Fire with Fire, Second Edition
Page 56
Consequently, while the UN began with a great deal of moral cachet, it lacked practical power. Ultimately, that cachet began to erode as it evident that too many powers (perhaps most of them) were more interested in gaming the systems of the UN, rather than embracing its stated objectives. The big powers used their Security Council vetoes to obstruct anything to which they were strongly opposed. The smaller powers passed hundreds of resolutions (many wildly self-serving) in the General Assembly. However, lacking any actual control over the world’s primary economic, political, or military resources, theirs was essentially empty legislation. As one Australian commentator put it, “the UN has more bark, and less bite, than any other dog in the ongoing fight for global control.”
The UN was, in the final analysis, largely unable to effect any significant change, other than a few markedly successful inoculation and disease-eradication campaigns overseen by the World Health Organization. Consequently, although the UN still reports on the ills abroad in the world, it rarely seems to recognize that the persistence of those unremitting woes is also de facto evidence of its own one-hundred-and-fifty year failure to ameliorate or eliminate them. Consequently, statements such as the one in the wire copy below have become a body of evidence that constitutes a sad, but largely inarguable, indictment regarding the UN’s own institutional inability to meet the mandates that were its vitiating and validating objectives:
“UNESCO announced today that despite steady rates of growth in productivity and capital accumulation, the disparity of average per capita income in the developed world and those of the developing and undeveloped worlds is at an all-time high. Developing World Coalition Vice-Commissioner Mei-Dong Bin congratulated UNESCO on the accuracy and impartiality of its six-year study, asserting that the profound inequities in income and quality of living are direct products of power-bloc politics over the last two decades, which he claims serve to consolidate and maintain the privileged position of the First World nations.”
At the very worst, the UN’s peace-keeping mandate has occasionally been exploited to legitimate intrusions and frictions that might not have otherwise arisen, or at least might not have escalated to the point of brutal, sustained conflict. A particularly disturbing example of this can be found in post-Megadeath Africa, where the restoration of order was often resisted by indigenous groups that stood to lose the most from foreign intervention, whether UN-moderated or not. Operating under numerous layers of plausible deniability, Beijing provided aid and advice to these traditionalist insurgents, which in turn led to increased aid to the more modern governments they opposed, most of the assistance coming former colonial parent-countries. When frictions between these two camps erupted into low-level guerilla conflicts that straddled half a dozen borders, a largely Moldavian and Romanian UN peace-keeping contingent was called in. The rapid upswing in serious, focused attacks concentrated on that force led to inquiries that ostensibly pointed (albeit via very questionable evidence) to Chinese involvement. As the UN forces ineffectually attempted to establish and mediate a cease-fire, an independent Russian force was sent into the region under the aegis of providing security for Russian locals and Romanian military support contractors who, although attached to the peace-keeping unit, were not military personnel per se. In consequence, a “secret” war brewed up in the region, exacerbating Sino-Russian frictions that spilled over into mercantile rivalries within the Pacific Rim and ultimately created the conflictual environment that led to the High Ground War. In conclusion, analysts suggest that, in part, the UN’s methods of intervention and mediation not only aggravated and perhaps caused a war in Africa, but set the stage for a broader conflict between the superpowers.
Common Language
Another issue that continues to dog bloc politics and has intermittently become an object of considerable contention, is the matter of establishing a common or official language in a bloc.
There are strong arguments both for and against the establishment of a common language. The advantages are obvious: when all the member states can communicate in the same language, coordination of everything from arts to industries is greatly facilitated. This is particularly true in the case of transnational organizations, such as militaries, space programs, intelligence agencies, etc. In addition to being far more efficient and inexpensive, a common language has the intangible but immense value of reinforcing and strengthening a sense of shared community, origins, and purpose.
The disadvantage is equally obvious: establishing a common language where none naturally exists is regarded by some as the single largest imposition of dominance in a political organization, even more than overt political or economic primacy. As one philosopher put it, “If you kill my language, you kill my culture—and right behind it, my country.” This issue was one of several that the EU could never resolve with England, since London always insisted that English at least be given equal consideration as the common language of the European Union (even if it was one of two). However, the continental powers excluded it from consideration. The reasons for this were numerous and subtle, but at the risk of gross oversimplification, the Union was concerned that if the official language of America and all its closest and culturally related allies also became the official language of Europe, the process of Americanization—also dubbed Coca-Colonization—would overwrite the cultures of Europe.
