The Coming
Anarchy
Shattering
the Dreams of the post- Cold War
By Robert D. Kaplan
Random House, New York $21.95 Pages 198
Early twentieth century saw an upsurge in the East West encounter in contemporary literature. This was caused primarily by the colonial expansion of the Western world over the East. Joseph Conrad was an outstanding author who wrote much on this from first hand experience.
Conrad was a Pole born in the Russian part of Poland. He spent twenty years on sea before settling down in England. From the age of thirty eight, he wrote a number of novels that established him as a novelist of import in English and in which he wrote about the East- including the psychologically penetrating and prophetic "Under Western Eyes" about the Russian revolutionaries of the time.
He also wrote about Africa, the Far East and Latin America (in "The Heart of Darkness", "Lord Jim" and "Nostromo" respectively). He painted a rather dreary picture of the East. With the benefit of hindsight one can say that Conrad's perceptive insights into the limits and ability of Western ideas to break down the physical as well as mental structures in the East sound quite true. During those times, however, this truth was less visible, even as critical a thinker as Marx had expressed the hope in his famous phrase about British colonialism in India creating the world in its own image.
As we are drawn by the wave of renewed imperial expansionism under globalisation, there is a discernible trend in contemporary literature to reflect again on the East- West encounter.
Robert Kaplan, long time international correspondent with "The Atlantic Monthly", bases himself on Conrad except the fact that he moves around the world in aeroplanes instead of ships and boats and that he is an all- American. He has also chosen to write non- fiction rather than fiction. This is a significant departure from his role model's background and chosen form of writing.
(The brief digression into Conrad's works is important to place Kaplan in context of the pessimistic tradition of Western thought that includes besides Conrad, Hobbes, Gibbon and Nietzche and also to highlight the differences between Conrad and Kaplan. Conrad remained, with the influence of his father's revolutionary ideals, a sympathetic liberal. Kaplan declares himself to be an admirer of Conrad, but this does not make him to be the latter's logical successor. There is both a continuity as well as break, as will soon become clear below).
Kaplan's ambition is to show the dark side of the post- Cold War world- "Shattering the dreams of the post- Cold War" as the sub- title of the book under review announces. While his reports clearly repudiate that Master Pangloss of the modern world- Francis Fukuyama's- grand illusion of the final triumph of liberal democracy, at the same time, there are overtones of Samuel Huntington's 'Clash of Civilisation' thesis.
In fact he goes farther. He provides empirical arguments the essence of which is that the rest of the world (outside the West) is white man's burden, and worse, that the anarchy all over the world after the end of the Cold War will one day engulf and permeate the 'secure' citadels of the developed world. His concern is to somehow stop this. And to achieve this, what the West needs to do is to support strong states like China, Singapore etc, that will be the bulwark against the anarchy and rein in the wild, uncivilised people. Democracy, he contends, has failed all over the world outside the West.
The aim of the first few essays in this collection, according to Kaplan himself, lies in identifying the "terrors of the post- Cold War", while the latter ones seeks a historical and philosophical framework with which to approach them.
Kaplan does a fairly good job in identifying the so-called terrors. In fact, he has done a fairly commendable job in one of his more recent articles in "The Atlantic Monthly" on the NWFP region of Pakistan (it may not be surprising that he decides to delve in the near future deeper into the South East Asian region and develops similar 'insights' into the sub- continent).
It is however, on the "historical and philosophical" realm that Kaplan sounds unconvincing.
The theme essay in the collection starts with developments involving the army coup in Sierra Leone in 1995. He quotes a minister as saying: "In fort- five years I have not seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves well after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse- the revenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to bring up children in a modern society". Referring to the recent coup in Sierra Leone, he said: " The boys who took power in Sierra Leone come from houses like this."
One of the coup leaders, Solomon Anthony Musa, shot the people who had paid for his schooling, "in order to erase the humiliation and mitigate the power his middle class sponsors held over him". In the villages of Africa, the minister explained, it is perfectly natural to feed at any table and lodge in any hut. But in the cities this communal existence no longer holds. You must pay for the lodging and be invited for food. When young men find out that their relations cannot put them up, they become lost and slip gradually into the criminal process".
In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa, there is much less crime. In the opinion of the writer, this is because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination. Such a Western Africa, according to Kaplan, is becoming the symbol of world- wide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real strategic danger. Disease, over- population, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation- states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are most tellingly demonstrated through the "West African prism".
In Sierra Leone, then controlled by the seventy- seven-year-old army captain Valentine Strasser, 400,000 citizens were internally displaced, 280,000 fled to neighbouring Guinea, and another 100,000 to Liberia even as 400,000 Liberians fled to Sierra Leone. Western Africa, the author concludes, is a microcosm of what is happening, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa, and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasive- ness of war.
Part of the problem in West Africa is that although its population belts are horizontal, with habitation densities increasing as one travels south away from the Sahara and toward the tropical abundance of the African littoral, the borders erected by European colonialists are vertical, and therefore at cross purposes with demography and topography.
Back in his homeland, in the safe, almost antiseptic environs of the USA, Kaplan indulges in much mortification at the rest of the world. His thesis, almost embedded in the deep recesses of his mind, unfolds finally in his observation: "Precisely because the technological future in North America will provide so much market and individual freedom, this productive anarchy will require the supervision of tyrannies, or else there will be no justice for anyone. Liberty, after all, is inseparable from authority". Well, Mr Kaplan, deep down in your concern for the underdeveloped countries, what finally emerges is a nothing but a haunting concern for preservation of the islands of the developed world.
To many, including the present reviewer, Kaplan is not only a prophet of doom but echoes the 'white- man's burden' notion of the colonial period. Except that the current neo- colonial drive is not even ready to transform the 'untamed wilds' outside the developed West in its own image- which the colonial drive attempted, howsoever clumsily and perhaps unsuccessfully.
The Enlightenment ideas still held ground then. In the current phase when post- modernism has emerged as a significant ideological critique of the Enlightenment notions of progress, Kaplan is more concerned on how to save the West from the catastrophe that awaits its precarious island- like situation in a sea of increasing anarchy. He fears not that the untamed wilds are dangerous for the inhabitants of those lands, but that these may one-day engulf and destroy the safe harbours of the cocooned West, unless, of course, the West, under the unquestioned hegemony of the USA, wields the baton.
With the return of George Bush and the hero of the Gulf War General Colin Powell by his side, we can expect to see Kaplan's ideas getting much wider acceptance in the US ruling circles. That Gen. Colin Powell happens to be the first African- American to hold the coveted post is both tribute to his personal qualities as an ironic comment on the power relations in the contemporary world.
Bhupinder
bhupi@bigfoot.com
17 December, 2000
