A Postcolonial State

In the two decades after the end of the Second World War dozens of new states came into being in Africa, the Middle East and Asia as the old colonial powers lost the will and means to keep their empires intact. Another wave of state creation occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Yet this week the opinion columns of the world’s papers are devoting a degree of attention to the 60th anniversary of the foundation of Israel that they certainly won’t be doing for the 60th anniversary of Ireland declaring itself a republic in 1949 or of Indonesia achieving independence from the Netherlands the same year.

So why, 60 years after its foundation does Israel still command so much attention? On the face of it, the answer seems easy; Israel was founded against the wishes of a large percentage of the inhabitants of what is now its national territory, many of its first citizens had been born elsewhere, it was not recognized by any of its neighbours, has fought a series of wars during the course of its existence and has for many years occupied territories conquered from its neighbours. And lurking behind these undeniable facts there’s the ever more commonly expressed feeling that Israel’s foundation involved a unique injustice, the triumph of the nationalism of the Jews over the nationalism of the Palestinians and the theft of their land and that its continued existence is, therefore, uniquely illegitimate. When comparable events elsewhere are examined, however, it becomes clear that there is nothing unique about either the circumstances of Israel’s birth or its history.

In the first place, there was no original sin and nothing artificial about Israel’s foundation; the violence and what we would now call ethnic cleansing that accompanied it were not in any qualitative sense different from those that accompanied the foundation of many other post-colonial states. To give just one example, the foundation of India and Pakistan in 1947 was accompanied by massive loss of life and huge population exchanges, they subsequently fought two major wars and continue to confront each other, eyeball to nuclear eyeball, over Kashmir. No one seems to consider that this calls the legitimacy of either one into question. On a more general level, there are many existing states that were founded against the wishes of some part of their original population and if we are to regard those states founded with a large number of immigrants or their descendants in their population and without any consideration being given to the wishes of the indigenous population as somehow illegitimate then Israel is only going to be one on a very long list.

The hostility of neighbouring states to Israel’s existence, uncommonly strong in the first 30 years of the half of the life of the state, has since waned greatly with full peace agreements implemented with Egypt and Jordan and de facto recognition and warming relations with a number of Gulf states, especially Qatar. Even in the case of the Palestinians it’s easy to forget the degree of progress that has been made; from a position barely 20 years of effectively denying Palestinian national rights, Israel signed the Oslo Agreement, recognised the PLO, uprooted its settlements in Gaza and today continues to negotiate with the President of the Palestinian Authority.

Again, a look at comparable cases suggests that it can often take a very long time for all the problems created by the foundation of a new state to be resolved and there’s nothing very unusual in this respect about Israel. An obvious example is Ireland, which achieved partial independence in 1922 and became a republic in 1949. The violent consequences of its liberation from Britain have, however, only exhausted themselves in the last few years.

The issue of the occupation of the territories seized from Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six Day War of 1967 is one that seems to particularly exercise Israel’s critics. Once more, it’s easy to forget the progress that has been made. Israel uprooted its settlements and handed the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt in the context of the peace agreement with that country and although some still talk of the occupation of Gaza continuing, it’s undeniable that Israel removed all its citizens and infrastructure in 2005. In the north a deal was very nearly reached with Syria to return the Golan Heights in 2000 and since then there have been repeated stories in the press about back channel negotiations sketching out an agreement to give the Syrians back their land in return for a comprehensive peace deal, an agreement that would be fleshed out and signed whenever the parties judge it to be in their interest to do so. The question of the West Bank and the settlement of Israelis there is the one where, apart from the closing of four settlements in the north of the disputed territory in 2005, almost no progress has been made and where it’s most urgently needed. As full a withdrawal from the West Bank as is necessary to reach a deal with the Palestinian Authority and allow for the foundation of a Palestinian state is as necessary for the preservation of democracy in Israel as it is for the Palestinians to enjoy the full use of their national rights.

And, once more, Israel is far from being the only country in the world that has engaged in long term military occupation of neighbouring territories conquered in war. Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara and the continuing Turkish occupation and colonisation of a third of the national territory of Cyprus - now a member state of the European Union - spring immediately to mind. Curiously, these and other examples of illegal occupations haven’t led to their perpetrators being heaped with opprobrium the way Israel has.

