CITIZENS OF ONE WORLD
Created | Updated Nov 27, 2013
THE CITIZENS OF ONE WORLD
It is not racist to acknowledge that there are particular features and challenges that face Britain’s communities with roots in Pakistan and Bangladesh. They are the product of historical actions and decisions. But more generally, after a day when we have been reminded of President Kennedy and his great “Ask not what your country can do for you..” speech, we really need ...to think carefully about events like the ‘Arab Spring’ and the whole post-9/11 return to the post-1945 obsession with ‘state-building’.
It was the belief that a new Civilization of Science and Technology had provided humanity with a new and unprecedented capacity to achieve a mastery over Nature and achieve the kind of ‘Triumph of the Will’ to which the Nazis aspired that shaped the creation of West and East Pakistan as one new nation state for the Muslims of the British Raj in 1947.
At that time the Second World War had produced a new and productive alliance of State power with Science and Technology, funded by National Debt financing that made it possible to wage war on this kind of scale, and politicians offered a “Brave New World” in which the same methods would be used to ‘wage peace’, a peace in which some of the ‘Futurist’ visions of science fiction of writers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells could be realized.
Sixty years later we have national and global governance dominated by technocracy that no longer believes that the alliance of State power with Science and Technology can offer us anything we want with the State acting as a ‘universal provider’. By the early Seventies it was already apparent that the kind of State planning that had been able to destroy vast tracts of the developed world in six years of war could not actually constructively build a new one. As the standard text-book on the UK economy sums up the handling of the great economic crisis of 1973, when none of the planned targets were fulfilled, Economics nevertheless did prove quite effective in navigating a way out of that deep crisis. Forty years later the whole art of global governance has become one of crisis management and ‘short-termism’ associated with future projections that may bring us either to triumph or to disaster. But either way ‘the system’ demands that everyone should be ‘harnessed to the wheel’ as the citizen of some State, for the stateless person is a ‘nowhere man’, and the political tradition of looking to the State for ‘redress of grievances’ creates a natural market for aggrieved people who must ‘jump the queue’ in the spirit of “to each according to his need’ with ‘From each according to his ability” largely ignored. It takes less effort and application to be needy than to be able.
The story of Pakistan and Bangladesh, however, points to the fallacious hopes that used to surround the idea of the Modern State, as does the enduring troubled story of the more or less simultaneous creation of the state of Israel.
The Moslem population of the Indian sub-continent was largely shaped by the Moghul conquest of that the ancient Civilization of the land of Hind. The conquerors came as armies with a small command structure and a large mass of foot-soldiers and the Moghul Empire settled down with an elite of fabulously rich princes, while the rank and file were given peasant plots of land. In between these two social layers there were all the classes or ‘castes’ of a complex and ancient society and economy, but the warfare that was endemic in the subcontinent created ongoing opportunities for new campaigns of rapine and spoliation, until the Wellesley brothers stopped that by the system of subsidiary alliances and small professional armies that they set up after the Mahratta Wars.
But globally life for peasants and all working on the land became increasingly difficult in the hundred years after c1860 with poverty and hardship within the Indian sub-continent producing some of the harshest conditions with terrible famines including the great Bengal Famine of 1943. But by this time educated elite from British universities (in Britain and India) had spread that British-Western belief in what could be achieved with them in charge of the State, and in the late 1920s the student-branch of the Muslim League had suggested that the Muslims should have a separate state based upon grouping them within a number of states whose first letters formed the name Pakistan.
And so in 1947 the Partition of India took place, arguably the greatest mass migration in the history of the world in terms of numbers and intensity, with non-Muslims leaving and Muslims entering Pakistan, with riots, looting, murder and all manner of atrocities including as has emerged recently many women and girls being killed by men of their own families in order to save them from being dishonoured, and bring dishonour on their family. Estimates of the death toll have climbed consistently since 1947 and by 2007 the figure was put at two million murders.
But by no means all the Muslims of the sub-continent went to Pakistan. The deal that was offered to the fabulously rich ‘native princes’, as India worked out its new constitution, was that if they surrendered all of their governmental functions and rights, accepting one united government for the new Indian Nation State, they would be allowed to keep all of their wealth and property much like the British aristocracy. Of course like that aristocracy they faced difficult days ahead with property taxes, death duties etc. But under the circumstances it was an offer that was almost too good for anyone to refuse, though the ruler of Hyderabad, a vast state, as large or larger than most European nation states, failed to accept, so Hyderabad was invaded and annexed by the Indian Army.
So East and West Pakistan were created with this legacy of all kinds of hardship and impoverishment: and as Pakistan and Bangladesh they regularly feature in surveys as among the poorest States on Earth. But they have family ties that have implications for these communities in Britain.
For as the Phillipines Disaster Fund has shown, like the Boxing Day Tsunami before that, British people are generous to those in need especially at such times of emergency, though the record donations to Children in Need this year, in spite of the ‘cost of living crisis’ show that there is an awareness that the State is a very expensive and inefficient mechanism for doing everything that is ‘needful’ in the eyes of ordinary people. So many of Britain’s communities that are based upon immigration, often living in some of the most challenging and disadvantaged conditions within the UK, are responsible for support of various kinds to their ‘roots communities’. This is real ‘care in the community’ that usually dwarfs the UK Foreign Aid Budget peaking at times of emergency and that reflects the fact that State borders should be irrelevant to those who are open-hearted people of goodwill who are the citizens of one world.
