Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  Figure 4.3 Margaret Thatcher portrayed as a pirate in the Argentinian press, 30 April 1982.

  Getty Images / SSPL / 90764586

  While most of the country seemed delighted that there was a war on again, and one that they were likely to win, other voices, standing a little outside the fray, took the view that nationalist and imperialistic rhetoric had been dredged up in a quite anachronistic way. Historian E. P. Thompson, returning to Britain at the end of April 1982, said that it was ‘like passing through a time warp into an earlier imperial age’. Ian McEwan wrote a play about an amateur historian researching Suez in the midst of the Falklands War. He called it The Ploughman’s Lunch because, he said, like the lunch, the hype around the war was ‘a completely successful fabrication of the past’.55

  In France, attempts to lay the colonial past to rest were also challenged. Jean-Pierre Cot’s attempt to develop a Third World agenda in Paris came up squarely against the perennial methods of Françafrique: pursuing French economic and strategic interests with the help of local African rulers, no matter how brutal they might be. He was obliged to resign on 8 December 1982 and later reflected that ‘decolonisation means not only the modernisation of French structures of cooperation but contributing to the changes hoped for by our partners in the Third World, by putting in place a new economic order’.56

  After Cot’s departure France reverted to business as usual in Françafrique. The former French colony of Chad was central to its strategy. Divided between an African population in the south and an Arab Muslim population in the north and east, it was vulnerable to predators such as Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, who invaded it in 1982. Cot had been reluctant to respond but after his departure Mitterrand sent in French forces to support Hissène Habré as the useful local leader. Gaddafi’s forces were finally driven out in 1987, but Habré turned out to be a brutal ruler, with the bodies of 40,000 victims found after his overthrow in 1992. Meanwhile Cot’s successor as minister of cooperation, the pied noir Christian Nucci, became involved in financial scandals. Aid money was regularly diverted to pay for arms supplies to local rulers or to finance their luxuries, but only rarely was this found out. Nucci set up a private company, the Carrefour du Développment, to finance the perennial summit of African leaders, due to be held in Burundi in December 1984. He siphoned off large amounts of state funds not only for the summit but to entertain African leaders in the Alpine town where he was mayor, and to pay for his own election expenses.57 This was discovered after the socialists lost power in 1986, and he was sent for trial. Far from signalling a change of course, there was a return to traditional Françafrique as the new right-wing government of Jacques Chirac recalled Jacques Foccart to his old post running African affairs.

  As it happened, the long history of France’s colonial brutality was not yet over. It was belatedly repeated in the late 1980s in its Pacific Territory of New Caledonia. Its history echoed in miniature some of the elements of the Algerian experience, but lessons learned from defeat in the Algerian War were put to good use. The New Caledonia affair may be seen as France’s Falkland Islands, 10,000 miles away from the metropolis, but in this case there was no obvious rallying of national sentiment around the cause.

  Seized by the French in 1853, New Caledonia was initially used as a penal colony and was the grim destination of many insurgents condemned after the Paris Commune of 1871. In the 1960s it became part of the ‘nuclear colony’ of French Polynesia selected for testing France’s nuclear weapons. After the loss of Algeria many pieds noirs moved there to develop a new settler colony, taking land from the indigenous Melanesian or Kanak population and growing rich on the 1970s boom in nickel which the island produced for steel and armaments. The French state paid the wages or salary of half the Caldoches or European population of New Caledonia but, unlike in Algeria, they become the majority population, squeezing the Melanesians to only 42 per cent in 1976. As in colonial Algeria, the political system, including sending two deputies to Paris, was controlled by the Caldoches, and in 1984 Kanak activists led by the former priest Jean-Marie Tjibaou belatedly launched a national liberation movement: the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS). Rather than adopt the armed struggle of the Algerian FLN, Tjibaou was educated in the practice of non-violence by the former 1968 activists and sheep farmers of the Larzac plateau who had won a ten-year battle to prevent their expropriation by a French military base, but not all his followers agreed with him. In December 1984 a provisional government of the Kanaky Republic was declared and the next day ten militants, including two of Tjibaou’s brothers, were killed by Caldoche thugs.

