After Bandung:

The revenge of modernity

By Uditha Devapriya

This is the second in a series of essays examining the Bandung Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the latter’s eventual dissolution.

Asked for his opinion of Western civilisation, Gandhi famously replied, “I think it would be a good idea.” There were many things Rabindranath Tagore agreed with Gandhi. His estimation of the West was not one of them. When the father of India’s independence struggle implored everyone to use the charka, the soul of the Bengali Renaissance begged to differ: “The charka,” he said, “does not require anyone to think; one simply turns the wheel of the antiquated invention endlessly, using the minimum of judgment and stamina.”

For Tagore, Western civilisation could be a source of liberation; for Gandhi, it could only be the object of amusement. To borrow an analogy by Isaiah Berlin, Gandhi was a hedgehog, a believer in the superiority of one way of life all others, while Tagore was a fox, a believer in the potential of human reason, individual freedom, and modernity. The latter is of particular significance and relevance, and forms the subject of my piece.

One of the most perplexing dilemmas of the 20th century has been the issue of modernity. Just what is it? Particularly for the postcolonial world order, the search for modernity has been coterminous with the search for identity. Western scholars, understandably, would pin it down to a clash of civilisations between East and West, and point out that modernisation inevitably involves Westernisation. Others, derided as “nativists”, would look to the East, at home-grown ideologies. The conflict between these two schools of thought has dominated the narrative throughout the Cold War, surviving its very end.

Francis Fukuyama believed that the collapse of the Soviet Union would usher in the end of history, transforming a bipolar world into a unipolar one: all world systems would flow into one, with the West dominating. For some time, the optimism of the West at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transition from Communism to capitalism in the Soviet bloc seemed to confirm this thesis. Modernity had returned, in the form of the marketplace. “Since 1991,” wrote Fareed Zakaria in 2008, “we have lived under a U.S. imperium, a unique, unipolar world in which the open global economy has expanded and accelerated.”

Samuel Huntington discounted such optimism. To him the collapse of a bipolar world could only lead to the rise of diametrically opposed ideologies, clashing with one another. Implicit in his view was a pragmatic belief in the withering away of nation states: now ethnicity, not nations, would reshape history. Nationalism, in other words, would transcend borders, and defy sovereignty. Huntington named eight cultures which would triumph over national borders in that manner: Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Japanese, and Buddhist. No wonder Gunadasa Amarasekara, the enduring symbol of the Sinhala Buddhist intelligentsia, referred to Huntington in his essays: it validated his own thesis of a world of competing civilisations, cultures, and worldviews.

Western civilisation continues to evoke hatred and infatuation among nationalist elites, and not just in countries like ours. Post-war Japan teetered, for instance, between adulation of Western culture, including forms of dress, with displays of exclusionary nationalism at times bordering on xenophobia. Thus when Marlon Brando rode a motorbike in The Wild One and Audrey Hepburn cut her hair short in Roman Holiday, Japanese teenagers followed suit, yet when cafes popped up in Tokyo, many of them actively excluded foreigners. The situation was certainly not as stark in other parts of Asia, least of all here: as with India, our tryst with the West has historically been a less complicated affair. In general though, we’ve been as ambiguous in our encounters with modernity as them.

For some, it would seem that modernity is white, male, bourgeois, and European. I hate to put it so bluntly, but that’s the truth. A corollary to this argument is the view that if we must embrace modernity, we must embrace the West. The only exception to that I can think of, from the last century, has to be the Non-Aligned Movement: it tried to forge a modernity acceptable to the ex-colonies of the Third World. That vision was many things: progressive, liberating, yet traditionalist. Anchored to the past, it sailed towards the future. It held the promise of growth, minus the dictates of Bretton Woods; an exit from underdevelopment that wouldn’t involve, much less depend on, the IMF and the World Bank.

Until the revival of neoliberalism in periphery countries (Sri Lanka included) in the late 1970s, this way out for developing societies seemed to work. Yet wrecked by differences in culture, growth and development potentials, resource endowments, and a frustrating lack of political consensus, it gradually fell apart. When Fouad Ajami wrote his critique of it (“The Third World Challenge: The Fate of Nonalignment”, Foreign Affairs, Winter 1980/1981), he began, fittingly enough, by quoting J. R. Jayewardene: “[t]he only real nonaligned countries in the world are the United States and the Soviet Union.”

To me it’s one of the biggest ironies that an outfit committed to neutrality between capitalism and Communism should come to be influenced by both camps. The capitalist bloc, led by the US, helped rightwing authoritarian elites, particularly in the military, to overthrow democratically elected leftwing governments; the Communist bloc, led by the USSR, supported reformist nationalist elites, often but not always in the military, who had overthrown or defeated at the polls dependent, compradore rulers.

