American Raj

MICHAEL WRIGHT: You wrote in one of your recent essays that Americans shouldn't try to help Pakistan, that they're the wrong people to try and help, and that Indians are the only people who could really help because they're family. You know that nobody in Washington is going to listen to your advice. So is there any insight you could give Americans on how to do the least harm in their relations with Pakistan? I know you've given lots of insights and recommendations over the years but if you could get across only one thing what would it be?

PUNDITA: Try and look at things on the Indian subcontinent from the top down, from the viewpoint of the rulers, during the British Raj at the height of its power. From that view, the Indians weren't living in subjugation to a foreign power, a colonialist power, they were an integral reason for the success of the British Raj -- they were the Raj, co-ruling with the British a vast swath of humanity. They sat at the right hand of the most powerful ruler on earth, in a manner of speaking, and that's how they saw themselves.

The British sought their help and advice, and in tribute to the Indian rulers they built and maintained roads, railroads, postal and telegraph systems, flood management systems, and many other infrastructure modernizations and improvements.

Then the unthinkable happened; it all came to an abrupt end. The British could no longer afford to keep up appearances on the subcontinent. They could no longer afford to maintain the infrastructures they built.

Then came Independence. The rulers who stayed on the Indian side, even though soon stripped of the legal power to rule, were better able for a variety of reasons to adjust to the death of the British Raj than the rulers who were on the Pakistan side at the time of Partition.

It's very hard to convey even to today's young generation of Indians, let alone Americans, how traumatic the situation was because Indians tend to focus on the trauma and horror of Partition -- and as with Americans, Indians are steeped in the harshly critical postcolonial views of the subcontinent's rulers, which are mixed with views on democracy and a rejection of monarchism. But the Pakistani rulers had assumed the British Raj would go on forever and that their special relationship with the British would also go on. Then it was all swept away.

MICHAEL WRIGHT: You once mentioned the flooded ballroom in Cameron's Titanic when you were trying to get across what it was like, with all those bodies in evening finery floating in the ocean waters.

PUNDITA: It was the best analogy I could think of at the time. But the point for Americans is that a big part of the special relationship was that the British paid what the Indian rulers considered tribute, in exchange for help from the rulers, and that the tribute included maintaining the subcontinent's infrastructure systems. That's the way things were done, that's the way they were always done. That was the way of the world.

If left to their own devices, as the Indians were after Independence, the Pakistani rulers might have gotten away from the idea of tribute and adjusted to the fact that nobody was going maintain their nation's infrastructures unless they did it.

MICHAEL WRIGHT: I get it; then along came the American Raj.

PUNDITA: Yup. The British maharaja was dead, long live the American maharaja.

MICHAEL WRIGHT: But the American Raj didn't perform to expectations.

PUNDITA: Yes and no. The great difference was that instead of wanting to rule over a vast swath of humanity the American Raj wanted to beat the Soviets. So the Pakistani rulers adjusted the kind of help they gave to this new raj. The trouble was that American aims meant that tribute -- what the Pakistani rulers considered tribute -- flowed more and more to Pakistan's military, which gave the military more and more power. This left the country's traditional rulers, who were soon demoted to the status of feudal landlords by the thinking of the West, in an increasingly desperate position.

And who was going to maintain the infrastructures built by the British Raj? Who was going to finance the building of new infrastructure systems while the rulers were busy with their traditional role of getting a decent day's work out of people who oversaw the laborers and settling the endless disputes that arose between them?

Then, just when it seemed the world was going to end -- drumroll, please.

MICHAEL WRIGHT: [laughing] Along came the World Bank.

PUNDITA: Yup. The Bank was already in existence by then but along came its International Development Association and the accounting practices that for some bizarre reason, from the viewpoint of Pakistan's rulers, the Americans considered corrupt. What corruption? It was simply the modern way for the American Raj to keep up tribute payments.

MICHAEL WRIGHT: [laughing] So much for development philosophy.

PUNDITA: Heck, the Pakistanis practically invented development philosophy. But Americans and Pakistanis had two very different interpretations of what development meant. Americans looked at development as a stepwise process toward modernization: we loan you the money to develop, then you build on that development and progress to more and more development, until voilà! you reach self sufficiency.