  The other lesson learned by settlers from the Algerian case was the need to retain the support of the French government. The socialist government offered a mix of ‘independence-association’ on the Françafrique model in 1985 but this was not enough for the Kanaks and too much for the Caldoches. The formation of the Chirac government in 1986 was a boost for the settlers. Chirac and Bernard Pons, his minister for Overseas Departments and Territories sided squarely with the Caldoches and were hostile to independence. They conceded a referendum in September 1987 with only three years’ residency qualifying to vote. The Kanaks boycotted the referendum as rigged and 98 per cent of the minority who did vote wanted to stick with France. After this the French came down hard on the FLNKS, which was treated as an illegal secessionist movement, while those accused of killing Tjibaou’s brothers and associates were acquitted by the courts in October 1987. Marginalised and hunted, the FLNKS responded with force two days before the first round of the 1988 presidential elections, in which Chirac was running against Mitterrand. They kidnapped twenty-seven gendarmes who were held in a cave on Ouvea Island. On 6 May, two days before the second round of the presidential elections, crack French troops stormed the cave on the orders of Chirac and Foccart, killing nineteen Kanak militants while losing two of their own. This action was defended in almost Thatcherian terms by Bernard Pons as ‘a matter that engaged the honour of France, the honour of the French army and the honour of the gendarmerie’. Tjibaou called Pons the ‘gravedigger of the Kanak people’. In France, the Left and trade unions demonstrated in favour of independence for Kanaky and ‘no to a second Algerian War’.58

  If New Caledonia was Chirac’s Falklands, his strong-arm tactics did not pay off in the same way. On 8 May 1988 he lost the presidential election to François Mitterrand, who secured a second term. The New Caledonia question was not settled in a defined way, as in the Falklands. The centre-left government of Michel Rocard negotiated an agreement in Paris between Tjibaou and the Caldoche leader, which made some concessions to the Kanaks and promised a new referendum on independence in 1998. This divided the Kanaks and Tjibaou was assassinated on 4 May 1989 by one of his own followers for allegedly selling out. Meanwhile, in 1989, the French were celebrating not nationalism or empire but the bicentenary of the French Revolution. They were taken up by internal wranglings about whether the Revolution had been a good or a bad thing. On 14 July 1989 the Communist newpaper L’Humanité denounced the ‘savage and ruthless’ bourgeoisie in the world, responsible for crushing the Paris Commune and for endless colonial wars. All eyes were nevertheless on the triumphal parade mounted in Paris by Jean-Paul Goude, culminating in the Place de la Concorde where black American singer Jessye Norman, draped in a vast tricolour flag, led the singing of the Marseillaise.59

  The Global Financial Republic: A New Imperialism?

  The challenges to British and French interests from settler populations in the South Atlantic and Pacific were in many ways marginal to their global economic and strategic interests. Decolonising movements threatened those interests but in many cases the metropolitan governments were able to impose their will on developing countries through a combination of networking, bribery and military intervention. The balance of power was clearly in favour of the North.

  Things did not always stay that way. The oil crisis of 1973 dramatically changed the economic balance of power between
North and South. Influence shifted to the oil-producing countries. In Africa these included Algeria and Nigeria, linked to Middle East countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Libya, together with Venezuela, which exerted leverage through the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Meanwhile, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which met in New Delhi in 1968, Santiago de Chile in 1972, Nairobi in 1976 and Manila in 1979, provided a forum for developing countries to push for a ‘new international economic order’ in which they could become industrial and trading partners on the same level as the industrialised countries. Planning, industrialisation and import substitution successfully took place in the 1970s in countries such as Algeria, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. The economic push was linked to a political offensive through the non-aligned movement that had been launched at the Bandung conference of 1955. In 1979 it met in Havana, where Fidel Castro had increased his Third World prestige by sending Cuban troops to Angola to defeat the dying Portuguese Empire.60

  These challenges could not be ignored by the industrialised countries. They looked for a push-back against the developing world. What emerged was a new version of the global financial republic which reasserted its dominance of the global South not by military intervention but by exploiting its greatest asset: Third World debt. This global republic may be seen as a new form of imperialism in that it used that debt to impose controls on developing countries that were financial and economic. Multinational companies were contemporary versions of the trading companies with sovereign powers that had extended empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their hidden strings were much less obvious than the formal trappings of empire, but they were no less effective.

