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The ‘western model’ and its discontents: an interview with Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra, Flickr/Palestine Festival of Literature 2008. Some rights reserved.William Eichler: You
recently wrote in the
Guardian, adopting a phrase used by two editors of the Economist, that the 'western model' is
broken. Could you explain what you mean by the 'western model'?

Pankaj Mishra: It's shorthand for certain assumptions,
certain expectations that elites in western Europe, and in the United States
since the early twentieth century, have used to define the evolution of their
powerful nation-states. They try to apply these so-called lessons from their
own history to the rest of the world, including places that they themselves
have dominated. I'm speaking here specifically of western Europe, of Britain
and France, where a particular teleology, which intellectuals, thinkers and
statesmen in these countries have observed in their own history, is then
applied to other countries in other parts of the world. The basic assumption is
that these societies can also progress, and arrive at western-style liberal
capitalism and democracy, using the same techniques and going through the same
stages that we have gone through.

It's very much a model that is dependent upon certain
provincial historical generalisations, certain historical assumptions, that are
applied to the rest of the world. These assumptions, though, are derived really
from the history of a tiny part of the world: western Europe and the US. It has
had many incarnations, as I said in the
Guardian piece, from the
Economist arguing from the
mid-nineteenth century onwards about the importance of free trade to Henry Luce
talking about the American century and then W.W. Rostow advocating
modernization theory down to the Washington Consensus. Since the Cold War,
there has been a renewed stress on, and an ideological certainty about, some of
these notions that what worked well for a small part of the world can also work
well for everyone else.

WE: You argue that this
'western model' became globalised as a result of imperialism. What are the
differences between western and non-western imperialism?

PM: The key difference is capitalist expansion through
industrialism. This defines the history of the last 200 years and has driven
the search for resources, territories and markets. If you look at the history
of the Ottoman Empire or the Qing Empire you'll find plenty of evidence for
varieties of capitalism, for a market economy, but you would not find this
frantic urge to expand, to continually find new resources in different parts of
the world, not just in your neighbourhood but on the other side of the globe.
The British empire, for example, was active in the Fiji Islands as well as the
Caribbean and India, not to mention Australia. None of the other empires of the
past had that kind of reach or that kind of hunger. Even if you could somehow
prove that they had the aspiration, the ambition, you would have to prove that
they had the means, which they certainly did not.

WE: The depth of
colonial penetration seems to be a key factor when discussing imperialism. How
deeply did western imperialism affect non-western societies?

PM: It radically changed – some might say devastated –
these societies. Many of them, such as China, had enjoyed periods of economic
growth and relative political stability for a very long time before the
Europeans arrived and those societies were thrown into chaos, civil war and
political unrest. You might say that many of them have never really recovered
from the particular trauma of facing this European invasion.

It was also not just a military invasion; it was
cultural, moral and intellectual as well. There was the trauma of having to
adjust to the fact of European power, to this particular modern world that
European power had made. I don't think we have witnessed that kind of radical
social and economic engineering before in human history. So in terms of, to use
your phrase ‘depth of penetration’, this turned out to be a project of remaking
the world that was really unprecedented.

Liang Qichao. Wikimedia Commons/Tung Wah News. Some rights reserved.WE: In your book From the Ruins of Empire (2012) you talk about how Asian
intellectuals responded to this process. What were their main reactions?

PM: There were people trying to resist that power by
upholding some sort of nativist tradition or set of nativist ideas. There were
people who said: let’s take selectively from Europe and combine it with what we
already have. And there were others who said we have to completely overhaul our
societies, nothing of the past should be allowed to survive. Those were the
radicals and we saw that with the communists in China and Atatürk in Turkey,
and indeed elsewhere over the twentieth century.

This was the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. 100 years later we are in a different world altogether and the past
that people could still invoke convincingly in the nineteenth century is lost.
It's now invoked by fanatics and fundamentalists of various sorts who have
never lived in that premodern world and who have no experience of it
whatsoever. They were trained politically and ideologically by modernity, so
when they invoke the past they are really invoking a figment of their
imagination, often based upon some ill-digested western scholarship. They have
no real experience of it, unlike many of the people who I write about in the
book. And so one has to emphasise that there is a big difference between how
those people responded, or tried to respond, and the way people respond today.

WE: How did the
intellectual challenges posed by western power affect post-colonial societies?

PM: The important thing to note here is that
decolonization must be understood in the context of the Cold War. It was
against this backdrop that these countries were decolonized and started to
develop modern economies and started to create for themselves new
nation-states. The 1940s and 1950s was a time when they were trying to convert
these heterogeneous societies into nation-states and this enormous task was
undertaken under great geopolitical pressures where countries had to make
choices between communism and joining the free world.

