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Ed Webb

(Why Brexit is) the Perfect Catastrophe - Eudaimonia and Co - 0 views

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shared by Ed Webb on 19 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • that’s what Brexit is really all about: empire’s ghost, the need to dominate and control, the inability to be a true equal in this world, the desperate dream of supremacy
  • despite the fact that the majority of them would now cancel Brexit in a second referendum, nobody much seems to understand the urgency of scale of the problem at issue here. There’s just a sense of weary frustration. But if your country was going to run short of food and medicine in approximately two months — wouldn’t you want to, well, stop it? So why do both sides in British politics seem not to care?
  • A poorer, more desperate society is not often also a tolerant and happy one
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  • What do you think life will be like when the interest rate is five percent higher? Ten? You will be wiped out. It won’t take years. It will just take months.It will happen with stunning, vicious, disbelieving speed. People become homeless. And jobless. And broke. And hungry. And sick. Is this sounding catastrophic enough to you yet? Do you think I’m kidding around? Can you pick any holes in the logic above? Go ahead and try. Don’t you think I would already know? This is the real deal, my friends, bona fide self-inflicted catastrophe, without parallel in modern history
  • shortages have devastating second and third order effects, like stagflation, depression, and collapse
  • People, now having to focus on bitter self-preservation, do something paradoxical and foolish — they swing harder and harder to the right. Think Weimar Germany becoming Nazi Germany. Am I saying Britain’s going to go full fascist? Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. I am saying that where the economic effect of even a soft Brexit will be economic catastrophe, the political effect of the economic effect will be a vicious circle, a feedback loop of ruin.
  • To undo sudden falls into poverty, a society needs to invest in itself — build hospitals, roads, schools, even just dig ditches. But a society of people focused on self-preservation doesn’t choose that often. It chooses to “tighten its belt” at the precise moment everyone should agree to just shower everyone else with money (it’s imaginary, remember?). In this, the economic effect of Brexit will be devastating, middle class implosion, working class immiseration — but the political effect will be even more lethal: it will produce a loop of austerity.
  • What happens when a society chooses austerity — apart from the fact that it gets even poorer, so it chooses more austerity, so it gets poorer, like America? What are the sociocultural consequences of austerity? Just look at America — the canonical example. A culture of intelligence, grace, wisdom, and truth becomes a loutish, brutish thing. People are turning on one another economically — now they do so culturally. Racism and hate all rise. But so do ignorance, folly, greed, and spite — because people are living much, much harder lives. You can’t get insulin — remember? Who’s fault is it? Maybe it’s that nasty Jew’s fault. Maybe it’s that dirty Muslim’s fault.
  • About half of Britain’s medicine comes from the EU. Half of its medicine. Like food, medicine is perishable. Like food, it must be transported with care. But now even the most minimal checks will disrupt the process — even under a soft Brexit. Wham! A nation goes short of medicine. How badly so? Well, consider for a moment that Britain imports all its insulin. What happens when even 20% of that insulin spoils? 30%? 50%? Where will it come from, exactly? Who will pay for it?
  • all the most lethal maladies of the body social — authoritarianism, extremism, oligarchy, kleptocracy
  • Remember all those shortages of food and medicine? See those American hedge funds, hungry for more profit? It’s a marriage made in hell. Brits will have to import American food, medicine, and so forth. But it’s a rip-off. It comes with broken systems attached to it — deficient healthcare, jobs that aren’t, pay that never rises, savings that are spent desperately buying it, because it costs an exploitatively huge amount in the end
  • Brits will be harvested for more and more profit every year — just like Americans have been, by their banks, corporations, hedge funds, all their institutions. There will be more NHS, no more BBC, no more M&S — there will be HMOs and Fox News and Walmart. There will be engines of exploitation and abuse more vicious than Brits really understand still exist
  •  isn’t all that…being colonized?
  • Brexit is the bitter, stubborn, stupid last stand of the colonial empire-builder — the one who imagines, shaking a fist, sneering at this world in which he is no longer on top, that he is still the master his great-grandfather was.
  • That is the dead end of the road Brexit goes nowhere to — one’s own self-colonization. Destroying one’s own society — in the name of power, control, dominance. So one can climb over the jagged, jumbled ruins and cry, “But see! I am still the master! Here is my dominion!!” Never mind it is is just a wasteland now — at least you are in charge of it all again.
  • Only the colonized can tell you what it is like to be colonized. When you are, stupidly, astonishingly, colonizing yourself. How you are. That you are. But it is at that precise moment the fallen colonizer, dreaming desperately of empire, haunted by its ghost, is least likely to know anything but the insatiable need for power and control at all.
Ed Webb

