{"id":222723,"date":"2021-09-22T23:49:41","date_gmt":"2021-09-22T18:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=222723"},"modified":"2021-09-26T12:03:45","modified_gmt":"2021-09-26T06:33:45","slug":"the-contending-claims-of-the-new-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/the-contending-claims-of-the-new-world\/","title":{"rendered":"The Contending Claims Of The New World"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Uditha Devapriya<\/a> –<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Uditha Devapriya<\/p><\/div>\n

Following the end of the Cold War, two texts appeared which were to have a profound impact on the course of political debates in the new millennium. These were Francis Fukuyama\u2019s\u00a0The End of History and the Last Man<\/i>\u00a0and Samuel Huntington\u2019s\u00a0The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order<\/i>. What is fascinating about these books, then as now, is not so much the differences in their conceptions of history as the similarities between them.<\/span><\/p>\n

It would be naive to ascribe to them the same philosophy, for the authors did not occupy the same political page. Yet, at a certain point in these texts, the themes running through them converged. In any case, they addressed a common concern: what would the new world order after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union be like?<\/span><\/p>\n

Running into several reprints, these books continue to enjoy an enormous reputation. It is easy to argue that Huntington\u2019s was the more prophetic of the two, given his predictions about the resurgence of nationalism, but no less true has been Fukuyama\u2019s conclusion that, in the absence of any alternative, liberal democracy will continue to be held as the ideal to aspire to. Not even China\u2019s rise, Russia\u2019s belligerence, and radical Islam\u2019s resurgence \u2013 to mention just three of five \u201cprofound transformations\u201d that Jessica Matthews in a\u00a0New York Review of Books<\/i>\u00a0essay (\u201cWhat Foreign Policy for the US?<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u201d, September 24, 2015) notes as having changed the course of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War \u2013 has dented the almost Panglossian faith in a liberal international order. Even in the breach, it remains adhered to.<\/span><\/p>\n

As with all political theorists, Fukuyama and Huntington remain both read and misread. While Giddensian Third Way centrists, whose local branch was until recently Mangala Samaraweera\u2019s Radical Center, summon Fukuyama when championing alternatives to the politics of identity, Jathika Chintanaya ideologues such as Gunadasa Amarasekara cite Huntington in their polemics against Western civilisation. It is no small irony that neither writer would have wanted their texts to be read this way. Yet it is a testament to the longstanding appeal of their work, and the conclusions we can reach from them, that both Radical Centrists and Sinhala nationalists bring them and their authors up in one intellectual debate after another.<\/span><\/p>\n

In hindsight, however, one must admit that the local chapters of the Fukuyama-Huntington debate were mistaken. Local Giddensian Radical Centrists who found their champion in the Chandrika Kumaratunga administration thought that liberal democracy was the way to go. Pinning their hopes on neoliberal prescriptions of privatisation and fiscal consolidation, they believed that opening up the economy would democratise politics. Their equation of Fukuyama\u2019s triumph of the liberal democratic will with free market economics was, in that sense, perhaps inevitable: hardly anyone thought that other political and economic systems would prevail. Not even the Left in Sri Lanka escaped this conclusion: in an interview with state media, Hector Abhayavardhana admitted that there was no alternative to the IMF.<\/span><\/p>\n

Charting a trajectory of liberal politics in Sri Lanka is a task I am ill-fitted to do. Yet from what I can gather, I can only conclude that Third Way Radical Centrists never got beyond their post-Cold War hangover. To put it charitably, they never woke up. While the liberal West they idealised morphed into a pitiable caricature of its ideal, whereby governments got stronger and the military-industrial complex gained in size and strength, especially after 9\/11, they continued to propound visions of minimal states and small armies.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rebelling against not less than common sense, these Centrists advocated reforms which, sans popular support, could only ring out the death knell of the liberal project: reforms such as the abolition of the Executive Presidency. The line taken up by the SJB after 2020, free of the market fundamentalism and utopian liberalism of the UNP before it, shows how history proved Colombo\u2019s Giddensians wrong, again.<\/span><\/p>\n

In that sense, the flaw in Mangala Samaraweera\u2019s vision, noble as it may have been, was its failure to discern the paradox on which he operated. As with all Third Way Centrists, he framed his reformist ideals in opposition to not just rightwing nationalism, but also socialist politics. There is no other reason why, decades after emerging as a critic of J. R. Jayewardene\u2019s regime,\u00a0he could openly celebrate<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0that regime\u2019s \u201cincredible economic advances.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Such turnarounds are hardly astonishing. As Kusum Wijetilleke has noted\u00a0in a piece on the Radical Center<\/span><\/a><\/span>, the experience of most Third Way ideologues is that, in vying for a middle position between nationalist and radical polarities, they capitulate to the neoliberal Right. Its inability to discern the link between market fundamentalism and social ruptures \u2013 epitomised by structural adjustment and food riots in the Third World \u2013 has become its biggest failing, notwithstanding its laudable adherence to a multicultural and democratic order. Even the latter commitment remains a tenuous legacy, since such an order is, in my view, a super-structural ideal that is meaningless without a socially equitable economic base, which can only be achieved by a radical socialist programme,\u00a0of the sort Samaraweera once derisively termed \u201coudated<\/span>.\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

