The colonial myth of international relations

07 Jul, 2019 - 00:07 0 Views
The colonial myth of international relations Early colonialism

The Sunday News

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena

We frequently imagine the present world as a wonderful place with a bright future.

And we regularly walk around society and the academy with a spring in the step and a whistle in the mouth, believing that our tomorrow will be free and better under the leadership of well-meaning nations.

As I write, a shameless but well known nerd from the Faculty of Engineering has just passed close to my window screaming at his friends about how the Fourth Industrial Revolution will eventually eliminate tyranny from the comity of the nations of the world.

I am pretty sure he stole that sentiment from Facebook or another platform where myths easily pass for fresh wisdom.

Did the wise Umberto Eco not say it in truth that the social media are the domain of drunkards and idiots: “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community” now “It’s the invasion of the idiots” all over the place.

First, except in political mythology and ideological fantasy nations in concrete terms do not exist, they are daily invented by politicians looking for constituencies and corporates hunting for markets. Flags, anthems, borders and maps are all artefacts that are colonial and political inventions used to manage populations and discipline societies. So, in all justice, the world is not run by any comity of nations but by states.

It is the interstate structure of the modern colonial world system that we need to understand.

Tragically, every self-respecting university these days has a discipline and even a department of International Relations, but nations in actuality have no relations to talk about, it is states that have a network of political and economic relations that condition the very social temperatures of the world that we occupy today.

Nations are supposed to be populations of people that share the same history, speak one language, have common religion and have the same aspirations for the future.

There are few countries and states in the world that have succeeded in nation-building or even tried, that is welding different tribes, clans and religions of people into one brave and proud nation.

Worse, in the colonies the conquerors took what were supposed to be nations and divided them into warring tribes.

No political and intellectual gamesmanship in Africa, for instance, has managed to forge national and even Pan-African unity.

The world system, as a monstrosity that it is, wants us the people of the true God divided beyond repair. The world system feeds fat from divisions and disunities.
Conception, Gestation, Birth and work of the State
Wherever they go, through their political representatives and intellectual spokespersons, states justify their existence by the grand claim that they represent the good interests of their nations.

Hidden behind that beautiful falsehood is that states represent the world system in their respective countries, the fundamental truth is that the world system rules the world, economically first and politically next, using states.

It is for that good reason that the Euro-American Empire is interested in every country having a viable and usable state.

Yes, the interstate structure of the world as a working network of similar but unequal states is the very engine of coloniality in the present.

Again, besides Enrique Dussel in his meditations on the “politics of liberation” at a world scale it is Immanuel Wallerstein that has led the conversation on the racism and also coloniality of the world interstate structure and system.
States date back to what is called “Renaissance Diplomacy” of communities and government systems of the West.

These otherwise loose political arrangements of religious courts, monarchical parliaments and military organisations were consolidated into states as we know and experience them now in 1492 when the last non-Christian and non-European, which was the caliphate of Granada in Southern Spain was vanquished, and its subjects forcibly converted from Islam and Judaism to Christianity.

Since then, all states cherish and claim sovereignty, which refers to internal autonomy, power and freedom to determine their own affairs.

Sovereignty of states, perhaps, is the first lie of International Relations.

The true political and economic legitimacy of states in the world is not given by nations or by the states themselves but by other states, especially the super-powers of the Euro-American Empire.

Countries have tried to give their states sovereignty and legitimacy and that has come to economic and political naught when the world system does not approve or legitimise those states, they become failed and vampire states that rule by force and drown their countries in the muds of poverty.

Some countries have tried to take away sovereignty from their states and failed because where the world system needs those usable illegitimate states; it incubates, cultivates, and irrigates them against all odds.

So, away from the myths of International Relations, Facebook ideologies and Twitter theories, the state of the states and their relations, is the true condition of the world. Sovereignty which is the talisman of nationalists and nativists is not found internally in the mythical nations but externally in the monstrous world system.

To understand the world system therefore is to grasp how the world works.

The true coloniality of the state in the world was actualised in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 when after a long time of fighting European states agreed to respect and give each other sovereignty.

After that, and especially in the world systemic event of the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, they agreed to take away the sovereignty of the places and peoples of Africa.

They established colonial states in different African countries that were led by colonial governors that managed the colonies for Empire, siphoning resources to America and Europe, in true colonialism.

Today we remain with states that knowing or unknowing, willing or unwilling, serve the very same purpose of being appointed managers of countries for Empire.

Failure or refusal to do that invites consequences that are dire even to contemplate. All states are in one way or another elected prefects of Empire or they are not states; that is how bad it is.

The real nation-states, therefore, are in the West.

Ours, in the Global South, are colonial figments that were constructed for colonial purposes and that are forced, in different ways, carrots and many sticks, to continue doing colonial work for Empire.

Myth of National Economies

Immanuel Wallerstein describes the “modern world-system as a capitalist world economy” that rules the planet. After Wallersten, I have written before how Economic as an academic discipline was invented to manufacture propaganda for capitalism against the growth of other systems of production and trade that were practised by indigenous people of the Global South.

There is no country, under the sun, especially in the Global South, that has a true national economy.

In true justice there are no economies but there is one capitalist world economy, that Wallerstein describes, a monster of a thing that on behalf of Empire distributes prosperity here and poverty there, in the elected places.

The world economy is the biggest fejafeja game to be seen, I argue.

The captains of Empire hide in the dark and blame everything on invisible but powerful things called Market Forces that decide the political weather and economic temperature of every country and village in the planet.

There are mythical and nameless objects called investors that, always, like angry ancestors, must be appeased for oxygen to circulate freely.

Market forces and investors are powerful people that have interests and moods, and dark agendas, that are the real force that runs the world economy.

This is exactly the reason why some giant multinational corporations of the West have more political clout in the globe than some African governments.

That is why property rights, especially the property rights of investor farmers and miners, and factory owners are the most powerful human rights under the sun.

In South Africa we remember well those days when Mandela happens to suffer a flue; the rand would tumble down to high lows.

That was no witchcraft but the true indication of the fear of the world capitalists that banked on the life of Mandela for the protection of their colonially gained big mines, farms and factories in Mzansi.

One of these days someone must think and write about how, in truth, it is not the people but the world economic and political system that actually votes and unvotes governments in the Global South.

Manufacturing the People

Nations as collectives of people are daily invented, politically manufactured and staged as existing and real.

A lot is done and said in the name of the people and national interests but real rules and laws of the world are in states and the interstate structure of the world system.

States that rule the world force states that are ruled to dance to the music of the world system or perish.

While in the West the people are citizens that have rights and freedoms in the Global South we are subjects that are ruled by states that are ruled by Empire. To decolonise

International Relations is to do exactly that, forget about nations and study with critical care the interstate system; that is where the Devil hides, I argue.

Someone must tell that famous nerd that, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, unless decolonised is here to eat us.

In private bedrooms tireless automated sex toys are replacing people and in factories industrious robots are retrenching men and women, like globalisation, this is another monster dressed in revolutionary attire, we need to fight for the dream and reject the nightmare of the 4IR, or perish, I insist.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Braamfontein, Johannesburg, in South Africa: decoloniality2016@gmail.

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