Not only that but the range of internal challenges was
staggering so in that context anything that was said or thought in the late
nineteenth or early twentieth century had very little purchase. So even some of
the more influential thinkers of the time were systematically disregarded. The
most prominent example is Gandhi. If you look at post-colonial India, you ask:
do we see any evidence of Gandhi's political or social programme in
post-colonial India? I think you'll find very few of Gandhi's ideas have
survived or very little of Gandhi's ideas have been developed into enduring
institutions. If you can say this about such an influential figure, then what
to say of all the others who were not as influential?

WE: What were the main
internal issues that these new nation-states had to deal with in their attempts
to ‘catch up’ with the west?

PM: If you are trying to create a nationalist identity
in a country like India, which is essential to creating a nation-state, you are
already running into all sorts of problems because the country is internally
incredibly diverse. Look at Europe and how much violence and ethnic cleansing
it had to undergo before it arrived at its present shape where you can say
these societies are relatively homogenous. At some point they were much more
fragmented and there were much smaller political units and so a lot of violence
had to be done before Europe arrived at its present shape. Europe had all the
time to do that – centuries in fact – when it was not threatened by any force
from outside or only threatened periodically, say, by Arabs, but even that was
a very localised threat and wasn't a threat to the way of life or political structures.

Now in the post-colonial world you had to create some
degree of national coherence. You had to build up an industrial economy very
fast because that was how you survived. Otherwise you were in danger of going
back to being a country that would be looted for its resources by the
 powerful capitalist industrialised nations. So industrialisation seemed
to many of these nations as absolutely key to any kind of sovereignty, and
there were so many related tasks such as having a proper army or having a
proper police force.

Some countries were fortunate in inheriting from old
colonial structures some semblance of a security establishment but that had its
own problems, like in India where the police did not become part of democratic
India and remained this essentially colonial and brutal institution. The
policeman is still one of the most hated public figures in India today. So
there were all these problems that these countries had to deal with. And they
had no time, they had to do it immediately.

Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China. Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved.WE: There is a lot of
discussion about the decline of the west and the rise of the rest. But you are
sceptical about this whole process. In From the Ruins of Empire you describe it as “something darkly
ambiguous” and you have also written elsewhere that the BRICS, commonly cited as the
most important emerging powers, are unable “to offer an acceptable moral and
political alternative to Western hegemony.” Could you expand on this?

PM: I think both of these notions – the decline of the
west or the rise of the rest – are incredibly inane at many levels. They can be
disproven in any number of ways. Economically you could look at the size of the
American economy and the size of China's economy: there are still huge gaps in
terms of power and living standards and there is no guarantee that those gaps
will be bridged. I'm not even talking of India which is 20 years behind China.
There are all kinds of social and political problems that countries like China
are yet to face. One can easily mock these notions of decline and fall or the
rise of China by simply pointing to some of these very obvious empirically
verifiable facts.

But I think I was making a different argument which is
to say that if we do not come up with an alternative to a model of political
and economic development that has caused so much ruin and violence in the
world, then whether you are in the west or the east we are doomed to live with
the same kinds of violence which we have already seen in other parts of the
world. In that sense, the rise of the east makes absolutely no difference.

I think you could argue that some people are well-off. They
can strut around the world and claim equality at the UN security council. They
can say we also want a seat here, we also want a place at the World Bank and
the IMF and if those are denied they try and set up their own world bank like China tried to do with the help
of other countries. This so-called decline of the west and the rise of the east
is a bonanza for these kinds of globalized elites who want a place at the high
table but most people in these countries are looking at a very uncertain, very
dark future.

So I think I would be more admiring of this so-called
assertion of previously trampled upon peoples if these countries who have had
their sovereignty violated innumerable times in the last 100 years had also
come up with a new way to ensure dignity and freedom for all of humanity. But
the fact is they have not. They are simply trying to adapt for their own
purposes certain techniques of achieving wealth and power, which include modern
modes of capitalist imperialism. If not imperialism in other countries then
internally, whether it’s dispossessing tribals in central India of their land
or developing Tibet, they are doing more or less the same kinds of things that
imperialists from other parts of the world have done.

The decline of the west is a narrative often invoked by
neurotic supremacists in the west; likewise, the rise of the east is the
preferred narrative of the megalomaniacal easterner. And there is a perfect
synergy between the two narratives. So we hear a lot about them and
decline-and-rise seems to be the dominant narrative. But once you start looking
at what decline and rise really mean, what success really means in this
context, then we'll have a very different perspective on these narratives.

