. Increasingly, however, they expose themselves as the new provincials, dangerously blundering about in a volatile world.

Comments

[Saif]

In the 70s at a British university, I attended international relations lectures given by a Czech emigre professor; who claimed Wilson's example as proof that professors of international relations should never practice what they taught.

After the Velvet Revolution he suddenly became deputy foreign minister of the Czech and Slovak Republic...

[beth]

Thanks for the good story, Saif! I think he may have been right!