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BEYOND NATIONS
& NATIONALISMS: One World
Nadesan Satyendra
10 May 1998, Revised 10 May
2008
"..the building of a nation is
of necessity accompanied by the discovery and
encouragement of universalising values. Far from
keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it
is national liberation which leads the nation to
play its part on the stage of history. It is
at the heart of national consciousness that
international consciousness lives and grows.
And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the
source of all culture. "
Frantz Fannon
"...A true trans nationalism
will not come by the suppression of one nation by
another. A true trans nationalism will come from
nationalisms that have flowered and matured: from
peoples who have grown from dependence to
independence to inter-dependence. It is only the
independent who may be inter-dependent - and to
work for the flowering of the Tamil
nation is to bring forward the emergence of a
true trans nationalism... Meanwhile, Tamils have
no cause, to be apologetic about their
togetherness as a people. As a people, they too
have much to contribute to the rich fabric of the
many nations of the world - and
to world civilisation..." Nadesan Satyendra in
One World & the Tamil Nation, 1998
We speak of the First World,
Second World, Third World, and Fourth World, and it
may be helpful to ask: how did this hierarchical
ordering of the world come about? Did it 'just
happen'? Or is the classification a reflection of
an often unstated, but value laden, view of the
world?
We know, ofcourse, that the First
World countries are those that are at the top end
of the Gross National Product (GNP) ladder. The
Second World, during the period of the Cold War,
was the Communist/Socialist bloc. And the Third
World were those countries at the bottom end of the
GNP ladder.
The countries belonging to the
Communist /Socialist bloc resisted this 'Second'
class categorisation. Be that as it may, with the
collapse of the Iron Curtain, the Second World
categorisation lost its earlier conceptual
underpinning and today has a largely historical
significance. And if, today, there is no
Second World as such, why
is it that we continue to speak of the Third World? Is that categorisation
too a relic of the past?
Even apart from such reflections
(which may be dismissed by some as a mere quibbling
with words), the question remains: why are
countries at the top end of the GNP ladder, the
First World? For instance,
these countries are also at the bottom end of the
ladder in so far as environmental pollution is
concerned. Should we therefore categorise them as
the Second World, and the former
Communist/Socialist bloc where pollution is at its
worst, as the Third World - that is if we rate
environment before gross national product.
That the classification is itself a
product of the First World will not surprise many.
Hegemony is secured not simply by military might
and economic power, but also by the artefacts of a
'legitimising culture'.
For more than three hundred years,
until the break up of colonial empires in the
aftermath of the Second World War, the colonial
ruler legitimised his rule as a 'civilising'
influence.
"...One .. aspect of British
authority in India ... was the conviction held by
every European in India of a final and enduring
racial superiority. Seton Kerr, a Foreign
Secretary of the (British) Government, explained
it as 'the cherished conviction of every
Englishman in India, from the highest to the
lowest, by the planter's assistant in his lowly
bungalow and by the editor in the full light of
the Presidency town - from those to the Chief
Commissioner in charge of an important province
to the Viceroy on his throne - the conviction in
every man that he belongs to a race whom God has
destined to govern and subdue'. Many equally
authoritative statements of this point of view,
from persons in the highest official position in
India, could be quoted to show how universal this
conviction was during the last century and indeed
up to the time of the First Great War. One
further quotation may, however, be permitted, as
it throws light on the attitude of the army. Lord
Kitchener, a most distinguished
Commander-in-Chief of India, declared:
'It is this consciousness of
the inherent superiority of the European which
has won for us India. However well
educated and clever a native may be, and however
brave he may have proved himself, I believe that
no rank we can bestow on him would cause him to
be considered an equal of the British
officer.'..." - K.M.Pannikar in Asia and
Western Dominance, George Allen & Unwin,
1953
The 'legitimising culture' of the
conqueror served twin purposes. On the one hand, it
served as a rationalising platform for the
conqueror to motivate his own army and strengthen
the will of his own people. On the other hand, it
helped to persuade the conquered to acquiesce in
what was passed off as a 'modernising' process.