The good ship Brexit's mission of free trade and empire | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ssion-of-free-trade-and-empire

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shared by Ed Webb on 23 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • As Britain looks to make new trade deals, politicians are promoting a Brexit where multinationals rule over elected governments as well as over the people they are meant to represent. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, Theresa May and co. have been clear in their ambitions for the global south. “The thriving economies of south and east Asia and, increasingly, Africa, are, and will become, ever more important,” said Fox in July as he gave the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington. He spoke of the “golden economic opportunities” presented by “the rise of the collective wealth of developing countries.”
  • The drive to boost trade links with African countries has been branded “empire 2.0”, reportedly by Whitehall officials themselves. This latest scramble to capitalise on the Commonwealth and other countries in the South is just an extension of what Britain has been doing for generations.
  • Last month an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in favour of the oil giant Chevron after it sued the Ecuadorian government. Chevron’s subsidiary Texaco have been accused of dumping billions of gallons of toxic wastewater in the Ecuadorean Amazon, polluting rivers and lakes, over the course of nearly 30 years. Campaigners told Latin American broadcaster Telesur that high rates of cancer and other disease were affecting indigenous people in the area, which they attributed to oil pollution of their watercourses. Chevron had previously been ordered to clean up extensive environmental damage, by a court in Ecuador, as well as pay £7.4billion ($9.5billion) compensation to local people. This latest ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration found that Ecuador had violated its obligations under a bilateral investment treaty signed with the US and said that the previous judgment against Chevron had been gained through fraud and corruption. Ecuador must now pay compensation to Chevron.
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  • One of the most worrying aspects of new trade deals is the likely inclusion of an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, or similar provisions, that allow corporations to sue countries for alleged ‘discriminatory’ practices that hamper their activities or profits.
  • “A free trade area between Britain, a largely developed country and Africa, a poor continent, was always going to exacerbate inequalities, trade deficits, and the dependency of the latter on the former. ‘Free trade’ is really just the name given to the ideology that justifies this power imbalance,” wrote Africa Kiiza of the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI) last year.
  • “These mechanisms under free trade agreements will give more implications not only for the state policies in our countries, but also the sovereignty of the people themselves,” said Hertani. “The people cannot sue the investors. If there are human rights violations, there have been are several cases where the people lost. We never win against the multinational corporations.”
  • Countries like Indonesia, and many others in the global south, are rich in natural resources. Multinational companies have been plundering them to the detriment of people and the environment for generations and new trade deals could make it even easier for them to do this.
  • Inequality is getting worse, as highlighted in the recent United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Trade and Development report. They point at debt – which is more than three times the size of global output – as symbolic of this.
  • “This mantra of free trade has been really central to the whole British empire, to the British imperial project, for a very long time now. It’s a very bloody history and I’m worried that the kind of Brexit envisaged by the likes of Boris Johnson, and indeed Liam Fox and Jacob Rees-Mogg, is precisely to replicate those kinds of relations which we’ve never completely got away from, but which could be made even worse after Brexit.”
Ed Webb

Max Hastings: Brexit's Predictable Crises in Gibraltar, the Channel, Ireland - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-gibraltar-the-channel-ireland

