:: Saturday, March 08, 2003 ::

Explaining the American Boom: The Roles of ‘Globalisation’ and US Global Power; The Gowan-Brenner Thesis:Part One

So far the intense debates about whether the American boom of the 1990s signals the arrival of a so-called 'New Economy' have focused mainly upon certain domestic features of the American economy: the productivity record, the role of new technologies, the structure of the financial sector, the nature of the US labour market and so on. This article will suggest this set of explanatory relationships: it will not prove them, far less demonstrate them in quantitative terms. It is based mainly on the recent work of Peter Gowan, and Robert Brenner on the subject. We will first examine the course of the boom and certain key economic relationships widely recognised to be central features of it. I will then suggest various ways in which these central features have been connected to the external relationships of the US economy. This will lead us to stress the ways in which these external relationships have themselves been shaped by political drives led by the US government since the 1970s.

Key Macro-Economic Relationships in the Boom

As Robert Brenner has emphasised, the US boom in the 1990s passed through two distinct phases divided in 1995. The phase up to that year was a fairly standard cyclical recovery. The novel features of the boom emerged in the second half of the decade between 1995 and 2000. As Brenner emphasises, the cyclical upturn in the first part of the 1990s was driven by two key forces: the deep restructuring of the manufacturing sector during the 1980s (involving a major downsizing of work forces and effective downward pressure on wages) and the US Treasury’s switch in dollar policy from 1985: a drive by Baker and his successors for a very large devaluation of the dollar, producing an export-led boom in the first half of the 1990s. The result up to 1995 was a domestic recovery which was very much in line with the US business cycles of the 1970s and 1980s.

What might be called the gear-change to overdrive occurred in 1995. The boom then gathered intensity in terms of GDP per annum growth during the rest of the 1990s. It is worth noting that this watershed year of 1995 was also moment when the US Treasury switched its dollar policy towards a high dollar against the Yen and the Deutsche Mark.Most accounts of the macro-economics of this second wave of the 1990s boom stress the importance of continued low inflation and low US interest rates in sustaining the boom. Both these features were not widely expected. There was a very widespread expectation that historically very high rates of GDP growth would result in strong inflationary pressures leading to higher interest rates, choking off the expansion. Yet both inflation and interest rates remained low. Hence the idea that some kind of ‘new economy’ had emerged.

There has then been a debate as to how this low inflation and these low interest rates have fed GDP growth. Some authors emphasise the effects of these two phenomena on the supply side: the stimulus they have given to new capital investment, especially in the information and telecoms sectors. Others stress their impact on the demand side, via their stimulus to the US stock market and the impact of the stock market 'wealth effect' on consumer spending. Both kinds of effects were occurring and in both cases, the importance of low inflation in US product markets and low interest rates are given great weight.We shall address three questions : why did inflation remain low despite the extraordinarily rapid GDP growth, fairly tight labour markets and rapidly rising consumer demand in the US? Secondly, why was there downward pressure on interest rates despite the boom? And thirdly, connected to these two phenomena, what have been the determinations of the dollar’s exchange rate vis a vis other currencies?

The Inflation Rate, Dollar Policy and US Imports

Despite the very high growth rates, low unemployment and very strong rises in consumer demand during the second half of the 1990s, the inflation rate in US product markets remained remarkably low. This contradicted received wisdom, not least orthodox thinking about the non-inflationary rate of unemployment.No doubt this continued low inflation was the result of a multiplicity of influences. Among the domestic forces at work Brenner emphasises the low trade union density in the US private sector, the success of employers in imposing job insecurity and the rapid increase in the capital stock -- all contributing to the very low growth of unit labour costs. But he also acknowledges the impact of the high dollar and of the impact of very small increases in import prices upon the US domestic economy. Indeed, he calls this ‘the main active force in keeping down inflation’ and it is this aspect that we wish to explore.But if the trade deficit has been an important product of both the high dollar policy and the domestic consumer boom, the question remains open as to whether the growing role of imports in the US economy has played an important macro-economic role in maintaining low US inflation.