  A first response was the formation in 1975 of the Group of Seven (G7) at a meeting in Rambouillet hosted by French president Giscard d’Estaing, involving the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, West Germany and Japan. They were closely linked to the governing councils of the World Bank, which was designed to help countries with long-term development, and of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which provided short-term loans to tide governments over short-term crisis. In 1976 the British Labour government, amidst economic crisis, had to go cap-in-hand to the IMF for $3.9 billion and implemented severe budget cuts. After 1980, however, the developing world plunged into crisis. Commodity prices fell, gravely affecting developing countries which relied on the export of raw materials and primary produce, making it increasingly difficult for them to repay loans. Argentina, in the aftermath of the Falklands War, had a foreign debt of $45 billion in 1983 which consumed over half its export earnings. The economies of Venezuela, Mexico, Nigeria and even Saudi Arabia were also in trouble.61

  In October 1985 the US Treasury Secretary James Baker told an IMF meeting in Seoul that henceforth loans to debtor countries would require deep structural adjustments in the direction of the free market. The argument was that if they could not repay loans they had adopted the wrong policies and must change, whatever the local conditions. Tariffs which allowed them to push ahead with industrialisation had to go, state-owned industries had to be privatised and allow in foreign capital, public expenditure and taxes had to be cut and trade union rights had to be weakened in order to make labour more ‘flexible’. This restructuring, as it happened, suited the international investors and traders of the industrialised world. This new strategy, agreed with the World Bank, became known as the ‘Washington consensus’.62

  These draconian conditions were extremely beneficial to international banks looking to invest and to multinational companies keen to massify production and export at the lowest cost. The number of multinational companies increased from 18,500 in the mid-1980s to nearly 50,000 in the mid-1990s. Among them, Walmart, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon ranked among the world’s top fifty economies. The structural adjustments forced on struggling countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia allowed multinationals easy access to raw materials such as precious minerals, oil and timber. Global supply chains were established by corporations such as Nike, whose shoes were manufactured in Vietnam, Indonesia and China. The migration of labour increased from country to town and from deprived areas to new centres of production in East Asia and the Gulf. In the United Arab Emirates at the end of the century three-quarters of the population were migrants, sending back to their families at home a proportion of their pay. Meanwhile, in the period 1975–2005 about thirty million people, often women and children, were trafficked for labour from Asia and the Pacific, amounting to nothing less than the return of the slave trade. The exploitation of raw materials such as timber deforested hills and made regions more vulnerable to flooding. Rural poverty increased, especially in areas such as Latin America where land distribution was unequal and peasants were driven off the land by large landowners and business oligarchs keen to develop export crops. Low-regulation economies led to industrial disasters such as the toxic gas leak from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, in December 1984, killing 8,000 people within two weeks, another 8,000 subsequently and affecting over half a million people. Poverty increased, with the population living on less than a dollar a day rising from 70 million in the late 1970s to 290 million in 1998. Meanwhile, in order to avoid taxes, profits made by investors were regularly deposited in offshore bank accounts, many of which were situated in island paradises such as Bermuda that were the last remnants of the British Empire.63

  In most cases, exploited populations were unable to fight back against this global domination. But resistance there was. Some came in the form of a rural resistance, championed by Marxist activists who were veterans of earlier national liberation struggles, and constituted the beginning of the anti-globalisation movement. The Landless Workers Movement developed in Brazil after 1984 against landlords and businesses that had displaced and now exploited them in order to grow and export coffee, sugar, soya and oranges. In the same year Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, a Jesuit-educated former lecturer arrived in the southern Mexican region of Chiapas, where the local Mayan people were being driven off the land by big producers. Calling himself Subcomandante Marcos, he organised them into a Zapatista Liberation Army which went into action in 1994, occupying seven of Chiapas’ main towns.64 The uprising ended with a negotiated peace with the Mexican government. Not all rebels in similar situations were as fortunate, as the global financial empire used local rulers to impose its will, as in the heyday of informal empire.