Even Karl Marx persuaded himself to the view that
despite its excesses, colonial empires helped
'modernise' the Asian economies - and in that sense
were 'progressive'.
The 'Red' Indians, Aborigines, the
Negroes, the 'pagan' Indians who prayed to idols,
the 'yellow' races, were 'uncivilised', even
'barbarians' and the conqueror persuaded not only
himself but in many instances, the conquered people
themselves, that he, the conqueror, was simply
carrying out a civilising duty imposed upon him by
God and history. Winston Churchill was eloquent -
as always:
"I do not agree that the dog in
a manger has the final right to the manger even
though he may have lain there for a very long
time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit
for instance, that a great wrong has been done to
the Red Indians of America or the black people of
Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been
done to these people by the fact that a stronger
race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise
race to put it that way, has come in and taken
their place." (1937, quoted by Arundhati Roy in
2002)
For Abraham Lincoln, though
democracy was the rule of the people, by the
people, for the people, Negroes, after all, were
not 'people' and therefore did not have the right
to vote. As for 'Red' Indians, those that had
not been killed off, should be confined within
'enclosed settlements' for their own good.
And as a divine instrument, the
conqueror was not averse to giving God a helping
hand. In 1835, Thomas Macaulay, President of a
Committee on Public Instruction in Bengal,
recommended for India, a thoroughly English
educational system which 'would create a class of
persons, Indian in blood and colour but English in
taste, in morals and in intellect'. The
'utilitarian' underpinning was provided by James
Mills and others:
"Throughout his life,
Mill�s ultimate concern was the
happiness of humankind as a whole, or as I shall
call it, global happiness. Global happiness will
be obtained if all races of peoples of the globe
are �civilized�
in the utilitarian sense. Mill had a conviction
that all non-European peoples would become
�civilized� if
the European knowledge, arts, manners, and
institutions were diffused to them. Mill was
particularly concerned with how to bring
enlightenment to what he believed to be
�half-civilized�
peoples, such as peoples in India and other Asian
nations..." Man To Leung on James Mill and British
Imperialism
Today, those of us who are 'Indian
in blood and colour but English in taste, in morals
and in intellect' may, without much thought,
perpetuate a categorisation of the world which
proclaims that the First World is somehow 'First'
and that the Third World is 'Third' - and has some
catching up to do. The Empire may be dead, but the
dead, sometimes, rule from their graves. For those
in the so called Third World to accept a hierarchy
imposed by their erstwhile colonial rulers, is to
perpetuate that rule by less obvious means.
It is not that the Third World does
not have much to learn from the First. It does. But
learning is a two way street and the Third World
has also much to teach the First - a First World,
which is rushing onwards on the basis of its
Cartesian certainty 'I think, therefore
I am', without knowing when and how to stop;
which is caught with a consumerism which is
destroying the environment and produces an
underclass within its own territorial boundaries;
which is unable to find answers to those fundamental
questions which trouble the human heart and
mind; which seeks escape from that
unease by immersing itself in a search for
heightened sensation; and whose more evolved
minds, in a search for meaning, are turning to the
fundamental truths embedded in the
civilisations of the Third
World.
"The general notions about
human understanding ... which are illustrated by
discoveries in atomic physics...have a history,
and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more
considerable and central place."... Julius Robert
Oppenheimer
Deprived of direction, the so
called 'First World' is intent on getting there
fast.
..Apart from their self assurance, the most
common characteristics of our elites are
cynicism, rhetoric and the worship of both
ambition and power... The assumption is that
world-weary cynicism demonstrates intellectual
superiority. In reality it indicates neither
intelligence, experience or accuracy... To be
world weary is to be willing to go on repeating
old mistakes...
Spirit, appetite, faith, emotion, intuition,
will, experience - none of these are relevant
to the operations of our society. Instead we
automatically assign blame for our failures and
crimes to the irrational impulse...