Of course, the very rise of the dollar stimulates an import surge precisely because it lowers the US prices of these imports. But it is important to see where within the US economy these cheapening imports were making their impacts. The data collated by Brenner on US trade flowssuggests that imports play an important role across a variety of end uses, including capital goods, but they have been particularly important in industrial supplies, automobiles and consumer goods. And in these areas, import prices can have a significant impact on the domestic US price index. If the dollar prices of these imports have been falling, this can be an important disinflationary force within the US economy. And such indeed seems to have been the case during the 1990s boom, particularly in the second half of the 1990s, until the sharp rise in the price of energy imports in 1999 and 2000.But since the dollar has, in the second half of the 1990s, been high and rising against other currencies, the fall in US prices for industrial raw materials will have been relatively larger than would have been the case, for example, in Europe. Statistics lend weight to the idea that the prices of industrial raw materials imports were falling very substantially for US companies during the 1990s, exerting a significant impact on final product prices in the US market. In the American consumer goods sector, the rising imports of cheap Chinese consumer goods such as toys is widely recognised as being important. But it would be worth investigating whether the falling prices of industrial supplies has been connected not only to the high dollar but also to long-term structural changes in the economies of the South.

Low Interest Rates and the Inflow of Funds

If low inflation is usually cited as one key macroeconomic parameter of the boom, another has been the lowering of interest rates and the maintenance of a low interest rate environment. Those authors who stress the supply side see the interest rate environment as a key to the rise in US investment; others stress its role in fuelling the stock market boom, generating the 'wealth effect' and strong, sustained consumer demand. The question that we wish to investigate here is what the impact of the US economy’s international location has been on US domestic interest rates.The boom has been accompanied by an extraordinary flow of funds from governments, corporate and private holders of wealth around the world into the US financial market.

The really massive increase in the inflow of overseas funds occurred from 1995 onwards. The average annual increase in the flow of foreign funds into the US financial market between 1994 and 1997 was an extraordinary 31.1% per annum. Brenner stresses the direct relationship in 1995 between the surge of overseas funds into the US financial market and the fall in US interest rates. Between January 1995 and January 1996 interest rates on 30 year T-bonds fell from 7.85% to 6.05% -- a nearly 25% fall. It has often been claimed in the press that the migration of funds into the US was a consequence of the boom and in particular of the revived profitability of the US corporate sector as well as of the rapid rise in asset prices in US stock markets. At first sight international financial flows may seem to confirm this, suggesting that the most dynamic part of the inflow of foreign funds was that into equities between1994 and 1997. Foreign equity holdings rose in value by 133% as against a 122% rise in debt securities. But the figures do not, in fact, point to such a large influx of foreign funds into stock markets. Of the $531 billion growth in the value of foreign equity holdings only $90 billion was the result of increased foreign purchases of equities; $441 billion was the result of price appreciation of equities. The dramatic rise in volume occurred in debt securities, where $898 billion of the increased value resulted from foreign purchases, while only $132 billion was the result of price appreciation.

The overwhelming bulk of these foreign purchases of debt was concentrated in the US government sector. Thus, the often made suggestions that the inflow of portfolio investment into the US economy was an effect of the profitability of US corporations during the boom is simply false. Since the Treasury debt market sets the benchmarks for domestic US interest rates the large inflow of funds into US Treasury debt during the boom must have exerted a substantial downward pressure in US domestic interest rates. The US Treasury acknowledges that this inflow did have an important effect on US interest rates and investment. In its Report to Congress in 2000, it noted: 'Capital inflows continued to increase during the period covered by this report, supporting high levels of business investment in the United States. Capital inflows helped maintain lower interest rates than would likely be possible otherwise.' Brenner argues that this fall in interest rates played a decisive role in launching and driving the steep rise in equity prices from 1995 which in turn in his view played a major role in stimulating domestic demand and demand-led growth.