WE: You have argued
that “the world of cohesive nation states is now passing, more rapidly than we
could have imagined. As in the early twentieth century, the elemental forces of
globalization have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties.” And in your
response in the Guardian to
the Charlie Hebdo massacres, you also wrote that globalization has brought
about a “negative solidarity of mankind”. Could you explain what you meant? And
what have been the consequences of this unravelling of “broad solidarities and
loyalties” and the “negative solidarities” that this has led to?

PM: The old idea of the nation-state was, in many ways,
an ideal or normative state that people talked about. Growing up in India in
the 1970s and 1980s, I experienced what one would call today a sort of national
culture where you had the sense that, broadly speaking, we were in it all
together, that the rise and fall of the country affected all of us and, very
importantly, it affected all of us equally because we were all more or less at
the same socioeconomic level. Some were, of course, much, much poorer but if
the country was doing well it was likely that all of us would be helped along.

Now whether this was an illusion in the mind or whether
this was something actually happening is a separate matter altogether. That was
the feeling and that's how nations are created and sustained. They are
essentially invented communities that tell successful lies about themselves and
this is what we were all doing and have been doing for a long time.

I think, though, that now the illusions have shattered.
Our societies have become more atomized. Everyone is supposedly on his own and
out for himself. And everyone is supposed to want what the richest and most
powerful people in the world have. At the same time, we've become much more
aware that there is extreme inequality in the world today and that national
economies are globalized and rigged against most people. We continue to behave
as though we are still working within the boundaries of nation-states but the
elites have broken free. They now belong to a transnational culture. Today's New York Times has a front page cover story which is
part of an investigative series about real estate in New York and what it is
doing is tracing these very expensive purchases of New York real estate back to
the countries where this money is coming from. The latest instalment is about
an Indian real estate tycoon who basically duped people in India who gave him
money to build condos and apartment blocks and he went ahead and bought himself
an apartment worth millions of dollars in New York.

This is just an example of the elites breaking free and
this would have been impossible in the India I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s
because at a very basic level it was impossible to take money out of the
country unless you were extremely well connected. And even then it was really
difficult. Now these things are possible. Capital is mobile, more so than
labour, and as we know political elites are now accountable to a great extent
to business men who actually help pay for the elections. These are democratic
countries we are talking about, not the outright kleptocracies.

So those solidarities that I was aware of in India back
in the 1970s and 1980s and the idea that we were working within a national
culture to resolve problems, such as those facing women in the work place, the
lower middle classes, the working classes or low castes, all these problems
have become diffused. They haven’t gone away but their importance in the public
realm has diminished because of globalization and the neoliberal idea that we
are all basically individual entrepreneurs. This is an extraordinary notion
which has dominated our minds, deluded many people and depoliticized our cultures
at large – while of course a small number of people grow rich and powerful. And
what are the implications for the politics of these countries? Scotland was one
illustration. Catalonia is another. There are many others all around the world.
There are enough re-politicised people saying that this process has gone on for
far too long and that wherever we are or however small our region is we need to
come together and take control of our particular destinies.

The other side of that phenomena is that the Internet
has created this illusion that we are all neighbours. We are all invited to
participate in this large extended public sphere where we are all talking to
each other all the time from our respective national, ethnic or religious
backgrounds. And not just talking to each other but constantly confronting each
other. This is because of the way capitalism works. It constantly creates
relations of inequality while knitting the world closely together and brings
people necessarily into relations of confrontation. I think that again has
created the sense that we are now living together on this planet sharing a
common present, but actually our interests and priorities radically diverge and
our values also conflict.

That is what I mean by “negative solidarity”. It is not
a solidarity anyone assented to. In a nation state you take a pledge of
allegiance to the constitution at various stages of your life and you are a
citizen.  This solidarity of this particular membership of the global world
that we are all now part of…we did not ask for this at all. It is something
imposed upon us from the outside.

WE: Is this the reason
behind the growth of conservative movements across the world? Are figures, such
as Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, trying to recreate these older
solidarities?

PM: In one sense, it's not really conservatism because
in many of these places there is not much to conserve. These are essentially
political movements manipulating remnants of the progressivist ideologies,
infusing them with the idioms of ethnic and religious identities. Even when
they invoke the past, even when Putin talks about Orthodox Christianity or
Erdogan invokes a mythical past or Hindu nationalists talk about Vedic science,
they are still modern movements. The fact is these are elites trying to
manipulate public opinion in their respective societies and they are using a
variety of ideological and rhetorical means to do that.