It is not racist to acknowledge that there are particular features and challenges that face Britain’s communities with roots in Pakistan and Bangladesh. They are the product of historical actions and decisions. But more generally, after a day when we have been reminded of President Kennedy and his great “Ask not what your country can do for you..” speech, we really need ...to think carefully about events like the ‘Arab Spring’ and the whole post-9/11 return to the post-1945 obsession with ‘state-building’.
It was the belief that a new Civilization of Science and Technology had provided humanity with a new and unprecedented capacity to achieve a mastery over Nature and achieve the kind of ‘Triumph of the Will’ to which the Nazis aspired that shaped the creation of West and East Pakistan as one new nation state for the Muslims of the British Raj in 1947.
At that time the Second World War had produced a new and productive alliance of State power with Science and Technology, funded by National Debt financing that made it possible to wage war on this kind of scale, and politicians offered a “Brave New World” in which the same methods would be used to ‘wage peace’, a peace in which some of the ‘Futurist’ visions of science fiction of writers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells could be realized.
Sixty years later we have national and global governance dominated by technocracy that no longer believes that the alliance of State power with Science and Technology can offer us anything we want with the State acting as a ‘universal provider’. By the early Seventies it was already apparent that the kind of State planning that had been able to destroy vast tracts of the developed world in six years of war could not actually constructively build a new one. As the standard text-book on the UK economy sums up the handling of the great economic crisis of 1973, when none of the planned targets were fulfilled, Economics nevertheless did prove quite effective in navigating a way out of that deep crisis. Forty years later the whole art of global governance has become one of crisis management and ‘short-termism’ associated with future projections that may bring us either to triumph or to disaster. But either way ‘the system’ demands that everyone should be ‘harnessed to the wheel’ as the citizen of some State, for the stateless person is a ‘nowhere man’, and the political tradition of looking to the State for ‘redress of grievances’ creates a natural market for aggrieved people who must ‘jump the queue’ in the spirit of “to each according to his need’ with ‘From each according to his ability” largely ignored. It takes less effort and application to be needy than to be able.
The story of Pakistan and Bangladesh, however, points to the fallacious hopes that used to surround the idea of the Modern State, as does the enduring troubled story of the more or less simultaneous creation of the state of Israel.
The Moslem population of the Indian sub-continent was largely shaped by the Moghul conquest of that the ancient Civilization of the land of Hind. The conquerors came as armies with a small command structure and a large mass of foot-soldiers and the Moghul Empire settled down with an elite of fabulously rich princes, while the rank and file were given peasant plots of land. In between these two social layers there were all the classes or ‘castes’ of a complex and ancient society and economy, but the warfare that was endemic in the subcontinent created ongoing opportunities for new campaigns of rapine and spoliation, until the Wellesley brothers stopped that by the system of subsidiary alliances and small professional armies that they set up after the Mahratta Wars.
But globally life for peasants and all working on the land became increasingly difficult in the hundred years after c1860 with poverty and hardship within the Indian sub-continent producing some of the harshest conditions with terrible famines including the great Bengal Famine of 1943. But by this time educated elite from British universities (in Britain and India) had spread that British-Western belief in what could be achieved with them in charge of the State, and in the late 1920s the student-branch of the Muslim League had suggested that the Muslims should have a separate state based upon grouping them within a number of states whose first letters formed the name Pakistan.
And so in 1947 the Partition of India took place, arguably the greatest mass migration in the history of the world in terms of numbers and intensity, with non-Muslims leaving and Muslims entering Pakistan, with riots, looting, murder and all manner of atrocities including as has emerged recently many women and girls being killed by men of their own families in order to save them from being dishonoured, and bring dishonour on their family. Estimates of the death toll have climbed consistently since 1947 and by 2007 the figure was put at two million murders.
But by no means all the Muslims of the sub-continent went to Pakistan. The deal that was offered to the fabulously rich ‘native princes’, as India worked out its new constitution, was that if they surrendered all of their governmental functions and rights, accepting one united government for the new Indian Nation State, they would be allowed to keep all of their wealth and property much like the British aristocracy. Of course like that aristocracy they faced difficult days ahead with property taxes, death duties etc. But under the circumstances it was an offer that was almost too good for anyone to refuse, though the ruler of Hyderabad, a vast state, as large or larger than most European nation states, failed to accept, so Hyderabad was invaded and annexed by the Indian Army.
So East and West Pakistan were created with this legacy of all kinds of hardship and impoverishment: and as Pakistan and Bangladesh they regularly feature in surveys as among the poorest States on Earth. But they have family ties that have implications for these communities in Britain.
For as the Phillipines Disaster Fund has shown, like the Boxing Day Tsunami before that, British people are generous to those in need especially at such times of emergency, though the record donations to Children in Need this year, in spite of the ‘cost of living crisis’ show that there is an awareness that the State is a very expensive and inefficient mechanism for doing everything that is ‘needful’ in the eyes of ordinary people. So many of Britain’s communities that are based upon immigration, often living in some of the most challenging and disadvantaged conditions within the UK, are responsible for support of various kinds to their ‘roots communities’. This is real ‘care in the community’ that usually dwarfs the UK Foreign Aid Budget peaking at times of emergency and that reflects the fact that State borders should be irrelevant to those who are open-hearted people of goodwill who are the citizens of one world.