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shared by Ed Webb on 08 Aug 21 - Cached
  • All that is certain about this dispute, concerning a territory with but 34,000 residents, is that it needlessly amplifies aggravation between Britain and Spain. Logic suggests that the U.K. should cede the territory, which no longer has any possible strategic value. I urged this on Douglas Hurd, foreign secretary in the 1990s, when he bemoaned to me the hair-raising secret service reports detailing criminal activity bankrolled through Gibraltar.But I am not a politician. The view of successive British governments about such things — including the refusal to surrender the Falkland Islands to Argentina — is that to quit Gibraltar would enrage jingoistic opinion at home for no political benefit. 
  • The more neurotic a nation becomes about its place in the world, the more likely it is to cling to micro-symbols. 
  • Going back to the 2016 Brexit referendum, Johnson and his colleagues have dismissed the obvious impossibility of reconciling Brexit with the terms of the Irish Good Friday peace agreement, as a mere technicality. 
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  • “Trust in this British government’s good faith, never high, is now minimal … on all sides in Northern Ireland.” 
  • Johnson declared recently that Northern Ireland is a part of the U.K. in exactly the same fashion as are its other constituent parts: England, Scotland and Wales. This is simply untrue. No U.K. prime minister since Irish Partition in 1921 has sought to pretend such a thing. Modern British governments have acknowledged that Northern Ireland remains a part of the U.K. — as long as that is the wish of its own people. And polls have shown a majority in the north now favors holding a referendum on exactly that proposition.
  • Unless Britain treads very carefully indeed, which recent events suggest that this government is not good at, militant Irish Republicanism could revive, the killing on the streets resume.
  • In the grand scheme of things — compared with U.S. confrontation with China, Afghanistan threatened with anarchy, Russian disruption of the democratic West — none of the friction points between Britain and the EU threatens an immediate or severe crisis. It was always inevitable that Brexit would generate issues and disputes. But the tensions involving Gibraltar, migration and Northern Ireland highlight the perils facing Johnson’s nation as a consequence of having made the historic choice to go it alone. The standard-bearers for Brexit made grandiose claims that it would “set Britain free” to develop its full potential. But freedom can also bring loneliness. Johnson is accumulating foreign adversaries — not quite enemies, but people who do not wish him well — much faster than he is winning allies and admirers.
Ed Webb

Brexit and Boris Johnson Are the Legacies of Tony Blair - 0 views

www.jacobinmag.com/...00s-labour-tories-blair-brexit

UK Britain opinion analysis history empire colonialism politics economy trade economics finance Brexit EU