Foreign demand for US debt securities also enabled the US to maintain, without high interest rates, a high dollar, so essential for cheapening the costs to companies and consumers of imports. But how strong this effect of foreign demand is, depends upon the scale of foreign demand relative to the overall size of particular US financial markets. Evidence indicates the changing foreign share of holdings in US securities markets.The growing weight of the foreign sector in US Treasury debt to a total of over 38% in 1997 is very striking. It is also worth pointing out that the percentage of foreign holdings of US equities in 1997 -- 6.3% -- was exactly the same as the percentage of foreign holdings in US equities in 1989 -- also 6.3%.

:: Conrad Barwa 8:22 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Media and Political Representation:

An interesting email from Tom Laniado to the Guardian was published a few days ago – it was originally written in response to the much-touted “Adlai Stevenson” moment that Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN was meant to be. The comparison I note is interesting, as Gore Vidal remarks, Stevenson was held to be before Kennedy’s nomination as standing for the ‘real’ or more progressive wing of the Democratic Party at the time and having both the experience and the gravitas that Kennedy lacked. Hence the decision to use him at this key juncture during the Bay of Pigs crisis to represent the sincere, professional and impartial face of the then US administration. A sign that the US was in earnest and believed in what it was saying. Ironic that now the only credible figure in the Bush administration and one widely respected outside, was pushed forward to do the unpalatable job of trying to convince a sceptical UN and even more sceptical public of the need to intervene in Iraq.

Laniado suggests the counter-cliché of the “Nayirah moment”, after the 15-year old Kuwaiti girl whose eyewitness account of Iraqi soldiers removing babies from Kuwaiti hospital incubators in 1990 and leaving them to die on cold floors, were broadcast across the globe, and adduced by senators in support of a resolution enabling George Bush Snr. to deploy forces. Nayirah later turned out to be the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the US. After the Gulf War no witnesses could be found to verify her account, obliging Amnesty International to retract its report on Iraqi human rights violation in Kuwait.

Earlier this week UK television audiences were treated to the sight of Donald Rumsfeld giving an interview to the broadcaster David Dimpleby on BBC TV. Some things struck me very starkly during the programme on the way it was presented and carried out:

1) David Dimpleby is one of the more assuring and accommodating interviewers on British television much more mild than say the "Rottweiler" Jeremy Paxman (whom cabinet minister frequently refuse to appear in front of for fear of being savaged) and the younger Richard Dimpleby (brother to David) who is also know for his willingness to keep on asking hard questions and ferret out a clear answer from waffling politicians. Yet even Dimpleby was pushed to criticise Rumsfeld at several points in the interview. The most ridiculous moment came when Rumsfeld disputed that Iraq had ever been taken off the list of terrorist states by the US – Dimpleby then felt constrained to point out that Rumsfeld had visited Iraq in 1986 and how could he visit a state that was listed as a terrorist regime by the US state dept. Rumsfeld fumbled around and initially said, even more heinously that he didn’t know whether Iraq actually had been taken off the list or not. An incredulous Dimpleby then had to ask him whether he would visit a country and not even know its “terrorist status”; top which Rumsfeld’s plea was that he was only travelling at the time as a “private businessman” and was carrying out the requests of the then Secretary of State, George Schultz and President Ronald Reagan – amazingly assuming that this kind of sanction made it irrelevant as to the nature of the Iraqi regime. A more ruthless interviewer would have savaged Rumsfeld but Dimpleby let the moment pass.

2) On future plans for military action: repeated questions as to when any military action against Iraq may occur or whether other states such as Iran may be targeted; Rumsfeld’s answer was all the time that these decisions were made by the President and that he wouldn’t’ be able to say. Now, obviously as C-in-C and the head of the Executive the President would make the ultimate decisions on such matter, but one would also have expected the Secretary of Defense to have some input as well as knowledge about these issues. In fact, Rumsfeld frequently hid behind the figure of the President – not even naming him but simply saying the President of the United States. While this is not incorrect in itself, repeated usage made me wonder whether Rumsfeld was confusing the man with the position; a dangerous collapse of the individual with the position he holds seemed to be occurring; in line with the general partisan nature of the current White House administration. This is a typical conservative technique, which tries to use the part to stand in for the whole and which attempts to project a national unity of will to cloak very particularistic and narrow sectional concerns under the smokescreen of national interest.