Our society was largely conceived by
courtesans. They have therefore defined the idea
of modernism in a way which reinforces their
skills... It isn't surprising that like most
ageing religions, reason is able to get away with
presenting itself as the solution to the problems
it creates...
The rootless wandering is perhaps the
explanation for the hypnotic effect which the
idea of efficiency has upon us. Deprived of
direction, we are determined to go there
fast... We confuse intention with execution.
Decision making with administration. Creation
with accounting. On the dark plain that we
wander, totems have been erected, not to indicate
the way, but to provide hopeful relief.... What
hope there is lies precisely in the slow, close
to reality enquiry and concern of the humanist.
But first he, and perhaps more hopefully she,
must stop believing that the accomplishments of
the last few centuries are the result of rational
methods, structure and self interest, while the
failures and violence are those of humanity and
sensibility. In spite of the rhetoric which
dominates our civilisation, the opposite is
true..." John Ralston
Saul in Voltaire's Bastards - The
Dictatorship of Reason in the West
If we wish to persist in a
classification of the countries of the world on the
basis of GNP, it may be more liberating to adopt a
more fact based approach. The so called Third World
is in truth the Majority World - and the so called
First World is the Minority World. Such a
classification will at least accord with the number
of people who belong to each category without
imposing an hierarchical pecking order.
By focusing on numbers, such a
categorisation will also help many in the Majority
World to more easily understand why some political
leaders of the First World, see the Third World as
posing a threat to their security.
".... the combination of
demographic pressures and political unrest will
generate particularly in the third world,
increasing unrest and violence... The population
of the world by the end of this century will have
grown to some 6 billion people.... moreover most
of the increase will be concentrated in the
poorer parts of the world, with 85% of the
world's population by the end of this century
living in Africa, Latin America and the poorer
parts of Asia.... the problems confronting
Washington in assuring US national security will
become increasingly complex..." - Power and Principle: Memoirs of
the National Security Adviser,
1977-1981
A fact based approach which names the First
World as the Minority World, will have the added
advantage of helping the First World recognise
that they too have a lot of catching up to do;
that GNP does not necessarily bring wisdom; that
a continuing onslaught on the environment will
not bring progress but deprivation for all; that
the future will be built by the peoples of the
Majority World and the Minority World working
together as partners; and that political leaders
will need to truly serve the constituency that
they seek to lead - the emerging One World, as a
whole, and not partisan state interests.
The One World will not emerge
by giving credence to the notion " that the Free
Market breaks down national barriers, and that
Corporate Globalization's ultimate destination is
a hippie paradise."
"...There is a notion
gaining credence that the Free Market breaks
down national barriers, and that Corporate
Globalization's ultimate destination is a
hippie paradise where the heart is the only
passport and we all live happily together
inside a John Lennon song. (" Imagine there's no country...")
But this is a canard. What the Free Market
undermines is not national sovereignty, but
democracy. As the disparity
between the rich and poor grows... Corporate
Globalization needs an international
confederation of loyal, corrupt, preferably
authoritarian governments in poorer countries
to push through unpopular reforms and quell the
mutinies...not the free movement of people, not
a respect for human rights, not
international treaties on racial discrimination
or chemical and nuclear weapons, or greenhouse
gas emissions, climate change, or god forbid,
justice.." Arundhati Roy,
2002 in Come September
And Immanuel Wallerstein was
right to point out -
"...Though it is
fashionable to speak of globalization today as
a phenomenon that began at the earliest in the
1970's, in fact trans-national commodity chains
were extensive from the very beginning of the
system, and global since the second half of the
nineteenth century. To be sure, the improvement
in technology has made it possible to transport
more and different kinds of items across great
distances, but I contend that there has not
been any fundamental change in the structuring
and operations of these commodity chains in the
twentieth century, and that none is likely to
occur because of the so-called information
revolution..." Immanuel Wallerstein , 1997
in
States? Sovereignty? The Dilemmas of
Capitalists in an Age of
Transition
Eduardo Galeano's remarks
underline the political reality - not of
yesterday, but today.