shared by Ed Webb on 23 May 22 - Cached
  • British history has a problem with nationalism, and indeed the nation — they’re not supposed to exist, or they exist in very unusual forms. A central claim of my book is that something I call the British nation, corresponding to the territory of the UK, emerged after 1945, with a national economy, national politics, and a self-consciousness of itself as a nation called Britain. But it had a rather short life and was broken up from the 1980s.
  • Before the nation came both the empire and a set of places that were located in a global, free-trading space. What came after the nation? A fresh commitment to a globalist, and in particular European, liberal economic perspective.
  • Most recently, we’ve had a claim for the centrality of empire in twentieth-century British history, coming right up to the present. I think this very often involves a misrepresentation of what empire was, a failure to distinguish imperialism from nationalism, and an implicit continuity thesis that the empire as it was in 1914 remains a potent ideological force today.
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  • The imperialists certainly made the empire and in particular the white dominions central to politics and economics. In many ways, today’s anti-imperialists have followed them rather naively in this.
  • For the Conservatives, the white dominions in particular were central. They provided an image of the empire as a brotherhood of free white nations — a very important part of the overall story. But it was also important because the white dominions really were the important bits economically. That was where the investment went, and where a lot of the food for the United Kingdom came from.
  • India is a different matter. That was a place, of course, with a massive population. It was an important market for exports, but it was in a different league from the white dominions, and both were in a quite different position from what were strictly speaking called the colonies. It is very important to remember that before the 1940s — that is to say, in the great age of empire — trade with foreign countries was greater than with “British” countries, to use the language of the time. Liberals pointed this out again and again. They argued that the great glory of the British economy was not the empire but rather free trade. That meant trading with everybody and in practice trading a very great deal with Europe. That was where British bacon, British eggs, British iron ore, or British timber came from, and much else besides. Before the 1940s, the UK was a profoundly European economy, deeply integrated into trade and production within the European continent.
  • The UK was the largest overseas investor and the largest trader, but it was also the most industrial country in the world — far more industrialized than Germany or the United States at this time. It was more industrialized precisely because it was more globalized. It didn’t need to grow all its own food. The City was investing overseas in UK-owned enterprises, whose business was often to supply food to the UK, directly or indirectly. That in turn allowed the UK to be industrial and indeed to supply the railways, the factories, and the ships that made all this trade possible in the first place. In fact, the relations between overseas investment and industrialization were synergistic, at least in this period.
  • it’s striking how little impact decolonization had. Take the cases of India and Palestine in the 1940s: there were no major convulsions at home — nothing compared to what was happening in France during the 1950s.
  • there was actually a silent revolution brought about by “de-imperialization.” That was best exemplified by the extraordinarily rapid transition of the Conservatives from being the party of empire and Imperial Preference to being the party of free trade and of applying for accession to the Treaty of Rome in 1961. It is extraordinary that, just a few years after World War II, the Tory Party in government applied for membership of what was then called the Common Market.
  • There was a movement of people from the Caribbean in particular during the 1950s, but they were people coming from a colonial territory who had the same nationality as most people living in the United Kingdom. They were what were called “citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies,” so they weren’t really immigrants. They were people moving within the space of British nationality. Interestingly, there were more immigrants, in the sense of aliens or semialiens, coming from Ireland and continental Europe in the 1940s and ’50s. Indeed, the dominant movement of population from the 1940s right up into the 1980s was outward rather than inward. The UK was a place of net emigration in that period. A lot of that emigration was to the Commonwealth, and Australia in particular.
  • It comes as a surprise to many people that in the 1950s, the United Kingdom was still the most industrialized economy on Earth. This doesn’t fit with the “declinist” images that have so affected our understanding of this period in particular. In terms of growth rates, poorer European countries and countries elsewhere were often growing faster than the UK economy — they were catching up. The German economy caught up with the UK and overtook it in terms of GDP per capita in the 1960s, and France did the same in the 1970s. But the overall result was that the West European economies, which had been quite different in 1945 or 1950, came to be very similar by the 1980s and ’90s or the 2000s when one includes poorer countries like Spain.
  • In the 1970s and ’80s, the UK became broadly speaking self-sufficient in the foods that it could grow itself, much as Germany, France, and Italy were self-sufficient in food. What had been the great factor distinguishing the United Kingdom from continental Europe disappeared as a result of a fundamental change in British political economy. The UK became an exporter of beef and wheat, which would have been unthinkable not just in the Edwardian years but in the 1950s as well.
  • The reality is that the 1970s saw a global crisis. There were important transitions and readjustments in the British economy. That decade was also a period of political radicalism and cultural inventiveness — a period of innovation, of a sort that conservatives didn’t like one bit. That’s essentially why the 1970s have this terrible reputation.
  • She did transform the British economy, but it’s important to note that she did not increase the underlying rate of growth. Since 1979, the British economy has grown more slowly on average than it grew between 1945 and the 1970s. In that sense, she most certainly did not reverse the British decline. Nor did she reverse the British decline in relation to all the other major economies in the world
  • while manufacturing employment did go down very radically, manufacturing output remained high. Indeed, peak manufacturing output in British history came in 2008 — it wasn’t the 1970s, let alone the 1870s
  • North Sea oil was certainly important because, together with the new self-sufficiency in food, it meant that the UK no longer had to import the two things that had dominated its import bill in the past: food and oil. That meant that the UK no longer needed to have a surplus in the manufacturing balance, which went negative in 1981.
  • Quite soon, you had a permanent negative balance of trade in the British economy — a quite extraordinary thing. A tiny negative balance of trade was the stuff of politics in the 1950s and ’60s, yet in the more recent past, a permanent deficit of 4, 5, or 6 percent of GDP has no impact whatsoever. What made this deficit sustainable? The emergence of a new kind of City of London. It was not the City of the Edwardian years. It was something quite different, like an enclave, which was about bringing money into the UK as much as taking it out. It was precisely those net flows of capital into the UK that allowed it to sustain the negative balance of trade.
  • The most important thing Thatcher did, apart from opening up the economy to Europe and the world, was to encourage the increasing inequality between capital and labor and between the regions. There was an extraordinary reversal of the move toward greater equality of income, wealth, and regional development that had been taking place from 1945
  • The loss of trust in government that arose from the obvious, systematic mendacity of the Blair administration around Iraq had and continues to have profound consequences. It generated a new, deep cynicism in politics
  • It’s striking that the Conservatives have increased their vote share in every election since 1997. The idea that Boris Johnson suddenly transformed the fortunes of the party is quite wrong. That’s one legacy of Blairism — not just Brexit, but also a new, revived, and dangerous Conservative Party. If Thatcherism begot Blairism, I think Blairism begot “Johnsonism” by a very different process.
  • The UK has been a place where global capitalism does its business. There’s relatively little we could straightforwardly call British capitalism
  • there aren’t the sort of connections between business and the Conservative Party that there would have been when they were all the same people. There are, perhaps, connections between particular kinds of business and the Conservative Party — particular hedge funds, for example, or Russian oligarchs. Between them, they’re pushing the Conservatives to be a party that’s pressing for an even greater degree of tax-haven status for the British economy, making it even more of a rentier, liberalized economy than it already is.
  • We have an extraordinary politics, in which a particular fraction of capital, allied with hard-right elements of the Conservative Party, are pursuing a policy that they don’t really understand and can’t really come to terms with.
  • We’ve had great programs of political-economic change, from mobilization in World War II to going into the European Economic Community. But those were planned and thought through — there weren’t any great surprises. This one hasn’t been. It hasn’t even really been improvised. It has just been a very peculiar mess.
  • the politics of the Brexiteers themselves aren’t the politics of Brexit voters. The Brexit vote is an old vote, just like the Conservative vote. One has to credit the Conservatives with realizing that their vote was an old one and doing everything they could to sustain that vote — for example, by keeping NHS spending and pension spending up, systematically targeting welfare at the elderly and taking it away from the young
Ed Webb