Each believed that history was on their side, and ironically both were wrong for the same reason: they assumed that the regimes they supported would respond to the people. In this, however, the socialist bloc proved to be more correct of the two in the long run: opposed as leftwing reformist nationalists may have been to a socialist revolution in their front yards, they nevertheless did manage to fulfil the aspirations of the peasantry, something rightwing compradore elites could never hope to do or achieve.

Meanwhile, the Non-Aligned Movement’s vision of modernity was being buttressed by culture. “Islamic lands,” Fouad Ajami wrote in his obituary of it, “had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity.” As with these Islamic lands, so with Buddhist, Hindu, and the other non-Christian nonaligned societies of the world: Pan-Africanism, the Bhoomiputra movement in South-East Asia, and over here, the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna and the Sinhala Basha Peramuna among other outfits. These appealed to a nationalist petty bourgeoisie. By pandering to them, the governments of their societies contributed to the Movement’s very demise. Not owing to what they had, but owing to what they lacked: a cultural consensus on which such a group could build a political consensus.

As much as I disagree with much of what the Jathika Chintanaya ideologues say and write, the likes of Nalin de Silva got it right when they claimed that almost all forms of Western culture and philosophy, including rationalism, were rooted in a Judeo-Christian framework. Fernand Braudel also made this claim: “Western Christianity,” he wrote, “was and remains the main constituent element in European thought.” From classical antiquity to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, encompassing the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Enlightenment – from Thomas Aquinas to Adam Smith – the paradigm shifts of Western society never actually swerved from the faith of Abraham and Moses.

From Galileo to Descartes, and from Einstein to Hawking and Dawkins, the growth of Christianity hence paralleled that of Western civilisation. Post hoc ergo, propter hoc: these in turn paralleled the evolution of Western modernity. A deeply unified culture, nourished by over four centuries of exploitation of colonies across Asia and Africa, the West gradually came to monopolise the idea of growth, progress, liberty, and modernity. Added to this was the formation of the colonial bourgeoisie, which in most colonies displaced the traditional ruling elites. Their thinking was no different to that of European officialdom, and even the most radical among them conformed to the decrees of the colonial bureaucracy.

That sped up the Westernisation of these societies even more.

The Non-Aligned Movement lacked that kind of unifying culture, and with it the rudiments of a political consensus. Ergo, its vision of modernity could not hold. Once it unravelled, the ideal of modernity had to revert to its assumed homeland: the West.

It’s not surprising that the descent of the Movement should coincide with the fall of the Berlin Wall and of Communism. The fortunes of the Non-Aligned Movement had been built on the Cold War: while it represented countries from both capitalist and socialist camps, it overwhelmingly represented the latter. If there’s one legacy of the Soviet Union’s support for these countries, it was the enrichment of a nationalist petty bourgeoisie. Yet as I wrote in my earlier essay, the Soviets vastly overestimated the potential of bourgeois democratic nationalist leaders to take forward the revolution in these societies. In Egypt as in Sri Lanka, the dalliance between bourgeois nationalists and leftists soured: Egypt with the dissolution of Communist parties in 1965, Sri Lanka with the expulsion of the LSSP in 1975.

The faith which Marxists placed in Third World bourgeois nationalists was hence, if not misplaced, then misaligned. Their main electorate, despite their efforts at land reform in favour of the peasantry, remained the petty bourgeoisie. Nationalism is by no means petty bourgeois dominated – that is a crass simplification – but in their hands, it invariably turns into the dominant political ideology. That is exactly what happened here.

The experience of the Non-Aligned Movement shows that even with Moscow’s support, this petty bourgeoisie consistently prevented the leaders of their countries from transcending a nationalist political framework, thereby preventing that much needed cultural and political consensus in the Movement. What it led to, firstly, was the defeat of the socialist project in favour of a neoliberal restoration – Jayewardena after Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka, Sadat after Nasser in Egypt – and secondly, the widening of cultural division.

With the dissolution of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Soviet bloc, the contradictions of globalisation and market fundamentalism led ethno-religious nationalism to erupt in and fracture these societies. Huntington called this the clash of civilisations, though it remains a reductionist and deeply cynical diagnosis to me. In any case, modernity has had its revenge: after a full four decades of “the East” endeavouring to come up with a tenable alternative to what Nalin de Silva refers to as “Judeo-Christian values”, it has returned to its assumed land of birth, leaving one half of the world reeling in chaos. Modernity, Gandhi could well have said today, thus remains, at best, a good idea for us. I doubt Tagore would retort.

Note: In my previous article on the Non-Aligned Movement (“After Bandung: Marxism’s exit from the Third World”), I wrote that J. R. Jayewardene made his facetious remark on the organisation at the 1979 Havana Summit. In reality, he mentioned it in an interview with the New York Times, which quoted him in the May 22, 1979 issue.

(The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com)