"...Christopher Columbus couldn't
discover America because he didn't have a visa
or even a passport. Pedro Alvares Cabral
couldn't get off the boat in Brazil because he
might have been carrying smallpox, measles, the
flu or other plagues the country had never
known. Hernan Cortes and
Francisco Pizarro never
even began the conquest of Mexico and Peru
because they didn't have green cards. Pedro de Alvarado was
turned away from Guatemala and Pedro de Valdivia
couldn't enter Chile because they had police
records. The Mayflower pilgrims were
sent back to sea from the coast of
Massachusetts, because the immigration quotas
were full. These misfortunes occurred in the
distant past, long before globalization did
away with borders..." New
Internationalist, February
2004
And we ignore at our peril the
words of Jeremy Seabrook -
"Globalisation permits money and
goods to move around the world unimpeded, yet
criminalises the other indispensable element of
production, labour, when it seeks to move to
where it can command a decent
livelihood....Globalisation is imperialism by
another name; the world market is an extension
of the global imperial adventure of the
nineteenth century; and the majority of the
working class are now located not in the
tenements of Berlin and Glasgow, the immigrant
apartment blocks of Chicago and New York, but
in the terrible slums of Asia, the favelas of Latin America, the
townships of Africa... it is not only as
workers that people need emancipation from the
totalising dogmas of neo-liberalism, but as
consumers too, as
complete human beings. There is a new
urgency to the need to formulate a richer form
of liberation than that envisaged by the
revolutionaries and pioneers of labour..."
New
Internationalist, February
1999
Hopefully, the views of persons
such as Margaret Wheatley will gain
increasing acceptance -
"..For
many years, I�ve been
interested in seeing the world differently.
I�ve wanted to see beyond the
Western, mechanical view of the world and see
what else might appear when the lens was
changed. I�ve learned, just as
Joel Barker predicted when he introduced us to
paradigms years ago, that "problems that are
impossible to solve with one paradigm may be
easily solved with a different one... Leaders are those who help
others.."
"... We are
all leaders, even without that formal title. We
are in communities, governments, corporations,
schools, universities, churches, non-profits,
NGOs, healthcare. We are very diverse, yet our
values unite us: We rely on human goodness. We
depend on diversity. We trust in life's
capacity to self-organize in sustainable,
generous, and interdependent ways. We live in
many different cultures and nations, and we express these
values in wonderfully
diverse ways. Yet we each serve the
vision of a world where people can experience
themselves as whole, healthy,
sacred, and free. In all our
different activities, we want to liberate the
creativity and caring that are common to all
people..."
How do we secure that leaders who
truly serve will emerge? Dee Hock, CEO Emeritius
of Visa International was right when he said
-
"We live in extraordinary
times. Around the world we face systemic and
deep-seated challenges in virtually every
field. At the same time, in part because of
these challenges, we are coming to see
ourselves, one another, and our home planet in
new ways. We have an unprecedented opportunity
to realize age-old dreams of abundance and
recreate our institutions in the service of all
humanity and life....A vital question is how
to insure that those who lead are constructive,
ethical, open, and honest. The answer is to
follow those who behave in that manner. It
comes down to both individual and collective
sense of where and how people choose to be led.
In a very real sense, followers lead by
choosing where to be led. Where an
organizational community will be led is
inseparable from the shared values and beliefs
of its members..." Dee Hock - The Art of
Chaordic Leadership
Our leaders are more
representative of us than we may sometimes care
to admit and Gandhi's words will help
remind us that we ourselves must become the
change that we wish to see in the world.