The myth of Brexit as imperial nostalgia | Prospect Magazine - 0 views

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...f-brexit-as-imperial-nostalgia

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shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • The idea that Britain should lead the EU—widely deployed in 2016—has as strong an imperial heritage as the aspiration to leave it; and in loading membership with unrealistic aspirations, it may have contributed to disillusionment with the European experience. By contrast, the anti-colonial left tended to be hostile to membership, and the idea that Brexit marks a liberation from Britain’s own colonial status—however perverse—has a long history in Eurosceptic thought.
  • we need a sharper distinction between nostalgia and amnesia: between the longing for empire and the forgetting of Britain’s imperial past. The two are not mutually exclusive: it is probably only possible to be nostalgic for empire if you forget most of its history. Yet there is a difference between the selective remembering of empire and its elimination from the historical record
  • In Eurosceptic readings of history, the dominant memory is not of empire but of “our island story”: of plucky “little Britain,” standing alone against overpowering odds. It’s the story of Dunkirk, of Sir Francis Drake, and of Britain fighting “alone” in 1940—a story that reduces empire to an expression of British power, rather than its source. The myth it fuels is not that empire can return, but that it hardly mattered in the first place: that Britain can flex its muscles on the world stage without the sinews of imperial power. For Boris Johnson, the task of Brexit is “not to build a new empire, heaven forfend,” but “to rediscover some of the dynamism of these bearded Victorians,” as if the two were unconnected.
Ed Webb

How Brexit marks the end of the British story | Latest Brexit news and top stories | Th... - 0 views