One can hardly blame the non-Anglophone nations of the Continent for their concern. They had seen plentiful evidence of this phenomenon at work, first through the post-World War influences and marketing that rode in on the tail of the Marshall Plan, and later through the electronic internationalization of English as the lingua franca of the information age. Their decision to draw a strong, prohibitive line against the adoption of English as the, or even one of the, primary language(s) of the Union is impossible to fault from this perspective.
However, from the perspective of the English, it constituted an a priori compromise regarding the primacy of their language—which to London was just one more irreconcilable difference with its Continental neighbors. This linguistic exclusion dated from the very earliest days of the formation of the Union. As French political philosopher Etienne Balibar declared during an address in 2000 (and which was later published in 2004 as part of his We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship), “English, in fact, is not and will not be the ‘language of Europe.’”
Although Balibar went on to propose “translation’ as the language of Europe, this answer demonstrated its profound weaknesses almost immediately when the political leaders of the Union put it into operation (in a much more simplistic fashion than Balibar was suggesting). It became, as one analyst observed, like working with old-time telephone exchanges: “your lines within an exchange always worked, but it was hit-and-miss when you tried to make connections between the exchanges.” And in a variety of urgent situations—military, emergency, political crises, fast-moving markets, real-time intelligence operations—this ever-present threat of a communication break-down became an impediment against functional integration of these services. Consequently, they remained almost exclusively national in organization, financing, and training. The unspoken acceptance of this problem ultimately gave way to an assumed, and in some cases required, competence in either German or French, and preferably both. Although there was some resistance to this model, it was ultimately employed simply because it had little day-to-day impact upon the national populations of the EU; mastery in one or both of those languages was only required for certain, national-level functions of high urgency.
However, the simple truth that few officials were wont to admit was that the Union’s unofficial third language was, of course, English. Given the ubiquity of English in media, on the internet, and in pop culture, it was and is still freely used when there are lapses in communication during crises where either party speaks only German or only French. As time goes on, the extended and rather unplanned preeminence of English continues to grow—in large part, perhaps,
because it is not premeditated. Like blue jeans and Coca-Cola and other symbols of Americanization, use of the English language is not part of a political agenda and so attracts new users by passive seduction, rather than active coercion. This fact rankles the various Continental agencies and organizations charged with cultural protection and preservation, but the reality of the matter is that the phenomenon is taking place in venues and for reasons that lie well beyond the power of juridical pronouncements and guidelines on approved language use.
The same situation is present in the TOCIO bloc, where English is more openly embraced as an important language because it is the only one that is in everyday use in all its various member-states. As one Indian official put it, “If it wasn’t for the constant exposure to, and rehearsal of, English in the global youth culture, I do not think TOCIO could function. This utterly foreign tongue has also, paradoxically, become our common tongue.”
There is much to support this casual observation: Brazil, Indonesia, India, and Japan have virtually no common cultural roots, and certainly no linguistic similarities. There were some initial attempts to resist Anglophone dominance, but they were abandoned much sooner, and more overtly, than in the European Union. The most infamous example concerns the bloc’s efforts in space.
When the TOCIO bloc was first established, Japan had the only strong, manned space program amongst the member-states. Japan, therefore, provided most of the crews initially. As the other nations began to provide crewmembers, the rule was promulgated that all TOCIO space personnel had to be fluent in Japanese.
To no one’s surprise (outside of the handful of Japanese cultural hegemonists who had formulated and passed that requirement), the best potential crewpersons from other nations discovered that they had better things to do than learn Japanese. However, it was equally obvious that they all knew English. And so the language restriction was rescinded within mere months of its having been enacted. Since then, the dirty little not-so-secret of the TOCIO bloc is that although it has no official language, its unofficial language is a kind of stripped-down English peppered with loan words and syntactical variation.
Inside the bloc where one would most likely expect English to be the definitive official language—the Commonwealth—it actually shares that billing with Spanish. This is partly an inheritance from similar legislation enacted long before by its central power, the United States. However, it was also a practical step, since Mexico, much of Central America, and the Philippines have all either entered the Commonwealth bloc or are considering such a move. The immigrant communities liberally scattered throughout the New World Commonwealths have also provided points of political integration for other, even more linguistically distinct states such as Taiwan and South Korea.
In the Russlavic Federation, there is no one official language, but anyone who wishes to hold a job or earn a degree in education, healthcare, emergency service, the military, aviation, etc., must speak one of three separate languages—all of which have enough common Slavic roots that a speaker in one will quickly be able to understand the speaker of another. This unusually gentle multicultural initiative by the Russian-dominated bloc has reaped considerable rewards. Unharried by the lack of cultural resistance to making Russian competency an official requirement, that language is quickly evolving as the one everyone studies in school and thus, is the imminent common tongue of the bloc.