From the Pakistani view, the view of the rulers, the point of development was toward closer and closer relations with the American Raj with commensurate increases in tributes.

Fast forward to the present era, which sees Washington tearing its hair out over all the development aid and loans that the West poured into the bottomless hole of Pakistan, and asking what the Pakistanis did with all that money. Everywhere Washington looks, it sees infrastructures built more than a century ago by the British, and left to fall into disrepair.

There's the Pakistani flood management crisis, the water crisis -- which is largely a water management crisis -- education crisis, energy crisis, roads and bridges crises, and on and on.

Whose fault is that? The fault of the American Raj for not keeping things in better repair.

A secondary problem with this attitude is that it trickled down in the society, so people who don't earn any kind of tribute still have the sense of entitlement that goes with earning it.

When Pakistan's mango growers wanted a larger share of the global market, they expected someone else, the Americans it turned out, to build them modern facilities for processing the mangos and giving them training in getting the mangos ready for markets that wanted cleaner mangos.

It's like that with everything. If you want us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps you make the bootstraps, put us in them, then pull. That attitude drives the Chinese up a wall, I might add.

MICHAEL WRIGHT: The really crazy part is that while we were pouring aid into underdeveloped countries, our own infrastructures fell into despair.

PUNDITA: The American Raj turned out to ignore its flanks as much as the British did theirs. But so much of the aid and loans got misused in Pakistan because it actually was a form of tribute. Americans were buying help in fighting the Soviets so if the aid money and IDA loans weren't used correctly, well, there was always more where that came from.

MICHAEL WRIGHT: That view wasn't limited to dealing with Pakistan. But to put it in one sentence, what Washington needs to know is that what it considers to be aid, Pakistani's ruling class still thinks of as tribute.

PUNDITA: I don't like putting things in one sentence but that's close enough, except I'd say that they prefer to think of it as tribute. They're not primitives, Michael. They know the way the modern world works.

But the end of the British Raj was relatively abrupt and so traumatic for Pakistan's leaders that another analogy is an amputation made on the battlefield. The legs are there one minute and then they're gone. Even under the best of conditions, where the person has had some time to adjust to the idea of amputation, there can be the 'ghost limb' phenomenon, where the amputee still thinks he can feel the lost limb.

In the same manner, a way of life was unceremoniously uprooted and with it a sense of order that the American Raj was not able to restore. This sense that 'something is missing but should still be there' percolates down through all levels of the society.

For a time the Pakistani military was able to backfill some of the lost order but at a very high price -- a debilitating cold war with India that exploded into hot war a few times with humiliating defeats. And a brutally enforced military rule that further eroded the sense of order. Neither could Pakistan's place in the world as an Islamic state restore the sense of order.

MICHAEL WRIGHT: Because the sense of order isn't rooted in Islam.

PUNDITA: Right. The Muslims who conquered parts of India took on the traditions they found on the subcontinent, where rulers were seen as living gods and expected in act in that manner.

MICHAEL WRIGHT: Do you think it would help if Pakistanis confronted more about their eras of kings?

PUNDITA: Well in many ways they've never stopped thinking of their kings. But by the mid-twentieth century the democracy advocates, socialists and anti-colonialist philosophers had demonized those eras. In doing so, they stripped away the pride that the peoples of the subcontinent should have about being part of those eras. It's like the British, who've spent the modern era beating themselves up about their colonial rules, whereas in fact there's much to be proud of about those.

You can't demonize or reject a big part of your past without incurring a big psychological cost. So, yes, at some point in the future it might be a help if they confronted the fact that the British Raj was a pretty glorious affair and that they were a big part of that. Seen from up close, the raj had an awful aspect, a very cruel one, but so did all other rules. It was just the way things were.

But you see I don't like to use the word 'help' anymore within earshot of Washington. There are times to attempt to be helpful and times to pull back, and this is one of those times when Washington needs to pull back.

If Washington wants to help, help itself. Going back my entire lifetime, it's misread one situation after another around the globe because it was always blind to how a monarchist past influences many crises.

I understand why the blindness exists. But if you want a better informed foreign policy and even defense policy, you've got to set aside your theories and try to overcome your blind spots, so you can see the way things are and how they were.