3) More markedly there seemed to be a deliberate attempt to obfuscate by pedantic use of language. When quizzed on whether he would like regime change in Iran, Rumsfeld replied that the women and young people of Iran were “astir” and would not tolerate for long the rule of a narrow clique of clerics and remove them from power. This stirring he felt was already underway and would occur soon – having said this he then took umbrage at Dimpleby’s summary that he did want regime change, reiterating platitudes about “stirrings for democracy” by the Iranian population at large to remove their current form of governance. There are several dubious things going on here. First of all, Rumsfeld is actually talking about regime change whether he claims otherwise or not; as the current regime is actually a liberal reformist one under Khatami. Removing what he referred to as “a narrow clique of clerics” will actually involve substantial changes to Iran’s Islamic constitution and the post-revolutionary settlement, which gives Muslims clerics considerable power to implement and carry out Islamic law and amend legislation accordingly. This is definitely a regime change and a fairly major one at that. Secondly, I find his reference to women and young people a slightly condescending and odious one – playing on stereotypes that in Muslim countries women are repressed and sexuality is rigidly controlled with obvious consequences for hedonistic youth culture. Apart from the ethnocentric biases at work here, it is more than a little hypocritical to single out Iran which is actually a functioning parliamentary democracy with a judicial system from states such as Saudi Arabia, a key US ally, which are far more stringent in the limitations they apply towards women and those like Afghanistan where the US has been quite cynical in using liberation of women as a potential rationale for their deposing of the Taliban and then conveniently allowing the patriarchical status quo of tribal rule by warlords to resume. This instrumentalist and myopic use of emancipatory rhetoric galls and repels me to the extreme.

The manipulation of the media to coerce and gain consent to policies and actions, which have very repressive and counter-productive roots, has become the one of the primary mechanism for ideological control in today’s modern democracies. More self-reflexivity by those who work in these sectors as well as control over ownership is an important way to preserve some independence from such mediums being abused.

:: Conrad Barwa 8:28 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Review of "Imprint of the Raj" by Chandak Sengooptu, Macmillan Publishers, London, 2003.

The origins of fingerprinting have an interesting source, that Chandak Sengooptu describes in his inquiry into Colonial governance in Imperial India, and has some broader points on how a mechanism that was oringianally meant to bring criminals to justice could also have other more sinister uses to be directed towards controlling undesirable elements of the population at large. In August 1897, a murder that would make criminal history took place on a remote farmstead. The victim, a much-hated overseer, was found in his bedroom next to an open safe from which a large sum of money was missing. Police soon discovered that there were many suspects with excellent motives, but they had only one clue: an almanac covered in blood-stained fingerprints. One of these proved to be the thumbprint of a cook who had been sacked by the overseer. The subsequent trial was the first ever to hear fingerprint evidence and perhaps it was the sheer novelty that saved the cook's neck - he was found guilty of theft, but not murder. This landmark case took place not in London, but Bengal, and the victim was a tea planter named Hriday Nath Ghosh.

Four years later the first murder conviction on fingerprint evidence came - in Mathura, northern India. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan police were struggling with a clumsy French system that required measuring, among other things, the length of the left middle finger. The colony had stolen a march on the home country, and in unravelling this simple fact Chandak Sengoopta has discovered an absorbing tale of scientific criminology. If that were all, the historian would have done a worthwhile job: he writes with unadorned ease, he balances each argument, his research is impeccable. But this book contains much more, at its deepest level touching on issues of freedom and oppression, and of how science, good or bad, will shackle itself to either cause. In the 19th century a belief in the career criminal was backed up by the scientific thinking of the time. Criminal traits were held to be hereditary; therefore if all the recidivists could be identified and rounded up, the larger part of the problem would be solved. Against this, however, was set the traditional English preference for being anonymous, unobserved by government or its agents. Any new method of individual identification had a mountain of suspicion to climb, and fingerprinting was no exception: one learned counsel described it in court as "a dubious French import incompatible with British justice".

