The Sunday News
What we know as Europe and America today are representations of a civilisation that has built itself with stolen bricks and mortar. What Euro-America has generously given to itself, using violence here and deceit there, it has greedily denied the Global South. The industrial and technological prosperity of Euro-America is directly connected to free slave labour and the colonial siphoning of resources from the Global South. As I write, judgement is upon the Euro-American Empire and civilisation.
The ecological crisis, terrorism and the war against it, growing economic inequalities and catastrophic global financial crises are not natural disasters but the evil that is the direct handiwork of Euro-America. In the Peace of Westphalia, a series of treaties that were signed between May and October of 1648 in Westphalia, European powers agreed to respect each other’s sovereignties and to protect peace among themselves as nation states. Peter Van Ham puts it like a joke: “The European Union’s founding myth goes as follows: ‘Once upon a time, there were nasty states that didn’t like each other much, even fighting bloody wars. Then the EU Fairy showed them the way to cooperate. Today, European people look back in wonder on their ignorant and aggressive forefathers, and they live happily ever after.”
The Peace of Westphalia that gave Euro-America eternal peace and blissful sovereignties did not stop Euro-America from violating the sovereignties of provinces of the world in the Global South through rapacious imperial and colonial projects. As a result, the peace and sovereignty that Euro-America sought to hoard for itself and deny the Global South is fast evaporating. Euro-America with Nato and the entire nuclear arsenal cannot have peace because of financial crises, terrorist attacks, marauding migrants and the “refugee threat” that became the chief push for the Brexit vote. Brexit is nothing but telling evidence that peace, unity and sovereignty that Euro-America sought to give to itself and to deny others is at stake, the nation state and its passions and interests in Europe, is back again.
A Civilisation of Death
Europeans and Americans, in fact the entire Global North does not listen to anyone but its interests and itches of the belly. American and European national and continental interests have been put before the interests of humanity. In condemnation of slavery and colonialism, for many years, philosophers, prophets and mystics of the Global South, including Rastafarians have warned the Euro-American establishment of pending judgement and doom on earth.
The Francophone poet and politician, one of the founders of the Negritude movement from Martinique, Aime Cesaire, was sure and made it clear that the Euro-American Empire was doomed. To Cesaire: A civilisation that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilisation. A civilisation that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilisation. A civilisation that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilisation. The colonial and imperial problem that Euro-America started in the world is a problem that the Empire on its own cannot solve.
Racism is an ideology and social construct that the Empire mobilised and deployed but can no longer recall. Speaking more like a prophet, Col Muammar Gaddafi, a few days before he was murdered, said: “Now listen you, people of Nato. You’re bombing a wall, which stood in the way of African migration to Europe and in the way of al Qaeda terrorists. This wall was Libya. You’re breaking it. You’re idiots, and you will burn in Hell for thousands of migrants from Africa.” In trickery and deceit, Euro-America used the UN to invade Libya and dethrone and murder Gaddafi. Publicly, in Libya Nato fought side by side with Al-Qaida, even arming it, until some of the weapons got into the hands of Boko Haram.
True to Gaddafi’s warning, refugees are flooding into Europe, and among these refugees are angry human beings that have lost everything and believe that Euro-America must die. The web of deceit and networks of violence that Euro-America has set afoot in the world have even produced some angry Europeans and Americans who believe that Euro-America must come to an end.
Politically, there is now a radical South in the North, Europeans that feel the pain of the victims of the South. The systematic distribution of pain and death in the world through invasions, bombings, regime changes and financial prescriptions from IMF and World Bank have surely made Euro-America a civilisation of death. Even with Brexit, in truth, there is no getting out of Europe for Britain; there is no jumping out of the ship of centuries of sin. While thinkers and countries of the Global South are intensifying decoloniality and the calls for total liberation, the present crisis of the Euro-American Empire must teach the self-appointed masters of the universe to de-Imperialise and de-racialise.
An Agenda for the Global South
Without Britain EU is weaker. As individuals European countries will come up with new strategies of relating with the US and China for survival economically and politically. Because of its power, all European countries have come up with ways of relating with China as it is and not as they wish it was. A disunited Europe is music in the ears of China; there are lesser chances of America ganging up with Europe to contain China the way in which the Soviet Union was managed. The globe and globalisation will never be the same. For countries of the Global South, more economic and political unity is needed.
There are chances that Europe will disintegrate further and set afoot new nation statist thinking in the world. America might strengthen itself more economically and politically benefitting from the shaky European solidarities. As the Euro-American Empire tumbles or re-organises itself, a real test, South to South dialogue and solidarities of the former enslaved and former colonised countries should be fortified. The pretence that Europe, through Eurocentricism as way of thinking, has circulated in the world putting itself as the standard for humanity and a model to be emulated has been exploded. Even those theorists of the Global South that have been pushing the “catching up with Europe” thesis in politics and development will be forced to re-think.
The world needs another standard, another way of thinking, doing politics and economics than the one that Europe has turned into common sense. With Brexit, in a strong way, an example has been set that Empire can crack and that even democracy needs to be decolonised. Clearly, democracy does not only coexist happily with racism and inequality as it does in South Africa, but it can be used to further hatred. The emergence in America of figures like Donald Trump, neo-fascist racist is a symptom of the present crisis of Empire.
The Euro-American racist unconscious has become conscious. The coming out of such racists and bigots is the falling of the mask of Empire. Donald Trump is an honest American who says publicly what most racist Americans will keep in the unconscious. Donald Trump is a true American stripped bare of all pretenses and dissembling. To know what America, in truth is and what it wants, behind all the languages of diplomacy and political correctness, one must listen to Donald Trump.
In the Global South, now more than ever before, national interests, sovereignty, peace and South to South unity and solidarities should take a front seat.
- Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in South Africa. [email protected]
