The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Like human beings States and their Nations in all countries seem, to an observer, to have their own psyches and egos that drive their passions for self-preservation and survival in our throw away world.
The pretence in international affairs is that what drives the comity of States and Nations in the world of countries are good diplomacy, cutting edge economic ideas and practices, and democratic politics. That is a compelling but fundamentally false post-political, naïve and innocent of realpolitik, pretense. I argue in this short article that States and Nations have political psyches and historical souls that propel their drives for existence and durability in an otherwise perilous and precarious world system.
The words “National Security” and “State Security” that are themselves dark slogans of Euro-American politics are code words and incantations of the soul and psyche of States and Nations. For instance, to perpetuate its imperialism and coloniality the United States of America pretends to have invented such paradisal democracy and human liberation that it feels bound in the name of God to export this democracy and liberation to all the ends of the earth, in the process violating other States and Nations. Using the muscle of military force, intellectual fraud and the stamina of finance, the USA is bent on rebuilding the entire planet in the image of America. This hidden but still dark international political agenda of maintaining a certain world system and certain world orders is presented in persuasive and tantalising intellectual and political language that makes it sound all gospel.
Otherwise starting with the United States and its archi-rival China, all countries, their States and Nations, have a good explanation for what they do but behind the good news they conceal what John Pilger canonically called “hidden agendas.” In the modern colonial world system, States and their Nations in all countries are both the artefacts and also symptoms of the Euro-American Empire that is being presently, and spectacularly so, contested for ownership and control of the world system by the resurrecting Confucian Empire of China.
States of Insecurity and Nations of interest
It is that discerning Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben who noted that the politics of the present world system works through disasters, through the production of insecurities and multiplication of states of emergencies and exceptions. When states of insecurity and natural disasters don’t exist politics and politicians invent and enhance them, making politics itself bad news. Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US and the UK in the main, the world was publicly told that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, threatened world security and interests, was connected to Al-Qaida and was very bad for the people of Iraq that needed to be urgently freed from his tyranny.
The toppling of the Saddam regime would, we were told, allow the spread of democracy to the Arab world. It is only very late that the world woke up to the truth that it was all about Iraq oil, the destabilisation of the Middle East for the purposes of maintaining Israel and protecting American interests in the troubled region. In Saudi Arabia, where tyranny and despotism are good for the USA, democracy is discouraged and anarchy encouraged in the name of respecting other cultures and religions.
The fiction of weapons of mass destruction was used as a weapon of mass deception by world powers that had fears to address and interests to pursue. Massive lies presented as good news, in the true post-political sense, are used to mask the real political stakes. Like its predecessor, the League of Nations, the United Nations is largely a spectator and incapable of changing the world or protecting human interests.
On 11/9 in 1989 the falling of the Berlin Wall caused post-political euphoria. Francis Fukuyama achieved world intellectual celebrity for predicting the end of history and victory of liberal politics and capitalist economics in the world; we were in the “joyful 90s.” Twelve years later, in 9/11, 2001 the felling of the Twin Towers announced the very beginning of a history of conflict and war, new states of insecurity and nations of interest were produced, and international uncertainty created the impression of a Third World War. Edward Said who had cautioned Fukuyama and others for their wrong-headed optimism called 9/11 the “end of Fukuyama” and his myth-making that masqueraded as intellectual analysis.
New nationalisms and patriotisms arose and fresh and unlikely international alliances were forged to fight terrorism. If Communism was the Anti-Christ of the 20th Century, terrorism became that of the 21st Century. History itself seems to draw its very oxygen from disasters and emergencies, states of insecurity and nations of interest. When the physical Wall fell down new invisible walls, borders and boundaries emerged that were to divide the world into warring factions. Terrorism and the war against it became a kind of world war, where all States and Nations had to spell out their true position or get clobbered in the “you are with us or against us” dictum of George Bush Junior. A world perpetually a war seems to be good for capitalism, the economic system of the Euro-American Empire that has indigenised itself in all parts of the planet.