Elsewhere in the Pax Britannica, however, such reservations were easily put aside. Indians, and especially Bengalis, were held to be notoriously deceitful in matters of identity, prone to perjury in court and impersonation outside. Classification and identification were imperial priorities. Caste was the first aspect of India that offered the Raj a chance to begin this work, and just as the British measured the land and its features, they began measuring its peoples. Noses were a particular obsession, ears were considered, the cranium had its proponents, eyes attracted interest. But it was a magistrate working in a backwater village in Bengal who hit on the fingerprint as the perfect identifying mark. One day in 1858, fearing that a Bengali contractor might break a road-building contract, William Herschel had the man place his palm-print on the document. There was already a Bengali system of using prints as signatures, but Herschel seems to have been the first to realise that each print was unique and unchanging. Soon his print system was proving valuable in settling contractual disputes.

Some of his contemporaries may have been racist imperialists, but Herschel emerges in these pages as heroically untainted: his love of justice and fair play rose above race. During the indigo riots of the 1860s, the so-called blue mutiny, he courted unpopularity with the planters, his own countrymen, by remaining impartial. After Herschel's retirement, however, his invention fell largely into disuse until an industrious young officer named Edward Henry spotted its potential for criminal detection. Henry had been appointed inspector general of Bengal police in 1891 and was soon convinced that fingerprinting was the answer to identification problems, if only a workable system of classification could be found. Whether Henry discovered that system, or one of two Indian assistants, is a question that is not resolved here. Sengoopta lets him off with a caution: "Henry was probably not as appreciative of his two Indian assistants as they may have deserved." Henry introduced the system in Bengal in 1897 and, four years later, in London - as the newly appointed assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police.

No one could doubt the importance of a detection tool that brought guilty criminals to justice. In 1905 the Stratton brothers were convicted on fingerprint evidence of the murder of an elderly couple in Deptford. Other convictions, and hangings, soon followed. But if Herschel had shown what a scientific tool could do in the hands of a good man, there were those who would show the opposite. In Bombay certain moneylenders learned how to fake fingerprints on legal documents. At the same time in Britain, a rising fear of Jewish and German infiltrators led to new laws tightening up on aliens. Fingerprinting was brought in for those who had expulsion orders against them. Henry himself had organised the fingerprinting of coloured workers in South Africa - an imposition which Gandhi denounced for reducing all Asiatics to criminals. The association of fingerprinting with criminality had allowed it to become a means of labelling and oppression.

Here Sengoopta has done a great service in pointing out the direct lineage between laws such as the 1906 Aliens Act and more recent ones. The Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act of 1993 requires that all asylum seekers are routinely fingerprinted, and in January this year those fingerprints became part of a Europe-wide electronic database. Like Victorian Bengalis, asylum seekers do not have the full civil rights accorded to others, not in the eyes of the government at least. Deliciously understated, yet precise and powerful, the book moves effortlessly from the detail of fingerprinting to the wider implications. Writing of the late 19th century, Sengoopta states: "The British public and its political leaders considered universal identification of ordinary people to be repugnant: the individual's right to live and die unobserved by a bureaucracy was a sacred principle of English liberty." These are sentiments that should live for ever but, one concludes, may have already expired.