So we now come back to the original question, why does Israel continue to arouse such passions in some many places, 60 years after its birth? I would speculate that it’s because a lot of people who have no problem at all with the nationalism of the Irish, the Uzbeks or the Tamils seem to be made, at best, uncomfortable by the nationalism of the Jews. Not by their own or anybody else’s, just that of the Jews. It seems to stick in their craws that the Jews have their own state. They are happy for Jews to be doctors, lawyers, shrinks and bankers but for them to have their own state, elect corrupt and ignorant politicians, defend themselves and commit the occasional atrocity, just like the great majority of other nation states at some point in their history, doesn’t seem to be acceptable.

And yet, despite the hostility of so many, Israel at 60 thrives. It has absorbed huge numbers of immigrants from the Middle East and farther afield (indeed it has recently become a magnet for Sudanese refugees), it has enviable indices of human development, contributed a huge amount to science and maintained the only liberal democracy – imperfect, like all others - in the Middle East and all this in a context where it has constantly had to defend itself from attacks designed to be mortal. It therefore deserves the warmest possible congratulations on its 60th birthday and it’s to be hoped that Palestinians will soon be accepting congratulations for the foundation of their own state too.

A shortened version of the text above appears in today’s Buenos Aires Herald.

60

Congratulations to Israel and fuck the begrudgers. Above, Ben Gurion declaring independence and a great post from Lisa here.

Nacionalidades

Juan Goytisolo pone la siguiente dedicatoria a un artículo acerca del sesenta aniversario de Israel:

A Daniel Barenboim, argentino, judío y palestino ejemplar

El hecho que Goytisolo se niegue a mencionar la ciudadanía israelí de Barenboim, cuando Israel es el país al que Barenboim se fue a vivir a los siete años y es el lugar y la nacionalidad desde donde desarrolla todas sus iniciativas a favor de la paz y la coexistencia, nos dice todo lo que es necesario saber sobre el contenido del artículo y nos ahorra el trabajo de leerlo.

Wars

After noting that the USA suffered comparatively few causalities in the great conflicts of the 20th century Tony Judt says,

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance. surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.

I think he exaggerates a bit in that glorification and exaltation of the military are not unknown phenomena in France and the UK, to take just two examples. My main gripe about his argument is different though. What he seems to be saying is that recent experience of catastrophic suffering and mass casualties on the national territory tend to make countries, or advanced democracies at any rate, wary of militarism and reluctant to go to war.

If this is the case you’d expect it to also hold true with respect to previous wars in the modern period that have caused mass causalities. The United States, for example, fought an enormously bloody civil war from 1861 to 1865, a war which laid waste to large parts of the country and caused a great deal of suffering to civilians.

Far from being chastened by the experience the end of the civil war saw the United States expand westward with redoubled energy, exterminating any Native Americans who stood in the way and plenty that didn’t. Furthermore, only thirty five years after the civil war ended - a much shorter period of time than that which separates today’s advanced democracies from their mass casualty experiences, the United States chose to go to war against the Spanish Empire and make a colony of the Philippines. It’s true that few US casualties were caused thereby but that doesn’t weaken my argument as the butcher’s bill for military adventures can’t be known with certainty in advance.

And even when the US entered WWI in 1917 – again, a war it could easily have kept out of - it was still closer in time to the horror of the Civil War than Judt’s supposedly peace-loving advanced democracies are now.

Update: Norm has a go at  Judt here.

Lost Book Review IV

Writers in this field have a wearisome tendency to strike radical poses while espousing views that, on closer examination, often prove to be a recipe for keeping things pretty much as they are. It is with some delight then that the jaded reader can report that Marnie Holborow does not fall into this category. Writing from an explicitly Marxist viewpoint, her measured, understated tone serves only to enhance the effectiveness of a critique which strives to reclaim the social nature of language and reject the overblown claims of theorists who see the world as having no reality outside the vortex of discourse.

I imagine that the word “Marxist” in the paragraph above may already have convinced some readers that neither Holborow’s book nor this review of it merit their further attention. Surely, they might argue, Marxism is crude, deterministic old hat and has long since been discredited in the wider world as well as the academy. Holborow, mercifully, is not that kind of Marxist. For her Marxism offers a method rather than a cosmology and her arguments ought to appeal to anybody who thinks that postmodernist views of the relationship between language and society in general, and the work of Michel Foucault in particular, have too often gone unchallenged in recent years.