From the outside you might sense some contradictions in
their positions, like Erdogan supporting various businessmen who are ruthless
capitalists and who are changing the face of Turkey, while at the same time
talking about Islamic values. But I think at a fundamentally different level
altogether these contradictions often work; they make people feel that they are
not being completely uprooted by the modern world, that they can be capitalists
at the same time as being devout Muslims. I think ostensibly conservative
movements like that have become particularly successful because their appeal
lies in their promise to resolve many important tensions and ambivalences in
the lives of many of their followers. Older parties who only talk about right
wing economics or left wing economics are finding it really hard in large parts
of the world because they really don't have a very effective vocabulary at this
point with which to address the existential challenges before many people in
these societies transitioning to the modern world.

Islamic State fighters, Anbar, Iraq. Wikimedia Commons/Ritsaiph. Some rights reserved.WE: In a recent essay
in the Atlantic, Graeme Wood argued that ISIS is
an essentially medieval organisation. He writes: "there is a temptation to
rehearse this observation – that jihadists are modern secular people, with
modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise – and make it
fit the Islamic state. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical
except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning
civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing
about the apocalypse." Is this a convincing analysis of the ideology of
ISIS?

PM: There has been a lot of fascinating discussion in
academia about whether our categories and oppositions of secular-modern and
religious-medieval are so watertight after all. I don't want to get into this.
But it is instructive to look at how many people in the Muslim world
interpreted the statements and actions of American statesmen right after 9/11,
especially the more Christian-fundamentalists among them – how they concluded
that a new crusade against Islam had been launched. So a similar charge of
medieval legality and apocalyptic mentality can also be levelled – and more
convincingly – against the ultra modern-seeming perpetrators of endless wars
and torture. Let's not assume they represent sweet reason, otherwise Guantanamo
would have been closed a long time ago, the 'torture memo' would never have
been written. Much of this kind of interpretation arises from our particular
location in the world.

The important question for us is: is it useful? Does
conclusively identifying ISIS or the Shia militias fighting it as a product of
the Dark Ages, or invoking theological categories, do anything apart from
satisfy our desire to feel morally superior and justified in unleashing extreme
violence around the world? Or does it make more sense to consider ISIS along
with very similar eruptions of political-religious fury in the last century and
a half: from the Taiping rebellion and the Mahdi and Boxer uprisings to Hindu,
Sikh, Jewish and even Buddhist millenarianisms in recent decades? If we do
this, then we can start to identity ISIS as the symptom of a wider social and
political breakdown in its region which inevitably produces various DIY
interpretations of scripture and a crazy utopianism. We can then also predict
that the transition to a new order would continue to produce such movements.
This at least helps us calibrate our response; the theological interpretation
on the other hand, or the pathological obsession with Islam, seems largely
useful to exponents on all sides of holy war.

WE: In your Guardian
essay on the 'western model', you write: “Looking at our own complex
disorder we can no longer accept that it manifests an a priori moral and rational order, visible only
to an elite thus far, that will ultimately be revealed to all.” But without an
“a priori moral and rational
order” isn't there a danger of cultural pluralism slipping into moral
relativism and cultural nativism?

PM: I think we have to undertake a careful attempt to
find a place between different kinds of triumphalist fundamentalisms. The right
wing fundamentalism that mostly comes from the technocratic business and
political elites and the mainstream media says that there is only one way to
spend one's time on this earth: to accumulate lots of money, to consume all
kinds of new products, to work in an office or a factory – hundreds of millions
of people are raised from poverty while car sales shoot up. The other
fundamentalism is the cultural nationalism that you find in Putinism, Erdoganism
or Hindu nationalism. I think you'll find that both of them have a particular
teleology in mind.

Essentially, these are fundamentalisms which are
positing this great redemption somewhere in the future and asking you to
sacrifice your present for it. I think my attempt is to undermine the
teleological assumptions and to say: actually, where we are right now, this is
it. We have to live in the present. We cannot commit crimes, kill or dispossess
people, for the sake of some future which may never come. Human life is a very
complex thing, not assessed by poverty statistics, and human desires are very
ambiguous and ever-shifting, not amenable to easy fulfilment. I’m attacking
this notion of a rational order which some of us can see right now but
eventually everyone will love when they see it. This is what tyrants of
different kinds have said throughout the modern era, whether it was Stalin or
Mao or Hitler, not to mention any of the smaller figures or the so-called
“civilisers” of the 19th century. The Iraq war was the most recent example of
this kind of catastrophic thinking. In 2015, we simply cannot afford to keep
believing in these fantastical projections. We have to be much more sceptical
of these notions that we have internalised.

Pankaj Mishra’s From
the Ruins of Empire is published by Penguin.