MICHAEL WRIGHT: It was never really about the money, was it?

PUNDITA: In British India? Of course not. Many of the subcontinent's rulers were fabulously wealthy. It was about what the tributes meant.

MICHAEL WRIGHT: An acknowledgment from the lord of the modern era, in that time, that the rulers had tremendous importance.

PUNDITA: An important place in that era. And, they thought, an important place in this era with the American Raj.

Recently State had to inform Pakistan that it couldn't have a Most Favored Nation trade agreement with the United States because those were only for major economies. The Pakistanis knew that, but still they wanted special treatment. And yet Pakistan's leaders had been talking for months about putting their relationship with the USA on a purely transactional basis.

MICHAEL WRIGHT: Old attitudes die hard. Maybe more of Pakistan's ruling class should read Gone with the Wind. But as long as they keep spawning terrorism we can't leave them alone to work out their present.

PUNDITA: With all due respect, that is the typical view of the enabler.

MENA's New Left (Updated)

Update 3:30 PM ET
Added a link to my discussion about a report on the Washington Consensus
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I offer this op-ed by Austin G. Mackell as a companion piece to the article I linked to in the previous post (Europe's New Right -- published in Foreign Policy at the height of the August 2011 riots in England). The op-ed, published at an ABC TV (Australia) blog on September 14, 2011, is titled, Believe the hype: Cairo is bigger than Berlin. By "Berlin," Mackell a self-described political 'progressive,' means the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events that led up to the historic occasion. To cut to the chase:

[...] In 2011, the spirit of Tahrir has been echoed not just around the Middle East (including in Israel) but in Greece, Spain, Portugal, the UK, the US, Chile, Burkina Faso and more. And as the workers in Wisconsin receive letters of solidarity from their comrades in Mahalla, and the internet kicks into gear as both a tool for organising and challenge to the dominance of the media giants, these local uprisings are beginning to add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The Global Justice Movement, which was -- before the racist and divisive War on Terror era -- the fastest-growing political movement in history, is ready for its second wave. Believe the hype, and then some. Something big is happening here.

So is this bigger than Berlin? He's correct about the global social justice movement taking a severe blow in the wake of 9/11, although I don't know whether it could be characterized as the fastest-growing movement in history. But I sat on the Berlin essay for so many months because I was still waiting for someone else to play the fool and explain in graphic detail that the Tahrir Square uprising was a textbook example of media manipulation. I'm still waiting but I'm getting tired of seeing the essay gather dust.

I doubt Mackell is aware that the Tahrir Square revolution was a stage show but he does try to preempt criticism of the protest movement by acknowledging that it was deeply flawed. So this is a variation on the Whistle Down the Wind thesis. I think that was the title of the movie in which some children mistook a criminal on the lam for Jesus, and yet good things came of their misplaced trust because of their great faith. Anyhow, that's basically the author's argument: that the spirit fueling the Tahrir Square protests has reinvigorated the global social justice movement and that no number of flaws in the Tahrir Square revolt would overturn this development.

The flaw in this line of reasoning was evident within days of the Tahrir Square protests launch, when a group of Egyptians rode into the square on horses and camels and attacked the protesters. CNN portrayed the attackers as government-hired goons and even after a spokesman for the government demanded that he be allowed to explain what happened, the CNN anchor who interviewed him made faces and in other ways conveyed to the audience that he was sure the spokesman was lying.

He wasn't lying. The attackers were tour guides at the pyramids. The protests had destroyed their business and so their families were facing starvation.

By this year countless other Egyptian working stiffs had turned against the ongoing Tahrir Square protests and the protest organizers -- and to such extent that many refuse to believe even video evidence that the military has continued to torture protesters. And many now believe the military's claim that the organizers are working for foreign interests -- a claim that has a little truth to it, if you recall the Associated Press report I quoted at length in the Headless Horseman essay.

My Still Waiting for Pasha essay, published at Pundita in 2005, infuriated Iranian democracy activists who read it because it poked fun at them. But they weren't willing to do their homework to bring about a real revolution. They weren't getting out in the villages and into the poorest sections of the major cities and working to win the understanding of the people outside the universities and intellectual circles. They were outwitted by Ahmadinejad, who went into the villages and the slums and played the Man of the People role to perfection.