Holborow sets out by addressing the legacy of the shaven-headed gloomster in her introduction. She summarises his views in the following way.

Discourse in Foucault’s account is pivotal. Foucault’s discursive formations share with structuralism the methodological procedure of providing definitions within a closed system. Like Saussure’s langue, it is self-referential in so far as discourses are defined in relation to other discourses. But its idealism goes all the way down; discourse swallows up all other phenomena, social, political, ideological (p.6).

She goes on to acknowledge that Foucault, eternally reluctant to allow himself to be tied down, might have been unhappy with the starkness of her summary. However, anyone at all familiar with his work would be obliged to acknowledge its fundamental accuracy. Reality, it would appear, is entirely a byproduct of our discursive practices.

What are the consequences of such a view of the world? Holborow is right on the mark when she suggests that no concept of justice can survive in a world where the notion of truth is relativised to particular discursive practices and that

If discourse is the prism through which reality is grasped, indeed is reality, how do you get out of language? What decides whether you can contest a discursive practice? At what point and for what reasons do you break the linguistic chain? Furthermore, if linguistic representation is everything, then politics becomes simply the rephrasing of language…a question of style (p.7).

There is more. The academic fashion for all things postcolonial can sometimes lead to the impression being given that the great empires were talked and written into existence. Indeed one is sometimes tempted to think that they consisted of little more than the orientalist gaze of western intellectuals and politicians playing on their unfortunate colonial subjects. Holborow is not having any of this. As she acutely observes,

Descriptions of starvation are not the same as being hungry. The discourses of imperialism are different to the devastating consequences for the actual lives of countless Indians, Africans or Irish, wrought by colonial capitalism (p.8).

The only thing that may possibly be missing from her discussion is an explicit acknowledgement that Foucault’s notion of discourse can be a useful one, provided that it is not allowed to go ‘all the way down’.

The author goes on to conclude her introductory remarks by wondering to what is that we can ascribe the popularity, in the academy and outside of it, of the ‘discourse is all’ world view. She draws the contentious but credible conclusion that it must have something to do with disillusioned 1960s radicals, having given up on efforts to change the world, trying instead to have it talked and written about in a different way. Having thus effectively dealt with some of the exaggerations and distortions inherent in Foucault’s vision, the author turns her attention to the legacy of Marx.

Marxism is frequently accused of representing relations between the economic base of society with its political and cultural superstructure in excessively simple terms, i.e. with the former rigidly and inexorably determining the shape of the latter. Many go farther and reject the base/superstructure view entirely. It is one of the signal services performed by the author to have gone back to what the founders of Marxism actually wrote in order to determine their views. On the basis of these readings, she convincingly states that

Marx never argued that the cultural and political spheres passively reflect the economic base…while the social relations of production set limits to developments in the superstructure, there is an interaction of all elements…the relationship is not predetermined or simply reflective, but dialectical (p.23).

She also refers to the process whereby ideas appear to take on a life of their own, unhooked from the material reality that helped to produce them, when she argues that

The sheer power that consciousness confers produces another effect: that ideas seem cut loose of reality, as if free-standing, floating above the constraints of the material world…this impression can lead to a distorted view of human mind over matter, to an overblown view of mental power over reality. Instead of history being seen as part of a dialectical process between humans and the material world, mind comes to be seen as the prime mover of historical change (p.21).

Her comments in this section make it clear that Holborow has not fallen out of the Foucauldian frying pan − where language makes the world −only to land in the fire of vulgar Marxism − where there is a lock step relationship between the economic and the cultural and linguistic. There is much more here that ought to cause even the most skeptical reader to pause and contemplate before dismissing the Marxist view of language and society as being past its ‘sell by’ date.

After an enlightening - for this reader at any rate - exposition of the work of the Russian linguists Volosinov and Vygotsky, Holborow turns her attention to the politics of English in the world today. It may seem a statement of the obvious to maintain that

The dominance of English today is the continuation of a process started in the earliest days of capitalism, deepened by the expansion of the British Empire and given further impetus by the commanding position of American capitalism in this century (p.57).

