As a writer who is, in some circles, blamed (or credited, depending on your point of view) for bringing colonialism into the public consciousness once again, it may surprise some that I I acknowledge the limits of anti-colonialism as a relevant discourse. in the 21st century. Thankfully, it is no longer fashionable in most developing countries to blame the evils of colonialism for every national misfortune. Internationally, the subject of colonialism has become even more out of date, as the need to end colonialism is no longer debated, and after all, there are no empires left. Nevertheless, it would be unwise to consign colonialism to the proverbial dustbin of history. As I have pointed out in my writings and speeches, we are a legacy of the colonial era, and many of our ills can be directly traced to the influence of imperialism and the policies of the colonial rulers. Colonialism remains a relevant factor in understanding the problems and threats to the world we live in.
still deadlocked
To begin with, residual problems from the end of the first era of colonialism, usually the result of an unhealthy departure by the colonial power, still remain dangerously entrenched. The dramatic events in East Timor in 1999 are no longer fresh in memory, and neither the recent crises in Afghanistan nor Myanmar can be attributed to colonialism. But in those old standbys of Western Sahara, Jammu and Kashmir or Cyprus and Palestine, there seems to be no closure in all the dirty legacies of colonialism. Fuses lit in the colonial era could re-ignite, as they did in the Horn of Africa, between Ethiopia and Eritrea, where war broke out on a colonial frontier that the Italians of the pre-occupation era could measure with sufficient accuracy had failed to define, and, more recently still, between Ethiopia’s government and its Tigrayan minority.
But it is not only the direct consequences of colonialism that are relevant: there are also indirect consequences. The intellectual history of colonialism is replete with many deliberate causes of recent conflicts. One, quite simply, is careless anthropology: the Belgian classification of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, which re-established a distinction that previously did not exist, continues to haunt the African Great Lakes region. A related problem is that of induced sociology: for example, how much bloodshed do we owe to the British invention of the “martial race” in India, which skewed recruitment in the armed forces and made certain communities (eg Punjabi Muslims) unhappy. done. Heavy burden of militarism? And the old colonial administrative habit of “divide and rule” could never be ignored by the British policy in the subcontinent after 1857, which systematically fostered political divisions between Hindus and Muslims, leading to the Partition. The tragedy happened. Such colonial-era distinctions were not just harmful; They were often accompanied by unequal distribution of state resources within colonial society. The Belgian colonists favored the Tutsi, which led the Hutu to reject them as foreign interlocutors; Sinhalese resentment of the privileges enjoyed by Tamils in the colonial era in Sri Lanka inspired discriminatory policies after independence, which in turn fueled Tamil insurgency.
Threats from a ‘mixed’ history
A “mixed” colonial history within a modern state is also a potential source of danger. When a state has more than one colonial past, its future is vulnerable. Ultimately, separatism can be motivated by a wide variety of factors, historical, geographic, and cultural as well as “ethnic”. Ethnicity or language hardly seems to be a factor in the separation (one recognized, the other not) of the “Republic of Somaliland” from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. Rather, it was the different colonial experiences (Italian rule in Eritrea and British rule in Somaliland) that set them apart, at least in their own perceptions, from the rest of their ethnic compatriots. A similar case can be made with respect to the former Yugoslavia, where parts of the country that had been under Austro-Hungarian rule for 800 years were joined by parts that had been under the Ottoman Empire for almost as long. Were. The war that broke out in 1991 was not a war at all, pitting those parts of Yugoslavia that were ruled by German-speaking empires that did not (or did not) oppose such colonization ).
The boundaries drawn during the colonial period, even if unchanged after independence, still pose huge problems of national integration, especially in Africa. Civil conflict on ethnic or regional lines may arise when the challenge of nation-building within colonially drawn boundaries becomes insurmountable. Where colonial construction forces disparate peoples to unite under the arbitrariness of the pen of a colonial map-maker, nationhood becomes an elusive notion. Old tribal and clan loyalties in Africa were fragmented by boundaries drawn in distant cities such as Berlin for colonially created states, whose post-independence leaders had to completely forge new traditions and national identities. Was lying. The result was the creation of disjointed political myths, as artificial as the countries they create, which all too often cannot command genuine patriotic allegiance from the citizens they seek to unite. Civil war has made it all too easy for local leaders to challenge a “national” leader whose nationalism fails to resonate across his country. Rebellion against such a leader is, after all, merely a reappraisal of history on “his” story.
crisis of governance
State failure in the wake of colonialism is another obvious source of conflict, as a by-product of a newly independent state’s inability to govern. The crisis of governance in many African countries is a real and enduring cause of concern in world affairs today. The collapse of effective central governments – as manifested most recently in Sierra Leone and South Sudan, and before that in Liberia and Somalia – can open up a stream of dangerous possibilities: many “weak states”, particularly in Africa, Seem vulnerable to collapse. A welder of struggle.
Underdevelopment is in itself a cause of conflict in post-colonial societies. Uneven development of infrastructure in a poor country, as a result of skewed priorities to the benefit of colonizers, can lead to unequal distribution of resources, which in turn leads to growing rifts in society between “neglected regions” and those Is. Which are better served by roads, railways, power stations, telecommunications, bridges and canals. Advancing underdevelopment in many countries of the South, which are faring poorly in their desperate struggle to remain as players in the game of global capitalism, has led to desperate poverty, ecological collapse and rootless, unemployed populations with weak state systems. out of control – a picture vividly drawn by Robert Kaplan in his book The Coming Anarchy, which suggests the very real danger of continuing violence on the fringes of our global village.
Paradoxically, even in the third decade of the 21st century, it seems clear that the anarchy of yesterday may still be due, in no small part, to the colonial efforts of yesterday. I have no desire to give politicians in post-colonial countries whose leadership is currently found to be lacking, any reason to seek excuses for their failures in the past. But in seeking to understand possible future sources of conflict in our time, we have to realize that sometimes the best crystal ball is a rear-view mirror.
Shashi Tharoor is a third term MP (Congress) from Thiruvananthapuram and author of 24 books including Sahitya Akademi Award winner Age of Darkness: British Empire in India