It is difficult, but necessary, to make the statement that there are times when we should ignore little panics, and keep in mind the long run. Discrete flare-ups may turn out to be serious, but they are often just the creaks and groans of large-scale historical change.
This week the eyes of the world will be fixed on the US election, what its outcome may mean for that country, and for the rest of us. Elsewhere, the DA’s Helen Zille reportedly told the SA Chamber of Commerce in the UK that during the bargaining process for a government of national unity the ANC was adamant that it would keep hold of the international relations & co-operation portfolio. The ANC has got many things wrong, but keeping the foreign relations portfolio is not one of them.
These two things, Zille’s statement and the US election, may seem discrete, but it would be silly to ignore the continuities between the American fin de siècle, the rise of the next global order, and the apparently little panics among Zille and the DA.
She and her constituency seem to be clinging to the declining set of norms, beliefs and values that have underpinned liberal internationalism for the past seven decades or so. An argument can be made that Americans, in general, have difficulty accepting that they are no longer great, and continue to demonise their “enemies” along the Bosporus to the East, including Georgia, Iran, Russia and China, and much of Asia.
Most observers would be aware, and have an opinion on the following but it’s worth restating here to draw a more complete picture. Over the 70 years of liberal internationalism — its fount was the liberal idealism of Woodrow Wilson that failed to prevent the restart of European wars in 1939 — the US provided effective leadership of “Western civilisation” and “the European world,” with attendant norms, conventions and institutions.
It is not unfair to remind (there may be an urge to forget and “move on”) that the people who governed and dominated SA until 1994 were “European,” the “white man of Africa” on a civilisational mission, as Hendrik Verwoerd told parliament on February 3 1960. We can ignore or dismiss it all, by people who do not see colour and who have drawn a line across historical events, but intellectual honesty requires us to at least acknowledge continuities between epochs. Remembering takes nothing away from efforts to establish social cohesion and engender trust among the population.
These Europeans and “white men” of Africa shared ethnic solidarity with the North Atlantic Community. “Ethnicity” refers here to all the shared values, customs, symbols of a group of people to secure some kind of internal cohesion and that sets them apart from other groups. So, the “white man” and the European in SA has always had more in common with the European world, and now, faced with having to cede power, dominance and control (after 500 years in the ascendancy), the fear and trembling is pronounced.
When Zille says a particular SA foreign policy decision has the fingerprints of Iran all over it, we probably have to consider the long-run story; the decline of the European world and what the late economist Angus Maddison, who brilliantly analysed long-run political economic development, described as its outgrowths.
We are meant to ignore “the fingerprints” of the West or the European world in current conflicts, or those of the past seven decades or more. We are meant to believe that Western or European interventions have always been for the common good. One important aspect of the contemporary period is precisely the morbidity of the interregnum of the shift from West to East.
The “crisis” in the US echoes the serious social problems at home (and abroad) that earlier powers faced when they reached the end of their imperial reach. One good example is the Dutch who, like the US-led Golden Age of Capitalism from 1945 to early 1970s, had their own “golden age” between 1588 and 1672, when they too dominated in trade, science and technology and art.
During its golden age the Netherlands military was the best and most feared around the world. It is probably not a stretch to imagine that when that era ended there were little panics in the Netherlands, and a faction that wanted to make Holland great again.
SA is no longer an outgrowth of the European world. Its foreign policies cannot be outsourced to Washington. This would be short-sighted and ethnocentric, in the sense described above. It’s probably wise to ignore these little panics as the last kicks of a dying horse. One thing we can be sure of is that Zille and the DA, and American society in general, fear looking in the mirror for the image of a decline and a world turned upside down staring back at them.
A lesson, here, from the Persian poet Shamsi Tabrīzī, who wrote: “Instead of resisting to changes, surrender. Let life be with you, not against you. If you think ‘my life will be upside down’ don’t worry. How do you know down is not better than upside?”
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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