China’s approach is, as one would expect, the exact opposite: there is no discussion on the issue of recognizing other linguistic traditions, because the official language is Chinese. Admittedly, there is no strong political push from Beijing to encourage its acquisition in other areas. But that is because non-Chinese populations are expected to see to their own affairs and to have limited influence upon (or even sustained contact with) Beijing and the bloc itself.
The only overarching problem with language among all the blocs is a new, expanded reprise of the linguistic concerns that the Union had regarding English in its early days. In short, as the blocs mature and move toward greater integration, and possibly unification, would English become the de facto and undisputed lingua franca of the human race? Wouldn’t that translate into political dominance for the Commonwealth bloc? How do the many peoples of the Earth protect themselves from eventual evolution into Anglophone societies, thereby losing their cultural identity?
Xenophobia, Xenophilia, and the Practical Absence of a Middle Ground
A source of ongoing tension among (and sometimes, within) the blocs is the question of where each one falls on the wide spectrum of reactions toward change, toward the new. Consequently, the aforementioned problems such as cultural protectionism and common language are not so much independent disputed as they are diagnostic symptoms of larger, linked disparities in attitudes towards social evolution.
One early twentieth-first-century analyst proposed the following (dangerously generalized and simplified) paradigm as a means of framing discussions on such topics: in short, he proposed that all states/cultures can be regarded as fundamentally xenophobic, xenophilic, or neutral. However, a culture which is neutral toward “the different” naturally leans in the direction of xenophilism, simply because it does not exert energy to erect barriers in a world that is steadily evolving toward a unitary infosphere. Consequently, he proposed that the foreseeable global trend is overwhelmingly xenophilic: only states/cultures that consciously and determinedly dedicate resources to wall themselves off can hope to resist this powerful tide.
Considering the contemporary state of bloc politics, this model provides an illuminating, but also potentially alarming, paradigm for understanding why, or how, a considerable majority of the world’s most xenophobic states and societies have become members of Beijing’s Developing World Coalition. From this perspective, the cohering glue of the DWC is that most of its member states reject, and have taken protective steps against, the electronic infestation of youth-culture influence. One fundamentalist imam labeled it “colonization by the insidious Eurogenic infosphere.” This perspective posits global culture trends as an invasive force with both malign intents and effects upon the often parochial and insular attitudes of the societies in question.
From the exterior perspective, it is often asserted that these are repressive societies which have elected to reject (or which express active hostility towards) the progressive evolution toward cultural exchange and intermingling, which is very strong among the three so-called “Eurogenic blocs” (the Union, Commonwealth, and Federation) and which is prevalent in the TOCIO bloc. Concerned analysts have pointed to the links, therefore, between cultures evincing insularity, the propensity to dehumanize or demonize foreigners/others, parochial social attitudes and protectionism, and how they have cohered around the skirts of Beijing. This is hardly surprising, since Traditionalist-dominated Beijing has long been China’s bastion of cultural protectionism and Sino-supremacism. The same analysts have highlighted how, historically, most of these societies are also arranged as rigid hierarchies, and do not have a place in their ontological/cosmological view for peoples of other societies/origins/faiths. They also observe that this perpetuates the need for command economies and often highly draconian methods of ensuring social order, since, despite the leadership’s best efforts, a significant portion of school-aged persons identify more with the global youth culture, and a majority find themselves torn between the xenophobic dicta of their own culture and the xenophilic siren-song of the Eurogenic infosphere. The long-term possibility for unrest and revolt is thus deemed highest within and among the member-states of the DWC.
Factionalism versus Functionalism
One of the most legitimate criticisms levied against the rise of bloc politics is that there is no guarantee that every nation will be allowed to join a bloc. Apologists rightly point out that a nation can elect to be a bloc unto itself; no one can or would stop them from doing so. But critics rebut (also rightly) that this would be akin to a pygmy styling himself to be a king in a land populated by giants.
Beyond the problem of “orphan states,” there is also the linked issue of “flexible states”: those which are engaged in comparison shopping for a better deal in a new bloc. On the one hand, there is no way to practically constrain a state from entertaining rival offers of membership. On other hand, actual or even rumored flag-changing can profoundly disrupt markets and makes long-term budgetary planning—one of the raisons d’être for bloc politics in the first place—quite difficult.