:: Conrad Barwa 6:27 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Reading Christopher Hitchens:

With reference to the Hitchens article Vikash links to below; I thought I would add my thoughts and responses to it. Obviously the sections that interest me in particular and of which I have some knowledge are those on South Asia; so the bulk of my comments will be limited to them. I have to say though that I am not a great fan or admirer of Hitchens and I never could see the esteem that he enjoys – or rather did enjoy on the Left. While I have only a limited acquaintance with his written work (having only read a smattering of his published articles and mini-tome on Kissinger) it leaves me unimpressed; as while the thrust and general drift was obviously one to which I would be broadly sympathetic, I did not find it particularly well written, thoroughly researched or lucidly argued. However, having seen Hitchens in action, as it were, during several talks and live debates, he is an impressive speaker and debater; though again his penchant for cheap rhetorical tricks and affected put-downs all too often are just a façade for weak and unstable arguments and political positions – it is nonetheless entertaining to see him perform. Still as a thinker or a writer, I find that he leaves much to be desired and his attractions past or present to so many of my colleagues and peers is a source of puzzlement to me. He strikes me as too-much the poseur rather than a real independent critic or dissident voice. Pressing on:

1) The first thing that jars me is the reference to the NYT in the second paragraph; I mean this is hardly the best source for news that I would imagine given the editorial biases in the American print media. However, the really surprising comment comes with his assertion that so many of the “flash-points” or “flash points” in modern times that compromise the journalistic shorthand are “astonishingly often the consequence of the frontiers created ad hoc by British Imperialism”. Ignoring what exactly Hitchens means by “modern” here I find this a slightly Anglo-centric view of post 1945 conflicts and even more so of post 1989 ones. A cursory examination of the UNHCR or Conflict resolution reports from other UN agencies which monitor areas that need or receive emergency aid as a result of refugee and conflicts which cause humanitarian problems shows that many such hotspots are actually not related much to post-colonial states from the British Empire. Some of the bloodiest conflict in recent times have taken place in states that have had no direct connection with British imperialism – East Timor with 25% of its population killed, the genocides of Rwanda and Burundi, the repressive regimes of Central and South America as well as the conflicts that erupted in the wake of the break-up of the Russian Empire in 1989. I think Hitchens unconsciously gears his message less at a global or relatively impersonal international audience than an Anglophone trans-Atlantic one. In itself not a cause for concern, unless it is the first step in a broader project of establishing some kind of Anglo-centric Atlantic policy for a new World Order. Something Hitchens cannot escape from at least partially guilty of. This is of course not to justify or lessen the horrific consequences that British imperialism had in its after effects; in the way that recent moves by conservative historians like Niall Ferguson have attempted in their work on empire. But it is an inverse form of narcissism to put so much blame on British redrawing of borders; it played an important role, but the real deeper damage of imperialism lay elsewhere and many other contingent factors have impinged to prolong such conflicts as well as start new ones.

2) The Partition of India: Again Hitchens can’t help lapse into some hyperbole to drive home his point. Yes, the formal partition of India did occur under British auspices and imperial policy did play and important role in the divide and rule techniques of governance that created two communities in India rather than one along religious lines; yet it is important to understand that British policy did not lead directly to Partition. The troubled nature between Hindu Nationalism and Indian Nationalism. The failure of the mainstream Indian nationalist movement to accommodate or successfully incorporate enough of the Muslim leadership as well as personal differences amongst the elites all played a role; it is pertinent to remember that the Pakistan demand was raised very late in the day – only in 1940 in the notorious Lahore resolution of the Muslim League containing the demand for Paksitan as a separate homeland for the Muslims. Yet the Muslim League s late as 1942 was an inconsequential player in mass politics and in the legislatures – a factor which contributed to Congress underestimation of its strength; it was the dynamics of politics in the intervening period that led to the two-nation theory. In anycase revisionist historians such as Ayesha Jalal have pout forward a convincing case arguing that Jinnah’s demands were a bargaining ploy to extract his first preference which was a loose federation rather than a highly centralised state; unfortunately his bluff was called and Congress intransigence on the nature of the polity together with an miscalculation of the strength of communal mobilisation opened the road to partition. As late as 1942, the Cripps Mission to India offered plans for a united and independent India but failed to win acceptance from all sides in the dispute. Moreover, Cyril Radcliffe’s task was to demarcate the boundaries of the two provinces, which were to be, partitioned – Bengal and Punjab (incidentally these were also two provinces where both the Congress and the Muslim League were not the dominant political forces either in mass politics or in the legislatures). The rest of the Indo-Pak border was not something decided by the departing imperialists – leading to problems over the exact demarcation of the border in areas like the Rann of Kutch.