www.theneweuropean.co.uk/...c-grayling-on-brexit-1-6322238

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shared by Ed Webb on 15 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The pride and pomp of the British in the heyday of empire did not last long. Two world wars impoverished the country and destroyed its empire. (Our 'special relationship' with the USA consisted in getting desperately needed aid during the Second World War in return for a promise to dismantle the empire. Even if the UK could have maintained the empire, which it could not, as proved by Suez, it in effect traded the empire for survival in the 1940s.)
  • Entry to the EEC/EU saved the country's economy and saw it flourish, and offered a new and significant role as one of the big three states in one of the big three blocs in the emerging new post-Cold War world, alongside the USA and China
  • British self-congratulation in the first decade of the 21st century had given a group of people in our political order - a fifth column from the past - the feeling that now was the time to reassert what they mythologised as the spirit of Britain in Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee
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  • There was no other reason for having such a referendum; it was purely an internal Tory party affair
  • The circumstances of the 2016 referendum, its nature, and its consequences, have multiple causes that jointly led to the stupefying mess in the country and its political and constitutional order that we are now in. The Eurosceptics made good use of these other factors
  • the policy from 2010 of austerity and the resulting large and rapid increase in inequality, which affected some areas of the country and economy much more drastically than others
  • a series of bad mistakes and misjudgements by David Cameron and Ed Miliband, the leaders of the two main parties
  • the quality of MPs after decades in the EU. Membership of the EU brought a degree of general consistency and equilibrium to the economies and states of the member nations, even taking into account the misguided austerity policies after 2010 in the UK itself. This has lessened the temperature of political debate in the UK, premised as it is (unlike most other EU countries) on a deeply adversarial style of politics. Before joining the EEC the UK was a theatre of intense struggles between left and right, socialism and capitalism, managements and unions, a pervasive 'us and them' mentality infecting every major decision.That moderated, with a more temperate tone entering politics in the period between the end of Thatcher and the post-2010 coalition. But as a result, politics became somewhat less attractive to energetic, clever and ambitious people, with the result that - with some extremely honourable exceptions - the general quality of MPs is not nearly what it was.
  • Banal careerism, the unchallenged sway of the party whips, unthinking sound-bite ideas as the staple of political discourse, the fact that literally hundreds of MPs in the Tory party can support a profoundly unfit person such as Boris Johnson in the office of prime minister - this is a mark of serious decline in quality of those elected to the legislature.
  • the innate fragility and dysfunction of the UK's outdated and ramshackle constitutional order. The uncodified constitution - 'a series of understandings that no-one understands' - is very convenient for any party that commands a majority in the House of Commons, because they can do whatever they like, always getting their agenda enacted and controlling the business of the House of Commons itself.
  • no separation of powers between the legislature (parliament) and executive (the government - meaning, the cabinet and prime minister)
  • Instead of holding the government to account, therefore, parliament is in effect the creature of the government, and does what the government wants.
  • "elective tyranny"
  • The clique controls the executive, the executive controls parliament, parliament is absolute in its powers: The clique is the tail that wags the entire dog.
  • when people of lower quality, less integrity, less intelligence and less honour populate these offices of state, danger looms. And that danger has burst upon us in the form of Brexit.
  • One of the major scandals of the 2016 referendum is that its outcome has never been debated in parliament. The question, 'Shall we take the advice of 37% of the electorate to take an enormous, uncosted, unplanned and unpredictable step?' has never been debated and voted upon in our sovereign state body.
  • our hopelessly undemocratic first past the post electoral system lies at the rotten core of these arrangements. It disenfranchises the majority of voters, turning them off politics. It puts majorities into the House of Commons on minorities of the popular vote. It entrenches two-party politics, in which elections produce one-party government by turns - with the foregoing 'elective tyranny' resulting. It is a mess, and reform is urgently needed.
  • there is a huge clean-up operation required in our political and constitutional order, in addition to addressing the serious inequalities and injustices in our economy and society
  • We in the UK have skated on very thin political and constitutional ice for a long time; the wealth and prestige of empire, the nostalgic dream it left behind, the self-deceptions and illusions of those who could not see how good a future was developing for us as a leading nation in Europe, made us unaware of the danger. We have fallen through that ice, and the bitterly cold waters we now flounder in must at last wake us up.
Ed Webb

Brexit reinforces Britain's imperial amnesia - 0 views

www.ft.com/...38-0fc8-11e7-a88c-50ba212dce4d

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shared by Ed Webb on 29 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • leading Brexiters and advocates of “Global Britain” misunderstand the past — with dangerous consequences for the future. They speak warmly of returning to Britain’s historical vocation as a “great trading nation”, when it was actually a great imperial nation. That important distinction leads to overconfidence about the ease of re-creating a global trading destiny, in a world in which Britannia no longer rules the waves.
  • For a Martian historian, the most interesting thing about modern British history would surely be that the country built a massive global empire. But for the Brits themselves, shaping a national story that centres around the war against the Nazis — rather than the empire — makes psychological sense. It has allowed Britain to nurture a national self-image as champions of freedom and plucky underdogs (captured in the eternal popularity of the television programme Dad’s Army) rather than imperialist oppressors.
  • Victory in Europe was a moment of national triumph that cushioned the psychological blow of the loss of empire. All British opinion formers have 1945 stamped on their memory — the year that marked victory in Europe. Few would be able to tell you that 1947 was the year of the independence of India.
Ed Webb

Ghosts of the Future: A Conversation with Larry Achiampong | The Current | The Criterio... - 0 views