"... As human beings, our
greatness lies not so much in being able to
remake the World - that is the myth of the
atomic age - as in being able to remake
ourselves. We must become the change we wish to see
in the world...�
And, the words of an unknown
author about changing the world continue to
retain their significance -
"When I was a young man, I
wanted to change the world. I found it was
difficult to change the world, so I tried to
change my nation. When I found I couldn't
change the nation, I began to focus on my town.
I couldn't change the town and as an older man,
I tried to change my family. Now, as an old
man, I realize the only thing I can change is
myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago
I had changed myself, I could have made an
impact on my family. My family and I could have
made an impact on our town. Their impact could
have changed the nation and I could indeed have
changed the world."
Each one of us may then begin to
recognise the enduring wisdom of Charles Chaplin
in the Great Dictator -
"...I'm
sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor.
That's not my business. I don't want to rule or
conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone
- if possible - Jew, Gentile - black men -
white. We all want to help one another. Human
beings are like that. We want to live by each
other's happiness - not by each other's misery.
We don't want to hate and despise one another.
In this world there is room for everyone. And
the good earth is rich and can provide for
everyone. The way of life can be free and
beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has
poisoned men's souls - has barricaded the world
with hate - has goose-stepped us into misery
and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we
have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives
abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge
has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and
unkind. We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery we need humanity. More than
cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.
Without these qualities, life will be violent
and all will be lost...." Charles Chaplin
in the concluding speech in his film the Great
Dictator - quoted in Charles
Chaplin : My Autobiography,1964
"
Today, more than 80 million
Tamils, living as they do in many lands and
across distant seas - live in the First, in
the Second and in the Third Worlds. And to the
extent that the Tamils are a trans-state
nation, they belong to the Fourth World as
well. It is true, therefore, to say that for the
Tamils, the world is already, in many ways, a
'One World'. It is a 'One World' not because we
are not Tamils, it is a 'One World' because we
are Tamils. It is a One World, because as
Tamils, dispersed in many lands and across
distant seas, our life experiences have given
fresh meaning to the words of the
Tamil poet Kanniyan Poongundran in Purananuru
(poem 192), written two thousand five hundred
years ago - words which continue to touch, move
and inspire -
"To us all towns are one, all men our
kin.
Life's good comes not from others' gift,
nor ill
Man's pains and pains' relief are from within.
Death's no new thing; nor do our bosoms
thrill
When Joyous life seems like a luscious
draught.
When grieved, we patient suffer; for, we
deem
This much - praised life of ours a
fragile raft
Borne down the waters of some mountain
stream
That o'er huge boulders roaring seeks the
plain
Tho' storms with lightnings' flash from
darken'd skies
Descend, the raft goes on as fates
ordain.
Thus have we seen in visions of the wise !
-
We marvel not at greatness of the
great;
Still less despise we men of low estate."
English
Translation by Rev. G.U.Pope
in Tamil Heroic Poems
யாதும்
ஊரே ;
யாவரும்
கேளிர்
;
தீதும்
நன்றும்
பிறர்தர
வாரா ;
நோதலும்
தணிதலும்
அவற்றோ
ரன்ன ;
சாதலும்
புதுவது
அன்றே ;
வாழ்தல்
இனிதுஎன
மகிழ்ந்தன்றும்
இலமே;
முனிவின்,
இன்னா
தென்றலும்
இலமே;
'மின்னொடு
வானம்
தண்துளி
தலைஇ,
ஆனாது
கல்பொருது
இரங்கும்
மல்லற்
பேர்யாற்று
நீர்வழிப்
படூஉம்
புணைபோல,
ஆருயிர்
முறைவழிப்
படூஉம்'
என்பது
திறவோர்
காட்சியின்
தெளிந்தனம்
ஆகலின்,
மாட்சியின்
பெரியோரை
வியத்தலும்
இலமே;
சிறியோரை
இகழ்தல்
அதனினும்
இலமே.
192,
எட்டுத்தொகை
நூல்களில்
ஒன்றாகிய
புறநானூறு
-
பாடியவர்:
கணியன்
பூங்குன்றன்
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