So while it's true that good things can come from a flawed premise -- good things can come even from believing big lies -- it's also true that there is no shortcut to freedom.

The author observes that the Egyptian "revolution did not come out of nowhere in a flash of Facebook magic" and that it came from the groundwork done by labor activists. It's true that the most experienced organizers came out of the labor union movement and also true that labor strikes during the Tahrir Square protests helped cripple the country even more, leading to a general sense of chaos that was portrayed as revolutionary. However, much of Egypt's work force does not belong to a labor union! This to include Egyptians who collect a paycheck from the military.

None of the above is any reason not to read the Berlin essay. I think it's an important writing because it aptly summarizes what many people around the world believe today. (By the way some of the author's digs at the Washington Consensus are justified. See my January 24, 2012 post.)

The catch is that if the beliefs are based in a yearning for the sense of order reflected in the rule of kings they wouldn't be open to rational argument. What to do, in such case? Gosh, that question was asked in ancient Athens. If I recall the answer was, 'When Zeus is uncrowned the whirlwind rules.'

Missing something?

Oh look it's a democracy! Come snuggle with the United States!

The title of this post refers to the punch line in a series of TV commercials in the USA for Sears Optical eyeglasses. The ads feature amusing skits of people in serious need of a pair of glasses, such as the woman who mistakes a police patrol car for a taxicab. But helped along by bravura performances from Tara L. Clark as a blind-as-a-bat cat owner and Squirty as a wild raccoon who can't believe his luck, one of the skits is so funny it's gone viral on the internet. (Click on the above link to see the ad on YouTube.)

There is nothing funny, however, about American officials who are so blind to what the United States stands for they snuggle with governments that march to a very different drumbeat than their own. Yet the officials are supported in their blindness by an equally blind populace. So in this post I'm going to break a taboo and wrestle with topics that are only whispered about in this country: monarchism and America's involvement with it. To set the stage I'll start with quotes from two recent news reports:

From the Globe and Mail (Canada), August 19, 2011:

Stephen Harper is working to recast the Canadian identity, undoing 40 years of a Liberal narrative and instead creating a new patriotism viewed through a conservative lens.

Restoring the “royal” prefix to the navy and air force this week is just part of the Prime Minister’s attempt at “creating a new frame” for Canada and Canadians. ...

From the New York Times, August 17:

A photograph taken last Friday of Gary F. Locke, the new United States ambassador to China, buying coffee with his 6-year-old daughter and carrying a black backpack at a Starbucks in the Seattle airport, has gone viral on the Chinese Internet. The seemingly banal scene has bewildered and disarmed Chinese because they are used to seeing their own officials indulge in privileged lives often propped up by graft and bribery and lavish expense accounts.
[...]
The first impression from the Starbucks episode has been bolstered by another photograph that shows Mr. Locke, his wife, Mona, and their three children carrying their own luggage after landing at Beijing Capital International Airport.

Chinese who saw them then spread the word that the family had gotten into an anonymous minivan because a formal sedan that had been sent to pick them up was too small.

“To most Chinese people, the scene was so unusual it almost defied belief,” Chen Weihua, an editor at China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, wrote in an article Wednesday.

Cheng Li, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who studies Chinese elite politics, said in an e-mail: “Ambassador Locke’s photo contrasts sharply with the image of the Chinese officials who often live in a secret, insulated, very privileged fashion.

Often I've heard it asked why Britain's political Right doesn't seem much less socialist than the country's Left. I'd say the answer is that the United Kingdom's welfare state has as much to do with Marxism as bread and circus did under the Roman emperors. I'd also say the same answer would apply to the welfare state in the Kingdom of Norway and the Kingdom of Sweden and a number of other countries that are constitutional monarchies.

Yet my fellow Americans have such difficulty seeing monarchism that they confuse it with something else. The same blindness can afflict Americans who insist that China is not much different from the United States. In his 2008 article for the May/June issue of Good magazine (Ten Reasons Why China Matters To You), Thomas P.M. Barnett, an American security analyst, wrote that "China’s transformation echoes much of America’s past. ... right now, China is somewhere in the historical vicinity of 'rising America' circa 1880."