www.criterion.com/...ersation-with-larry-achiampong

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shared by Ed Webb on 14 Apr 21 - Cached
  • Relic Traveller is set in a moment in the future where the global West is coming to a point of decline because of nationalism, while the African Union has come into prosperity, harmony, and independence. And it’s quite important that I say this: the project isn’t about a utopia. This point in time brings with it responsibility. During this shift, the African Union creates a range of initiatives, one of which is the Relic Travellers’ Alliance. Relic Travellers are people who are sent around the planet to pick up clues and, in particular, vocal testimonies from people who have been oppressed by the ghosts of colonization. These are stories and experiences of people who have not yet been allowed to be healed or learned from. These stories help to govern the future and create a space for healing, from a bottom-up rather than a top-down perspective.
  • in the past few years, particularly in the UK, there’s been a real resurgence of empire fetishism, and seemingly more reluctance than ever among the media and ruling classes to address the reality of this history
  • the films represent a warning to the West about its negligence, ignorance, mythical approach to history, omission of the histories and legacies of empire, slavery and colonization, and how those things affect the way that we live today: the way that Black people are still disenfranchised. They’re a stark warning that the West will undo itself as a result of the lies it has celebrated, taught, and disseminated for a while
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  • Something like Brexit is only possible because the UK, the powers that be, and the media have propagated myths for so long regarding the idea of the “other,” the foreigner, and the so-called independence and strength of the United Kingdom or the West, without recognizing the resources and contributions [of colonized and oppressed people]—voluntary and otherwise—that make these nations so apparently great.
  • I have my own terminology for my work: “Sanko-Time.” It brings together two words. “Sankofa” is a Twi word from Ghana, meaning to go back and retrieve something that may have been lost or forgotten, or something that is known but needs to be revisited in order to make sense of the present or pave the way for the future. The future does not become possible without the past. The word “time” represents my interest in ideas of science fiction and time travel.
  • For the Relic Traveller films, I was thinking about creating heroes who looked like myself—our heroes, who are African and Black, are exploring these mostly Western environments, where the West becomes exotic.
  • I’ve created a film that connects with the main quadrilogy, called Reliquary 2, which was commissioned by John Hansard Gallery and released online last year. It utilizes film footage from my own archive as well as new animation, and illustrations by Wumi “Wumzum” Olaosebikan, who has worked with me on creating the vectors on the Pan-African flags. What’s different this time is that the voice-over—the vocal testimony—is my own. It’s set during the pandemic, and it’s something of a letter to my children, talking about my hopes, my concerns and fears about the future and their place in it, and how the world—in particular the Western world—has viewed and may continue to treat them. It’s in a similar vein as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, which he wrote for and to his son.
Ed Webb

By Ignoring Racism and Colonialism, Mainstream International Relations Theory Fails to ... - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...ir-blind-to-racism-colonialism

IR racism colonialism theory empire opinion history pandemics

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Jul 20 - Cached
  • Beginning with its creation as an academic discipline, mainstream IR has not been entirely honest about its ideological or geographic origins. It has largely erased non-Western history and thought from its canon and has failed to address the central role of colonialism and decolonization in creating the contemporary international order.
  • the international processes through which race and racial differences have also been produced.
  • The history of the modern state system, as it is often taught, focuses on the impact of the American and French Revolutions in the late 18th century. However, this is precisely the period of colonial expansion and settlement that saw some European states consolidate their domination over other parts of the world and over their populations, who came to be represented in racialized terms.
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  • the so-called modern state—which, then, is imperial as much as national. The racialized hierarchies of empire defined the broader polity beyond the nation-state and, after decolonization, have continued to construct inequalities of citizenship within states that have only recently become national.
  • Scholars and practitioners of international relations must take seriously the colonial histories that were constitutive of the formation of modern states
  • it is clear that many pre-colonial African polities’ activities had important international implications
  • democratic governance from India to South Africa to the American South has emerged principally through the activism and agency of subaltern populations—those subjected to the hegemony of a more powerful class or group, especially colonial subjects, and those victimized by anti-Black racism and other forms of discrimination.
  • race almost always operates in conjunction with other categories—such as caste, class, civilization, and, in today’s context, the racialized Muslim. The challenge for IR is to find a new language that is not confined to just one master concept or one corner of the world.
  • The subalterns have had to rectify the contradictions of global liberalism by transforming the idea of freedom for some into the practice of freedom for all.
  • there is no historical evidence that Western presence has ever enhanced the well-being of the previously colonized world. It took me a solid decade—and exposure to post- and decolonial approaches—to change my doctoral research question from: “When do Western actors not show up?” to “Should they be there in the first place?”
  • International relations that do not reproduce the logic of colonialism must instead engage with ideas of repair, dignity, and even retreat.
  • Taking the problem of racism seriously in the field of IR means viewing it not merely as an issue of stereotypes or cultural insensitivities, but as a colonial technology of life and premature death built on ideologies of whiteness and white supremacy
  • The scholarly imperative is to study and question the current international system built on racial capitalism, and to imagine alternatives
  • the global subalterns and historically marginalized peoples are the ones who have pushed the international system to adopt whatever level of democratic governance exists
  • IR was born in the age of empire, and for the first few decades of its history it was explicitly occupied with questions of colonial administration and the justification of racial supremacy
  • Race was often viewed as the basic unit of politics—more fundamental than state, society, nation, or individual.
  • Though the most extravagant versions of Anglo-utopianism were exhausted by the mid-20th century, the idea that the “English-speaking peoples” are destined to play a leading role in shaping world politics has proved remarkably durable. It has resurfaced in assorted conservative visions of the so-called Anglosphere and in projects for reorienting Britain’s post-Brexit foreign policy.
  • the majority of what students read about in IR continues to be written by a minority of the world’s people. The presumption that all worthwhile ideas originated in the West is not only exclusionary but false
  • Feminist foreign policy often allows wealthy countries to focus attention on the plight of women in countries with developing economies. Wealthier countries, or developed economies, then position themselves as being better placed to respond to the challenges around gender discrimination.
  • A country with a feminist foreign policy often invokes its own experiences as good practice elsewhere. Yet gender discrimination is universal, and often members of minority groups within the developed economies are significantly disadvantaged by endemic racism and xenophobia
  • A different way of doing foreign policy that is people-led rather than state-led and emphasizes solidarity over interest is the only means toward justice for all.
  • what the world is witnessing today could be the third phase of cultural encounters. The pretention of Western culture to universal validity is being challenged from the angles of cultural relativism (what is valid in one society in the West was not valid in another); historical relativism (what was valid in the West at the beginning of the 20th century was not valid in the West at the beginning of the 21st); and empirical relativism (the West often failed to live up to its own standards, and occasionally those standards were better met by other societies).
  • This is the era of the West on the defensive.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic and the global protests against police brutality demonstrate that, first, the challenges to humanity transcend the territoriality of the state and the parochialism of race and, second, a transnational, if rudimentary, convergence of political sensibilities may be emerging at the grassroots level. For many around the world, the moral disease of racism needs to be confronted as vehemently as the physical disease now sweeping around the globe.
  • shared sensibilities could, in the long run, become a catalyst for something bigger: the creation of a truly global village that is based not on cultural hierarchy but on what Mazrui called cultural ecumenicalism—a combination of a global pool of achievements with local pools of distinctive innovation and tradition
Ed Webb

