Misapplying M-E model and mode
Dr Dayan Jayatilleka
The conversation I had on Lankan trajectories and ‘declinist’
discourses in a Paris cafe on a Sunday with my friend and former
colleague, Prof Nira Wickramasingha, now holding the Chair of South
Asian History at Leiden University, reminded me of a point she had made
sharply in her slender book History Writing. Sri Lanka, she had
remarked, was one of the few countries in which mainstream newspapers
carried pieces on history by those without any credentials or formal
training in the disciplines of history and historiography.
Dr Dayan Jayatilleka |
Prof Nira Wickramasingha |
This, she wrote, would never happen in India for instance, where any
incursion into history in the quality press would have to be backed up
with credentials in order to secure publication.
What she said of history is just as true of politics. Sri Lankan
newspapers and websites are replete with pieces that go beyond
intellectually legitimate critical commentary to the pontifically
prescriptive and hortatory - almost in inverse proportion to academic
training and testing in the domain of political studies or any of its
sub-fields.
Popular upsurges
Consider the recent sensationalism in the Sri Lankan press on the
relevance and applicability of the popular upsurges in the North African
Arab societies. Some Sri Lankan political personalities and commentators
‘read off’ from the Arab revolt, the political future of our island in
the most absurdly linear and mechanistic fashion. It is assumed that
there is a universal trend which is sweeping the world.
This mistake which was made by those of us who assumed that Tet (and
Paris) ‘68, the victories in Vietnam ‘75 and Nicaragua ‘79 heralded the
triumph of world socialism - taking the North Vietnamese tank punching
through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon for (Hegel’s)
Napoleon on a white charger after the battle of Jena - was replicated by
those who thought that the events of 1989 heralded the worldwide victory
of liberal democracy.
Be it the vulgarised ‘End of History’ school or its Huntingtonian
opponent, the Clash of Civilizations corps; be it the applauders and
denouncers of the New World Order and the Uni-polar moment (of neocons
gurus like Charles Krauthammer), all these grand theorists have been
proven wrong or only episodically and ephemerally right.
Cuban revolution
All of these meta-theorists forgot the phenomenon that Mao, a far
greater philosopher, pointed to: ‘absolutely everything develops
unevenly’. This is why the Russian revolution was not successfully
replicated or followed in Europe, Vietnam’s liberation was not
accompanied anywhere even in its neighbourhood and the Cuban revolution
had to wait twenty years for the Nicaraguan counterpart to succeed.
Althusser’s best pupil Regis Debray realized this while in jail and
ruefully observed in ‘A Critique of Arms’ that historical time is not
the same everywhere; the clock of history keeps different times in
different places, even on the same continent.
This he attributed to the autonomy of the political instance, most
especially the specificity of ‘the national’ (the Achilles heel of
Marxism, he said in a 1977 essay). He has re-developed the thesis in
recent months here in Paris, in an intervention termed ‘In Praise of
Borders’.
Those who seek to mechanistically apply the Maghreb model to Sri
Lanka can only fuel an adventurism which will result in needless
sacrifice and retard the very transformations they claim to seek.
Fundamental feature
Those who assumed that with the collapse of the USSR, an entire
historical period of US uni-polar hegemony had arrived confused the
conjunctural and episodic for the structural and systemic. Uni-polar
hegemony proved but a ‘moment’. Similarly, Sri Lankan political history
of the post-independence decades has seen many ‘uni-polar moments’ which
were mistaken for and lustily cheered or luridly denounced as
dictatorship, fascism etc, but which proved reversible and transitory.
Major differences
If the hotly debated 18th Amendment removing Presidential term limits
is the equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Law of 1933, then the latest
candidate for Hitlerhood is Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and the
future Nazi Germany is Nicaragua. The contentious abolition of term
limits in no way abolishes the fundamental feature which makes Sri Lanka
a democracy, namely the need to win elections held at regular intervals
in what is a multiparty representative system where political parties
are neither confections nor caricatures, but resilient organic entities.
Ebb and flow must not be mistaken for structural watersheds, just as
the role of Bismarck (national state unification through ‘blood and
iron’) must not be confused with that of Hitler. Nazi Fascism was
defined as ‘open terroristic dictatorship’ by Georgi Dmitrov,
foregrounding the crucial characteristic of the violent (often lethal)
mass suppression of all forms of opposition. It would be lunatic to
describe Sri Lanka thus.
Fortunately for the West, smart political minds are trained to
distinguish and differentiate. In conversation in Normandy with
centrist/centre-right Senator Nathalie Meriem Goulet, member of the
Foreign and the Armed Forces Committee and of the NATO Parliamentary
assembly, we concurred that the recent phenomena in the Maghreb were
distinguishable from manifestations in Iran: “one is Arab; the other
Persian and there are major differences between the matrices”, she said
with lightning lucidity.
Civil wars
On almost every count Iran is far closer to Egypt than is Sri Lanka.
Similarly, the theorem of a global tsunami sweeping away the political
superstructures of the planet would evoke polite smiles among the highly
educated strategic and policy elites of East Asia.
This is not an argument by me for ‘Asian values’ but a reminder that
the universal -the Zeitgeist, even- operates unevenly in terms of time,
place, form and outcome. The universal operates through the (regionally
and nationally) particular.
The most important single feature of Sri Lanka today is not that a
six year old elected administration is in the same category as Arab
regimes of decades’ duration - Aristotle, who emphasized the importance
of a typology of regimes, would shudder - but the fact that it is barely
post-war, living in the shadow of a 30 years war which ended a mere one
and a half years ago; struggling to emerge from it, in the throes of a
complex convalescence and open ended transition.
The country and its peoples are in no further need of ‘storm and
stress’. Sri Lanka’s multiparty democracy has proved resilient under
extreme pressure over decades, surviving civil wars in North and South
and authoritarian and totalitarian projects from above and below.
The Lankan citizenry has no need of tutelage in the preservation and
advancement of democracy from anyone, anywhere. Our literate,
politically conscious citizenry has proved unerringly adroit at securing
and safeguarding its principal interests (variously national, social and
democratic) at the given time, through the determined exercise of the
franchise.
The agency and medium of democratic change in Sri Lanka must not and
cannot be rocks and rifles but the ballot box.
Whatever the diversions and detours on the streets, any endgame in
Sri Lanka must, will and can only be resolutely electoral and
democratic.
The writer is Honorary Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian
Studies/National University of Singapore |