3) I am also less sure of Hitchens’ analysis of Partitions. Particularly his argument that all Partitions lead to another Partition or to war (with the exception of Germany he notes) leaves me unsure as to what he would see as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which at the moment is inclining towards a two-state settlement. A single, bi-national state arouses strong passions on both sides. The British game in Palestine is a labyrinthine maze in which many researcher have got lost; what surprises me is Hitchens omission of any direct mention of the Zionist movement and its machinations in the region. Zionist leaders approached several external powers including Germany, the Ottoman Empire and the French in an attempt to win support; as given the disproportionate ground realities it would need an external power to allow it to make headway in the face of Arab resistance (something which has proved to be a permanent aspect of state policy in Israel since 1948). Similarly to India and other areas, the British did take advantage and attempt to play a dangerous balancing game with competing interests and antagonisms – but it is important to note that in almost all cases such antagonisms were not the result of conscious state policy; all too often they came into being as segmentary vertically organised societies experienced rapid change and as primordial sentiments were exploited and manipulated by local political entrepreneurs. The dark side of modernity and techniques of colonial rule were the contributing factors to this; yet little of this was foreseen much less planned by the imperial and colonial powers.

4) The most glaring error in the essay comes towards the end in the penultimate paragraph. Hitchens assertion that “In India the British were openly partial to the Muslim side” is mind boggling in its historical audacity. I am unsure where exactly Hitchens gets this view from and he does not back it up with one example or point. Krishan Kumar, has written an excellent monograph comparing the different ways history has been taught in India and Pakistan going over the similarities and divergences, which obviously flatter the host country and denigrate the other neighbour. However, most historians will concur that Colonial policy in religious lines could not be said to be favourable towards the Muslims in the region since at least the 1857 Mutiny – as in this uprising the symbolic figurehead selected was the old titular Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah and many of the older successor Muslim states and landed Muslim gentry in northern India on the Gangetic plains joined in the revolt; the British were apt to see it as a Muslim-led one (an incorrect but widely perceived view) and subsequent colonial policy relied more on Hindu and non-Muslim groups within the internal economy and the bureaucratic apparatuses of the colonial administration such as the Bengali Babus and the Raiyat trading and service classes of northern and western India. Ironically it was these groups and not the old Muslim gentry and peasantry that formed the leadership of the nascent Nationalist movement. The famous Brass thesis debate between Paul Brass and Francis Robinson goes into further detail over how declining representation in the provincial bureaucracy, profession, judiciary and military heightened Muslim elite discontent and sense of marginalisation in the United Provinces towards the end of the 19th century. Indeed Muslim falling behind in taking advantage of the new career opportunities and educational facilities was explicitly acknowledged and understood by traditional sections of the Muslim elite in northern India – hence the efforts of Loyalist Muslims such as Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan to improve educational standards and Muslim representation in the liberal professions and led to such steps such as the founding of the Anglo-Mohammedan college, later to become Aligarh University. Also in as fictional works such as Satyajit Ray’s Shitranj ki Khilari (The Chess Players) shows, it was in British interests and part of the self-legitimising mission civilatrice to portray Muslim pre-colonial India as a backward and repressive regime; whose colonisation liberate the populous Hindu classes from the heavy hand of Muslim tyranny. Being the dominant elite they replaced in areas such as Oudh and Mysore, the British had an interest in making sure that the groups they favoured would be decidedly the non-Muslim ones. Moving onto the Middle East; being forced to acknowledge the Muslim losses in Palestine; Hitchens asserts that the Hashemite and Saudi dynasties benefited as much as anyone else from the imperial carve up and from the guardianship of the Muslim Holy Places!!!! This is an odd piece of sophistry as outside Palestine the Middle East was nearly completely Muslim (with concentrated pockets of Christianity sprinkled in Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt) so how Muslims could possibly be said to have benefited from the break up of the Ottoman Empire given that they were the overwhelming majority in confessional terms and that no other group had any territorial claims in the region is difficult to imagine. Hitchens asserts that the Hashemite and Saud clans did benefit – but this is very different from asserting that any policy that favours these clan leaders somehow also favoured Muslims at large. In fact a more sensible argument would propose that in favouring these leaders the interests of the great mass of Muslims in the region were empathically not served well at all. This is an odd sleight of hand that Hitchens attempts to perform equating a people with their rulers and one is in the dark as to why he does it until the appalling sentence “No, the Muslim claim is better stated as resentment over the loss of the Islamic Empire: an entirely distinct grievance.” I am at a loss as to how to respond to this. First of all what empire? The Abbasid Caliphate? The Ottoman Empire – this would hardly have aroused much remorse given the involvement of many Arabs in armed insurrection against the clearly Islamic imperial rule of the Turks; many regions such as Egypt had to all intents and purposes broken away from the empire long ago without arousing any backlash from their domestic population demanding a restoration of Islamic imperial rule (the intervention and imposition of British colonial rule in the 1880s did however cause a violent and strongly antagonistic nationalistic upsurge). Hitchens’ claim here just doesn’t make sense and he ends it by saying that the biggest losers were those who “believed in modernity and who transcended tribalism”. Er, yes, apart from the fact that these would hardly have been in the majority in most Arab countries; areas where there were such Liberal progressives such as Iran quickly saw the deposition of autonomous democratic rulers under the auspices of the US; Hitchens’ new hope for restoring order and democracy in the region.

