brief infatuation with spreading democracy. When the nationalities of the members of the suicide squad became known, some officials expressed the opinion that America would be safer if the Arab world were governed by democratic, modernising regimes, and that the country had been wrong until then to support obscurantists and autocrats whose only virtue had been their willingness to be aligned with Washington. Shouldn’t these ‘clients’ have been required to share some of the values revered by their protector?
This infatuation — translated into high-flown slogans such as ‘the Greater Middle East’ or ‘the New Middle East’ — misfired. I shall not dwell therefore on this episode, but perhaps I may express
But this fine idea was soon forgotten: after three laps of the track, the land of Abraham Lincoln reached the conclusion that all this was much too risky; that feelings were running so high that free elections would bring the most radical elements to power almost everywhere; and that it was better therefore to stick to tried and tested solutions. Democracy would have to wait.
Chapter 7
In the months that led up to the invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell often found himself in the most awkward situation imaginable: having to convince the whole world that the war absolutely had to go ahead, while in private making great efforts to persuade his president not to proceed.
In a one-to-one meeting at the White House on 13 January 2003 he reportedly warned him: ‘You break it, you own it.’ It is a policy that some shops apply, according to which a customer who breaks an item has to pay for it. Powell spelled it out to the president in the following terms: ‘You are going to be the proud owner of twenty-five million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You’ll own it all.’
Colin Powell’s warning did not just hold good for those who were about to ‘break’ Iraq. In a single sentence, this son of Jamaican immigrants, who had become chief of the US armed forces and then in charge of its foreign policy, had defined the historical responsibility of victors and put his finger on the perennial problem of Western powers: as soon as they had established their hegemony over the whole planet, demolishing the political, social and cultural structures that used to prevail, they became moral guardians of the future of conquered peoples and should have thought seriously about the way in which they behaved towards them — whether they should welcome them in gradually like adopted children, applying the same laws to them as to Europeans, or simply tame them, subdue them and crush them.
A child can tell the difference between an adoptive mother and a stepmother. A people can tell the difference between liberators and occupiers.
Contrary to the received idea, the perennial fault of the European powers is not that they wanted to impose their values on the rest of the world, but precisely the opposite: it is that they have constantly renounced their own values in their dealings with the peoples they have dominated. As long as this misunderstanding remains, we will run the risk of falling into the same error again.
The first of these values is universality, the belief that humanity is one. Diverse, but one. That being so, it is an unforgivable error to compromise on fundamental principles on the perennial pretext that others are not ready to adopt them. There is not one set of human rights for Europe and another for Africa, Asia and the Muslim world. No people on earth is made for slavery, tyranny, arbitrary power, ignorance, obscurantism or the subjugation of women. Every time this fundamental truth is overlooked, we betray humanity and we betray ourselves.
I happened to be in Prague in December 1989, as the demonstrations against Ceausescu were beginning in Bucharest. Immediately there was a spontaneous expression of solidarity with the Romanian people in the Czech capital, which had recently been liberated in the ‘Velvet Revolution’. On a sign near the cathedral someone had written in English: ‘Ceausescu, you don’t belong in Europe!’ The anger of the anonymous sign-writer was understandable, but his way of expressing it shocked me. I wanted to ask him on what continent a dictator
Sadly, what this person naively expressed is a widely held view. A dictator who would not be tolerable in Europe becomes acceptable when he plies his trade on the other side of the Mediterranean. Does this constitute a mark of respect for others? Respect for dictators, certainly, and therefore contempt for the people who endure them and for the values that democracies are supposed to promote.
But, some people may reply, isn’t that the only realistic attitude? I don’t think so. Not only is it wrong; it does not even make for a good bargain. When the West compromises its moral credibility, it also compromises its position in the world and ultimately its security, stability and prosperity. The West used to believe it could do so with impunity; now we know that everything comes at a price and that even old debts fall due. The statute of limitations is an invention of lawmakers; in people’s memories, it does not exist. Or to be more precise, people who come through and manage to escape poverty, abasement and marginalisation, end up forgiving, without always abandoning their fears; those who do not come through dwell on it for ever.
This leads me to pose the crucial question again: have the Western powers really tried to transplant their values in their former possessions? Unfortunately not. Whether in India, Algeria or elsewhere, they have never accepted that the indigenous peoples they govern should celebrate liberty, equality, democracy, the spirit of enterprise or the rule of law; indeed, they have even constantly repressed them whenever they have demanded these things.
So much so that the elites in colonised countries have had no choice but to seize those denied values themselves, against the wishes of their colonisers, and turn them on their colonisers.
A detailed, dispassionate reading of the colonial era shows that there have always been exceptional characters among the Europeans: administrators, soldiers, missionaries, intellectuals and some explorers such as Savorgnan de Brazza, whose behaviour was generous, equitable, sometimes even heroic, and certainly in keeping with the precepts of their faith and the ideals of their civilisation. The colonised sometimes remember such characters; that is probably why the Congolese retained the name of Brazzaville.
But they were the exceptions. As a general rule, the policy of the Western powers was mainly dictated by greedy companies and colonists who jealously guarded their privileges and feared nothing so much as the advancement of the ‘natives’. When from time to time an administrator sent from Europe advocated a different policy, they tried to influence him with bribes or intimidation. If he proved stubborn, arrangements were made to get him recalled. Once in a while, a civil servant deemed to be idealistic was mysteriously killed, as probably happened to Brazza…
It is often said that the West ‘even’ alienated the most modernist elites in the countries of the South. This statement is so incomplete as to be misleading. It seems to me that it would be more accurate to say that the West has alienated even the modernist elites, while it has constantly found accommodations, common ground and convergences of interests with regressive forces.
The West’s tragedy, today as it has been for centuries, is that it is perpetually torn between its desire to civilise the world and the will to dominate it — two irreconcilable impulses. Everywhere it has enunciated the most noble principles but it has carefully refrained from applying them in its conquered territories.
This was not a trivial mismatch between political principles and their application on the ground; it was a systematic abandonment of the ideals that had been proclaimed, which as a result aroused the lasting mistrust of the elites in Asia, Africa, Arabia and Latin America, and especially among those who believed most wholeheartedly
