We live in the center and worry about the periphery

Dear AID volunteers,

The current crisis in world order whose latest manifestation was the war in Iraq forces us to ask some difficult questions about the world and our place in it as AID volunteers living and working in the United States. The Unites States today has assumed unmistakable status as imperial power and world hegemon. Furthermore, its supremacy is unlikely to be seriously challenged for some time to come. What does this mean for our work? AID volunteers worry about what is broken in India and how to fix it. It is a truism that the ills plaguing India do not occur in a vacuum but owe much (not all) to the political, social and economic relationships that have governed the interactions between Europe and North America and the rest of the world for the past few hundred years. Imperialism, racism and globalization are instantiations of these political, social and economic relationships.

We say we are interested in development. We all have ideas about what constitutes development and what does not. One view of development that is a direct descendant of colonial modes of thought holds that the toiling masses of the third world need to be raised to the standards of living enjoyed by those of the first world. Today less than one billion humans live in the first world while five times that number call the third world their home. An important question to be raised in this regard is whether our planet can sustain six billion first world lifestyles at current levels of technology or foreseeable extensions of the same (i.e without relying on the possibility of cold fusion, colonizing Mars and the like). I admit that most of the third world is not going to start consuming resources and generating waste at first world standards for many years to come, but any model of development, in my view, should take a long term perspective on things. If we do not genuinely believe in the feasibility or desirability of such lifestyles, enabling people of the third world to better mimic them is not the solution. AID’s emphasis on supporting people’s struggles for control of their resources and therefore of their destinies, of resisting the MacDonaldization of India seems rightly placed. For as has been said MacDonald’s does not function without McDonnell Douglas, the hidden hand of the market does not work without the hidden fist.

There are those among us who believe in the rhetoric of globalization, believe in the power of the rising tide to lift all boats, believe in benefits of an ever-expanding economy trickling down to the poorest sections of our society, believe that capitalism is not a zero sum game. There are several arguments to be made from both sides in this issue and I cannot do justice to them here. But let me point out that the rhetoric of colonialism in its hay-day of the nineteenth century was not much different from that of globalization today. Our colonial lords and masters and their native henchmen denied that there was anything of value in indigenous cultures and hoped to bring civilization and the benefits of modernity to the ‘naked and hungry masses’. What got obscured in the process was the role of these very people who claimed to elevate us, in creating poverty and underdevelopment in the first place.

In the language of empires we live in the center (Rome) and worry about the periphery (outer regions). This is because the empire is American. The American Empire will not tolerate any genuine threat to its existence. True liberation of the subject races will not be allowed by the imperial powers. They wrote the rules when colonialism was the order of the day, they write the rules today (27,000 pages of them in case of the WTO). Those outrageously undemocratic bodies called the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank and the US treasury today decide the fate of billions. If we wish for lasting, transformative change in the way marginalized sections of society lead their lives today, we cannot escape the conclusion that the process of this change will involve the challenging of the very structures and institutions that have given us all we have and continue to support us today. Are we up to the task?

Among those who have a lot to lose with the going of the current order, people like us, in other words, radical ideas of change get at best lukewarm and at worst hostile receptions. The more radical the idea more tepid the reception. And yet surely there must come a point when we can no longer honestly maintain to ourselves that we can have our cake and eat it too? That, to quote Balaji Sampath, we cannot continue to be a part of the problem and the solution too.

Amit Basole