This paradox, in fact, is what characterises revisionist accounts of the J. R. Jayewardene administration: free market advocates hail its classical liberal reforms and the opening up of the economy while ignoring the enormous costs, in terms of crackdowns on trade unions, the Left, and Tamil politics, they entailed. That economists, commentators, and MPs can defend that government on the basis that it could not reap the full dividends of its economic reforms because of political tensions, without acknowledging that such tensions were a product of those reforms, is a sign of our political literacy. Or at least the lack of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet misconceived as their assumptions may have been, Sri Lanka\u2019s Third Way centrists occupied only one side of the debate. They were no more wrong in their belief in the triumph of their ideals than their nationalist counterparts were in that of theirs. Indeed, if Sri Lanka\u2019s Radical Centrists misapprehended Fukuyama\u2019s conclusions about the fate of liberal democracy, Sinhala ultra-nationalists did the same with Huntington\u2019s thesis of civilisational conflict.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here we come to a paradox of another sort. Jathika Chintanaya ideologues, while critiquing Western society, did not see anything off-putting about accepting neoconservative notions of competing nationalisms. What is ironic there is not that they went ahead with a selective reading of politics \u2013 in which all Western ideals were to be deplored, but the logic underlying them accepted \u2013 but that they gave way into the same Cartesian frames they had considered their civilisation \u2013 our civilisation \u2013 superior to. This tells a lot about their dependence on Western frames of reference, regardless of their pretensions to the contrary.<\/span><\/p>\n

The failure of the Jathika Chintanaya project goes deeper than this. In making race their ultimate criterion of value, its ideologues sidestepped certain considerations that any political programme based on ethnic nationalism should have accounted for. Put simply, if Colombo\u2019s Third Way neoliberal centrists considered ethnicity too pass\u00e9 to include in their manifestos, Huntingtonian nationalists considered it too fixed and eternal to ignore.<\/span><\/p>\n

But as scholars such as R. A. L. H. Gunawardana and Senake Bandaranayake have argued, categories of race and religion were until recently notoriously fluid concepts. Gunawardana\u2019s contention that not until the 11th century does the idea of a Sinhala consciousness begin to take shape in the country\u00a0has been contested by K. N. O. Dharmadasa<\/span><\/a><\/span>, yet notwithstanding those debates,\u00a0his point that Sinhala nationalism evolved to what is has become today under conditions of colonialism<\/span><\/a><\/span>, holds valid. But Sinhala and Tamil nationalists persist in attributing a sense of timeless solidity to these ideals. In this they invert Marx\u2019s classic dictum: for them, it is the social consciousness of a people that determines their social being.<\/span><\/p>\n

What are we to conclude from these points? Post-1977, both Sinhala nationalism and Radical Centrism would come to be informed by the same circumstances, namely the end of the Cold War. While Third Way neoliberals saw in Fukuyama\u2019s end of history the triumph of neoclassical economics, Sinhala nationalists saw Huntington\u2019s thesis as a vindication of their assertions of civilisational superiority. It goes without saying that both were wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, inasmuch as both were wrong, I would venture to say that the neoliberals were more wrong than the neoconservatives, for the simple reason that Fukuyama\u2019s predictions about the post-Cold War world order were more restrained than the meanings given to them by advocates of free markets. The clash of civilisations thesis, by contrast, contained a semblance of the meaning ascribed to it by Sinhala nationalists at the turn of the century.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet even here, the latter were mistaken, for they thought Huntington\u2019s civilisational paradigm to be a viable alternative to the ideological paradigms of the Cold War that they had rejected. As H. L. Seneviratne has noted, Huntington\u2019s idea of cultural conflict remains very much situated in an ideological framework. Seneviratne\u2019s assertion that Huntington\u2019s thesis would become obsolete does not seem to have been borne out by events thereafter, but the fall of and retreat from Kabul shows that the hour of American neoconservatives, who held the Huntingtonian line for a quarter century, has gone. That Sinhala nationalists have not yet properly grasped this confirms Dr Dayan Jayatilleka\u2019s observation that they pretend as if George Bush never left office.<\/span><\/p>\n

We must be grateful to Marxist scholars who showed that a country\u2019s cultural history refracts and reflects the material base of its society, and is not, contrary to what some think and believe, a timeless construct that depends on the meanings of abstractions like race. The nationalists have failed to grasp this, just as Radical Centrist have failed to grasp the implications of Fukuyama\u2019s End of History. It would seem that Sinhala ultra-nationalists remain as outdated, and out of place, as their liberal counterparts. This is the irony of our day and age.<\/span><\/p>\n

*The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com<\/i><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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