  The period from the 1960s to the 1990s thus saw a process of formal decolonisation, as Britain and France conceded independence to their former colonies. Settlers who clung on to their privileged position against the demands of indigenous revolt and independence movements were, in the end, sacrificed to the greater interest of the metropolis. Formal colonialism was replaced in the first instance by a neo-colonialism which, behind the façade of formal independence, defended and extended the strategic and economic interests of the metropole, often in alliance with multinational companies. The creation of Françafrique with all the fraud and brutality deemed necessary was one good example of this. The use of violence to defend French settlers and French interests in New Caledonia is another. Most of these interventions were conducted under the radar, and with no thought of legitimation. The exception was the Falklands War, where heavy news censorship coexisted with carefully orchestrated propaganda that this was a war for Greater Britain that was of no less consequence than the Second World War.

  Increasingly, neo-colonialism was marginalised in favour of a global financial empire of which the United States was the senior partner. It relied less on force than on economic leverage, exploiting debt in order to impose liberal economic frameworks on developing countries that benefited the World Bank, the IMF and multinational companies. Populations in those countries became the serf labour of this new feudalism, virtually unfree labour paid miserable wages and prey to dangerous risks. If protest broke out l
ocal governments in hock to the global empire could generally be relied on to put it down. The end of the Cold War meant that even Russia became part of this neo-liberal, corporate regime. There was, however, one emerging force that could not be dealt with by financial measures alone. Resistance to the globalising West and its reinvented imperialism came after 1979 from a new source: political Islam.

  5

  Colonising in Reverse and Colonialist Backlash

  Louise Bennett, a Jamaican poet, actor and broadcaster who first came to London in 1945 on a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, neatly characterised immigration from the colonies as ‘colonizin’ Englan in reverse’.

  What a joyfulness, Miss Mattie

  I feel like me heart gwine burs’

  Jamaica people colonizin’

  Englan in reverse

  What a devilment a Englan!

  Dem face war an brave de worse,

  But I’m wonderin’ how gwine stan’

  Colonizin’ in reverse.1

  The notion of ‘colonizin’ in reverse’ expressed the hopes of the immigrants coming to the United Kingdom for a better life. They were arriving at the fount of imperial civilisation, under the headship of the king or queen. They were keen to work hard and improve their lot. They wished to integrate with the host community as far as possible. However, Louise Bennett also wondered how the host community was going to stand ‘colonizin’ in reverse’. Until then colonisation had been ‘out there’, in the Americas, Australasia, Africa or India. International events and the rise of nationalist movements had forced the British to withdraw. Now the peoples of those colonised regions were coming ‘over here’ to live and work. What was felt like a defeat in the colonies was experienced at home as an invasion. Far from being welcomed, immigrant peoples were subjected to racial prejudice, racial discrimination, even to racial violence. Those who identified as British defined themselves as superior to those from the colonies and attempted to redraw colonial hierarchies. The working class might be at the bottom of the social pile but they were certainly not at the bottom of the racial or colonial pile. The presence of immigrant peoples likewise transformed the political landscape. A defensive nationalism defined itself as a ‘white man’s country’ against former colonial subjects whose presence, it seemed, was a reminder of the country’s former imperial greatness, now compromised. ‘Without a thorough working-through of the decolonization trauma’, wrote historian Anna Marie Smith, ‘the black immigrant becomes the postcolonial symptom […] the most visible symptom of the destruction of the “British way of life”’.2