Things could be good | Dazed - 0 views

www.dazeddigital.com/...d-actually-be-good-adam-curtis

UK Britain analysis opinion culture economy class empire austerity politics

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Feb 22 - Cached
  • There is something haunting and desperate about the chokehold that white, sallow humans from southern England have over the identity of the UK. In his 2021 docu-series Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, Adam Curtis characterises post-war English society as strange and rudderless. During this period of mass emigration and rapid industrialisation, he suggests many white people entered a state of prolonged philosophical mourning over the loss of the empire; sleepwalking through a kind of ambient identity crisis, confused as to what their “story” now was. Speaking of the Black revolutionary and civil rights activist Michael de Freitas, who emigrated to London from Trinidad in the late-50s, Curtis says: “Having grown up with a picture of a strong and confident homeland at the centre of the Empire, instead, what he found was, what seemed to him, a sad and frightened country.” This feels very much the same now. Misery and spite can be felt in almost every corner of England, lying dormant like a landmine that will go off at the first sight of anyone enjoying themselves outside the parameters of white, middle-class acceptability. 
  • There is a powerful history of working-class revolt in every nation that makes up the UK, but we are taught very little about it and very rarely celebrate it. Meanwhile Brexit – a political agenda driven by right-wing politicians, aristocrats and landowners – has been consistently referred to as the working class having their voice heard for the first time in decades, which is so far from the truth it would be easy to call a “conspiracy” if it wasn’t so blatantly racist. As a result, our connections to actual working-class history are frayed and obscured, and that has a serious impact on how we act politically today.
  • Even the French middle-classes will chuck on a high vis vest and get involved in some street violence once in a while, whereas their equivalents in the UK mainly seem to deal with their grievances by bullying marginalised communities on Twitter.
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  • There is this assumption, particularly among the British middle and upper classes, that things exist to serve the individual. The shop better have the thing they want or they’re going to go sicko mode, hospitality workers are punching bags for a bad day, coastal Wales exists exclusively as a holiday destination. There is a lack of real connection to anything, which imbues society with an austere and passionless vibe.
  • At some point we’ll need to put the mindset that globalisation has instilled – one that dangles £18 flights to Italy in front of our noses while rapidly eroding the quality of life we have at home – into reverse gear, if only for a reason to get up in the morning. Many countries across Europe and the world are experiencing similar socio-economic problems following the 2007 financial crash, but when you can’t even have a decent sandwich about it… well, that is very sad.
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