Beyond the mist and blinkers of naïve and innocent post-politics, we can read what is called State Security in the modern colonial world system as the way in which States create insecurity of citizens to maintain the economic and political power of elites, in other words, State Security is euphemism for regime security.
That is why security organisations have caused the most insecurity in the globe. National interest would be the ideological code for what is economically and politically interesting for economic and political elites in any country in the present Euro-American World Order. In such a world, such issues as democracy, national sovereignty, human rights, law and order, are reduced to an emblem and an alibi for official terrorisms and international hooliganisms of all kinds.
Narcissist States and Paranoid Nations
In political studies and political journalism psychoanalysts are ignored in the reading of politics and understanding of the behaviours of politicians. Political observation is left to political theorists and some philosophers. Yet, I observe, Freud Sigmund and Jacques Lacan for instance are critical in understanding how exactly, politics of the States and that of the Nations, in countries and the politicians that drive them and are driven by them operates.
Philosophy, political theory and sociology are not enough; psychoanalysis and psychology at large help us to get into the minds and hearts of State institutions and individuals to decipher what exactly produces madness and extremism in politics and politicians.
States are full of self-love that Jacques Lacan explained as narcissism. That self-love is not based on strengths and beauty of the States but their very fragility, vulnerability and fear in the world. States daily conduct and experience themselves as threatened and fearful political entities. Politicians too expend so much energy and resources on informers and flatterers that polish their egos. Wars have been fought not because countries, the States and Nations, are brave and powerful but because they are weak and frightened. Bullies, in psychoanalytical analysis and understanding are mainly guilty and terrified cowards of individuals and institutions. Self-loving and self-eating narcissism leads to what Sigmund Freud referred to as the passions that come in shape of drives, away from pain, towards pleasure, but that are fundamentally drives towards death, the powerful death drive in all of us and our institutions. When too much love for life combines equally with excessive fear of death, the State, Nation or an individual politician become paranoid. A Paranoiac in the explication of Freud is a dangerous coward that sees a pursuing enemy in his own shadow. A paranoid person kills because he imagines that he would be killed.
The post-political zeitgeist was very wrong in its understanding of world history and politics. States, Nations and the politicians that drive them and are driven by them are at first psychological beings and institutions before they are political animals and entities. Fantasies, aggressive desires for power and security in a dangerous world drive politics and politicians to extremism. Most of our daily drives and political passions, be it our nationalism, patriotism and partisanship, are mainly expressions of both our desires and fears, powerful energies that can lead us to kill or to be killed, for our political convictions.
It is for that reason that we take slogans, ideologies, doctrines and dogmas in politics and elevate them into rigid life and death convictions that are like political religions, convictions that we hold until they end up holding us and becoming political fundamentalisms. Nothing, in the life of States, Nations and politicians is as dangerous as a political belief that grows into a political certainty and graduates into political fundamentalism, the one and the only truth which those who oppose it are sinners that must not exist.
So called party-lines, national interests and national security are in most times hiding places for State Narcissisms and National paranoias, that look on the outside like efforts at seeking happiness and security but are actually death-drives that have led to holocausts and genocides in the wild world. Weakness that pretends to be strength and fear that masks itself as anger and bravado in politics are a true death drive that has driven many an Empire to nullity.
It is for that reason that States and Nations of the Global South should belong to this world system, there is no other way, but they should do so critically and courageously, and reject political habits and drives that are anti-life and nihilist, we should learn to unlearn most political sensibilities that Empire has given us. What Walter Mignolo calls “border thinking” is the political and intellectual ability of the people of the Global South to think from the “fences” and choose only those political systems of States and Nations that are rehumanising and that are liberatory. It is for that reason that we cannot truly decolonise the world by simply imitating Empire and reproducing its politics and economics.
-Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founding member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN). He writes from Pretoria, South Africa: [email protected].
