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Journalism of Courage
The US has demonstrated its possession of the most formidable military machine in the contemporary world. It has used it to oust Saddam Hussein — somewhat akin to swatting a fly with a sledge hammer. Realism demands both the recognition of this power as well as its limited achievement.
In the foreseeable future it would not be possible to match this power militarily by any other power or coalition of powers. At the same time, it would not be necessary to match this power militarily in order to prevent its possessor from dominating the globe.
In order to prevent US overlordship of the world, it is, first of all, necessary to accept the fact that the present US administration seeks to achieve this overlordship. Strategic, tactical or any other kind of cooperation with it is not possible unless it abandons this goal which, of course, will take a lot of doing.
This does not mean that India and other nations would have to pursue a strategy of anti-Americanism. It is possible to pursue a course of normal relations steering between running after the present US administration for help against Pakistan and petulant annoyance when such help is not forthcoming. We should leave the US in no doubt that we are for normal civilised relations with it, nothing more and nothing less.
There is considerable scepticism in influential quarters in our country whether this objective is a realisable one. These sceptics hold that whatever noises we choose to make, in the final analysis there is no alternative to making the US realise that we are the best bet when it comes to choosing satellite powers to assist it in attaining world domination.
Is US power as formidable and invincible as these cynical sceptics believe? In technical terms its military might is greater, perhaps, than that of the rest of the world put together. So far, however, it has been used relatively successfully only against Milosovic’s Serbia and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — neither were military giants. What is even more important is in both these countries there was neither civil libertarian democracy nor was the ruling regime hegemonic in any meaning of that term.
Though it was in a different world and the balance of military might between the contending parties was not so skewed as in the two cases mentioned above, one is reminded of the defeat Vietnam inflicted on the US. To personalise the difference one has only to remind ourselves of Ho Chi Minh and how utterly different he was from Milosovic and Saddam Hussein.
The Vietnamese did not confront the dilemma of fighting a foreign invader which simultaneously meant defending a tyrannical domestic order. For them, the fight was for freedom and justice all the way. The Iraqis, in fact, were eventually defeated not so much by inferiority in weaponry but by the compulsions of the dilemma mentioned above. In this matter, they had been preceded by the Serbians at the time of the war over Kosovo.
The crucial element in the worldwide struggle today is not military power but whether nationalism and democracy can be overcome by the neo-imperialist juggernaut. This is not a new query, nor does it confront only the US. It was there when the Soviet Union was at the height of its military power and when it attained strategic-military parity with the US.
Possession of this power enabled it to blow away the Prague Spring in 1968 but this proved the turning point in its fortunes. It defeated Dubeck but it surrendered the banner of nationalism and democracy not to the US but to the heterogenous millions who emerged from the subaltern regions of history.
When the Soviet Union aided and allied with the Vietnamese it grew greatly in stature itself because it was on the side of subaltern forces. It was then that Le Dan, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, declared that the Soviet Union was the second homeland for the Vietnamese because it helped their motherland to survive and win.
Contrary to a fairly common assessment of where history has reached, we are not in the post-nationalist epoch. On the contrary, nationalism is the strongest history-making force today and has been ever since capitalism went into its imperialist phase, i.e., it needed colonies for its continuation and expansion. Capitalism, of course after retreat and radical reform, was able to thwart the non-capitalist and socialist assault on it. But it has not been able to do the same with nationalism and states founded on nationalism. It has not been able to totally seduce or subjugate this ideology or states based upon it.
On the contrary, there is a continuing conflict between the imperialists and their successors against emerged and emerging nations. The shaping of nations is a protracted process which gets aborted on occasions or splits away from multinational clusters. Still it represents the latest phase in the evolution of communities into which humanity gropingly groups itself.
What the next phase will be cannot be told but it is certainly not going to be a disintegration of nations into a herd of subjugated communities based on religion. Nations have not yet completed their historical role, be it against the neo-imperialists or the communal fragmenters.
The only advantage that the neo-imperialists have is the temporary one of concentrated possession of military power and the failure of the newly-emerged nations to unite. The dire straits in which the non-aligned movement finds itself today or the humiliation that the United Nations has had to suffer are stark reminders of this fact.
It is precisely here that India has a crucial role to play in rebuilding the unity of the newly-emerged nations. The greatest ally that such nations have is the worldwide explosion of democratic consciousness, including in the US. But to forge such an alliance requires the establishment and reinforcing of civil libertarian democracy in the emerging nations themselves. It must not be that nationalism has to suffer setbacks because the neoimperialists are able to pose as standard-bearers of democracy.