In my retort (The National Petition Bureau will see you now, Dr Barnett), I pointed out that Chinese make the pilgrimage to a bureau that's a CCP place marker for an emperor's go-fers. I added in exasperation, "Ah yes, I remember as if just yesterday the tens of millions of American peasants in the 1880s who pilgrimaged to the nation's capital every year to seek redress from the emperor."

Dr Barnett turned out to have a sense of humor or at least a fair-minded attitude about receiving criticism because he linked my post at his blog. Yet that did little to allay my concern that Washington's foreign policy establishment was blind as a bat to the fact that modern China is an imperial society with a frownie face of Communist Party dictatorship painted on it, and that modern Britain and a good number of other NATO-member countries are basically monarchist societies with a smiley face of democracy plastered on them.

One could even make an argument that modern Mexico's most entrenched problems are rooted not in the rule of the Spanish but in indigenous imperial civilizations that predated Spain by thousands of years.

In fact, the more one starts looking around the world for societies that are not holdovers from the days of kings the more one appreciates that the United States of America has very few natural allies; i.e., countries that represent a real break with monarchism and the class systems that uphold it.

Norwegians might bristle at their society being described as monarchist. They would point out that their noble class has no political power anymore and that Norway today is an egalitarian society. However, it is an egalitarianism so rigidly enforced that the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik believed after he set off a bomb in Oslo that he would be caught and killed by the police before he reached Utoya island.

His faith in the omniscience of Norway's government was dashed but the point is that the country's egalitarian "open society" is maintained by the second largest deployment of public-space CCTV cameras outside the United Kingdom. And Norway's generous public welfare system means that from cradle to grave Norwegians are easily monitored by the state, which helps the government make sure Norway stays an open, egalitarian society.

Yet Americans insist on describing such states as Leftist! Karl Marx would roll in his grave if he saw what passes today for many Leftist governments.

These same Americans decry their government's close alliance with absolute monarchies such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They do so without realizing that there is a long history of the United States being closely allied with monarchies; that many of these are no longer "absolute" but "constitutional" with parliamentary forms of government and voting rights makes them no less monarchist.

Americans were also miffed at what they considered snobbishness when they heard the Swedish Chairman of BP, Carl-Henric Svanberg, expressing concern for the victims of the Gulf oil spill by referring to them as "the small people."

Translation malfunction, explained his apologists. There was no malfunction; English is Svanberg's second language. And he wasn't being snobbish, he was being Swedish. Noblesse oblige and all that; one must always look after the basic needs of the small people so they don't revolt.

None of the above is meant as a criticism of the countries I've mentioned or their people, and one would be hard-pressed to find nicer peoples than the majority of Swedes or Norwegians -- and Canadians for that matter, who also live under a constitutional monarchy. I see no harm in people upholding traditions that provide them with a sense of order and give them continuity with their past, which is why I cheered on the royal pomp associated with the marriage of William and Kate. If it helped Britons get clearer on their values I was all for that.

The harm comes when Americans are so unclear on their own values, their own past and traditions, they can't engage closely with the rest of the world without becoming terribly confused. One consequence is that the more the U.S. government has tried to mesh with the "international community," the lower America's standing in the world has fallen.

Americans can't turn the situation around without first acknowledging that the international community is in large measure of bunch of royalists. Arriving at this realization doesn't mean Americans should eschew friendly relations with people in such societies or that official Washington should spurn engaging with the governments on issues of mutual interest. It does mean that Americans are asking for ever greater trouble by lumping "democratic" monarchies" with American democracy.

Over at ZenPundit, Mark Safranski has again expressed concern about what he calls an emerging American oligarchy, an elite that's manipulating the rest of the American populace to accept its rule. Meanwhile, Fareed Zakaria is seriously proposing that America replace its president with a prime minister and Congress with a parliament -- with an upper house, I suppose, to be stuffed with Mark's oligarchs, duly elected of course, so that Americans will stop the troublesome habit of vehemently disagreeing with one another.

Now just see how one thing leads to another. First you're snuggling with liberal monarchies, then authoritarian ones, then one day you're asking, 'Why is there no USA anymore? Why is there only the international community?'

Missing something?