An illiberal tilt: A clash of civilisations with American characteristics

India will be hosting Brics Plus summit later this year. The grouping has major powers with significant independent agency and is certainly not a mere market to be carved up among countries of West

The much-awaited speech by United States (US) Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also national security advisor, at the Munich Security Conference on February 14 may have elicited a “collective sigh of relief” from the largely European audience, but should be cause for serious alarm among post-colonial and developing countries of the Global South. His remarks celebrated the history of conquest, exploitation, barbarity, and even ethnic cleansing, which has marked the history of Western imperialism and colonial empire-building across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He wants this to be a source of pride and inspiration, not something to “atone for purported sins of past generations”. What is perplexing is that the history of the world after the Second World War, which is often described as an American era, is instead seen as a period of Western decline:

 

“But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it [i.e. the West] was contracting. The great western empires had entered into terminal decline accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”

 

Anti-colonial uprisings, which would include our own against British colonialism, are not celebrated as struggles for freedom and human dignity but as evidence of the abdication of the Western will to rule. Strange that this should come from a representative of a country that is celebrating 250 years of its own successful war of independence against British colonialism.

 

This echoes US President Donald Trump’s desire to launch America once again on a path of territorial expansion. And presumably this would include Greenland though Mr Rubio did not mention it. The Danish Prime Minister has confirmed that the threat of US takeover of the Arctic island persists.

 

Mr Rubio celebrated his own origins from the Spanish conquerors of Cuba:

 

“The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions of the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbearable link between the olds world and new.”

 

He failed to mention the indiscriminate massacre of the indigenous population of Cuba much as was true across the Americas. While he praised the hard work and pioneering spirit of European immigrants into the US, not a word was said about the sweat and labour of the black slaves imported to work on cotton plantations of the American South. Their descendants and the African American population, who now constitute over 14 per cent of the US population, are obviously not part of the European heritage that Mr Rubio celebrates. He condemned the “unprecedented wave of immigration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture and the future of our people”.

 

Presumably this does not include white immigrants of European stock like himself.

 

In short Mr Rubio’s remarks are an unabashed white, racist manifesto that should be called out and condemned by Europe and most decidedly by the people of the Global South. Significantly, this is also an implicit legitimisation of violence that accompanied the colonial enterprise. There are echoes of this in the Western tolerance of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. This is also the mindset behind the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites and the abduction of the head of state of a sovereign country, Venezuela, in an act of blatant aggression.  This is a charter of neo-colonial ambition that has no place in our world of the 21st century. It should have been rejected and condemned by the professedly liberal Western democracies gathered in Munich. Instead several applauded Mr Rubio’s remarks and found them oddly “reassuring”. Several of them are, like the US, plural democracies with large multiethnic populations. Some of their non-European citizens occupy senior positions in government and are indispensable as professionals in diverse fields. One wonders how reassuring they would have found Mr Rubio’s remarks and, more ominously, the applause he received.

 

What has been surprising is the muted reaction so far from the Global South, several of whose representatives were present in Munich. For Mr Rubio, the Global South is merely a market in which the US and Europe must win “market share” and not a partner in pursuing peace and development. During the much-maligned era of the non-aligned movement there would have been universal condemnation of such neo-colonial and racist attitudes. Countries like India would have taken the lead in condemning such language and in mobilising international opinion against it. Even Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, present at the conference, ignored Mr Rubio’s remarks. One has only seen some brief critical remarks from South Africa and Brazil. It is evidence of how much transactionalism has come to define foreign policy in our world today that we ignore the dangerous direction in which a supremacist ideology is taking us. That the revanchist blueprint is backed by immense military power and technological superiority should be cause for deep and universal concern.

 

There is another reason for disquiet and that is the rejection of the United Nations (UN) and multilateralism by Mr Rubio. The “abstractions of international law” offer no constraint on American actions to serve what the US regards as its national interest. This points to an anarchic and orderless world where violence and the threat of violence, not diplomacy, are the instruments of choice. The multilateral effort to tackle the threat of climate change is dismissed as appeasement of a “climate cult”.

 

If any evidence was required that one is in an age of “disruption” described by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the recent Davos forum, then this speech should leave no lingering doubt.

 

India will be hosting the Brics Plus summit later this year. The grouping has major powers with significant independent agency and is certainly not a mere market to be carved up among the countries of the West. They should articulate their vision of what shape the emerging global order should take. They should reject neo-colonial pretensions and racist prejudices and reaffirm their faith in multilateralism and principles and provisions of the UN Charter. One hopes that, as in the past, India will take the lead in mobilising international opinion against a regressive and outdated vision of the world, the contours of which are visible in plain sight in Gaza and may soon erupt in other parts of the world.

 

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The author is a former foreign secretary