However, I think it is well worth repeating because a great deal is written about the expansion of English that may as well have been written about the growth of moss on a damp rock - one rather gets the impression that it kind of just happened. She goes on to make the worthwhile point that the spread of English, great though it has been, is easy to exaggerate and that, like global capitalism, it has passed large sectors of humanity by.

Turning to the way in which certain sectors of the academy have dealt with the legacies of the empires, once more, she hits the nail on the head.

Colonial ‘discursive practices’, in other words, are not the same as the actual practice of colonialism, any more than it was imperial ‘discourse’ that ran the slave trade or destroyed India’s cotton industry. Crude materialism drove the imperial project and in Victorian Britain this was universally taken for granted, by apologists and detractors alike. Today…seen through the intellectual haze of postmodern introspection, such fundamental questions of material primacy are not so readily accepted (p.63).

One is tempted to suggest that a scroll bearing this quotation should be fixed to the door of the Arts faculty of every university in the English-speaking world.

Robert Phillipson and Alastair Pennycook have in recent years made well-intentioned contributions to the debates surrounding the role of English and English language teaching in the world. Their work receives its critical due here. While acknowledging, that Phillipson’s work has “…raised themes hitherto unaired within English language teaching…”(p.74), and lauding his “…open anti-imperialist stance…”(p. 75) she takes him to task on a number of points. These focus on the inadequacy of a simplistic north-south, centre-periphery, theoretical framework that prevents him from seeing that it is local elites who are the “…agents and beneficiaries of capitalist development” (p.77), and that, consequently, nationalism (including linguistic nationalism) does not necessarily represent an adequate response to imperialism.

Alastair Pennycook’s work, though bearing the surface marks of greater sophistication, is shown to suffer from what, perhaps, are even more severe problems.

For him, there is no rational body of knowledge and no overriding social causes to human activity, merely ‘discourse practices’ that are hegemonic…He also holds that the role of discourse in the process of domination is central (p.81).

Holborow correctly identifies the main problems − which focus on the elevation of language and discourse at the expense of flesh and blood social and economic factors − with these views, most of which can be ascribed to Pennycook’s adherence to a strict Foucauldianism. However, another accusation could be added to the charge sheet, that of performative contradiction. If there is no truth, only ‘truth’ relativised to particular discursive practices, then this insight must apply to Pennycook’s own work too. His epistemological relativism pulls the rug from under his own critique. We simply cannot believe what he says. He tells us so himself.

She concludes her section on the role of English in the world by pointing out that

Like railways, language can be used for many purposes, and not always those laid down by British engineers.

She is also correct to say that there is nothing necessarily progressive about linguistic nationalism and draws on the sorry tale of the Irish language − forcibly suppressed by British colonialists and later subject to attempts at forcible revival by conservative native elites − to make her all too accurate case.

By this stage the reader will not be surprised to learn that Holborow is skeptical about certain aspects of contemporary feminism. She doubts the existence of separate men’s and women’s languages and further questions the possibility of purging language of sexist features by such top down strategies as dictionary reform. She also thinks the desire for such reform can distract feminists from more serious issues. Referring to one particular writer’s criticism of sexist remarks by President Bush concerning the invasion of Grenada she says that

Sticks and stones, alas, are of a different order to words. Concentration on speech codes misfocuses and misfires; it eclipses more severe social realities…(p.113).

Anyone who has ever believed claims for linguistic reforms being the precursor of broader social change will find plenty of food for thought here.

On the debates surrounding standard English her generally sensible discussion succeeds in demonstrating that many commonsense views in this area are not what they appear to be and concludes by saying that

Over-rigid demarcations between non-standard varieties and standard dialects can lead to giving codes and varieties a causative role in inequality, whose roots lie in society not in language (p 185).

There is a lot of truth in this, but as a speaker of Hiberno-English, I am very glad that I had the opportunity to learn the standard written form and am aware that command of it has opened doors that may otherwise have remained closed to me.

Marnie Holborow’s book is perceptive, well-written and timely. The fairness with which she treats her opponent’s arguments only adds to the power of her critique - a critique that demonstrates that postmodernist thought, far from providing a basis for achieving any kind of social justice, serves instead to domesticate and neutralise demands for real change. It should be read by anyone with an interest in the role of English in the world, and more generally, in relations between language, discourse and society.