Lastly, he ends with a call to confront the inheritance of responsibility of what he calls the “global man’s burden” and how to avoid the mistakes of the British past. One wonders as to whether Hitchens realises that the first step in avoiding such mistakes is not to take up such fictional and imaginary burdens in the first place! What we have here is really Kipling’s White Man’s Burden re-labelled and given a new liberal, progressive and humanist dressing to make it palatable to a democratic audience deeply sceptical of traditional imperial ventures. Yet the structural dynamics are the same; the two problems of Hitchens’ approach are his mis-application of the role that “we” can play (meaning I think in his vocabulary the Anglophone Atlantic alliance) and of the source of the conflicts in many post-colonial states. The first ignores the role of the Atlantic alliance in creating and prolonging these conflicts; Hitchens’ response as to this being part of the responsibility of resolving them is valid but this in turn depends on conditions that generated such policies in the first place having themselves changed – which is not the case. Secondly it also mis-percieves the agenda of intervening states, which is anything but humanitarian or geared towards any “global man’s burden” Hitchens’ is falling into the trap of 19th century Liberal supporters of Victorian Imperialism who believed the hype and the civilising aspect of imperialism; all the time failing to discern the role it played in acting as a veneer of legitimacy and a smokescreen for much more venal and material objectives and processes. Lastly, there is a certain Eurocentric and epistemic imperialism about Hitchens’ view of such conflicts in seeing them as purely the result of past imperial mistakes or current neo-imperial neglect. The periphery in this view is forever condemned to have its history written and shaped by the Core; without ever enjoying the possibility that it might shape or be responsible form some of its own histroy and mistakes. Many of the conflicts are partially influenced by the factors that Hitchens talks about; but so too are they reflective of other broader and unplanned socio-economic and cultural/political changes which have taken place independently of such external interventions. The creation of nations, Hitchens seems to have forgotten is always a bloody business – it was so in Europe, which did not have the privilege of blaming the strife on an external agency. Claiming responsibility for all mistakes and errors in this regard is actually another way of claiming ownership in toto and so should be avoided.

:: Conrad Barwa 8:49 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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