As most of you know I am the child of Bangladeshi immigrants to the US. I don’t make much of my “identity” because it rests lightly on me, and is not a major concern. I’ve been to Bangladesh twice in the last 40 years. My views on ascriptive identity are old-fashioned, you should listen to me because I am a human, not because of my sex, gender, class, race or religion. My experience and background are not trivial, but neither are they the most important thing.
But sometimes they do matter. Recently I saw this Tweet:
This person lives in Washington D.C. and refers to herself as “Tree-hugging, granola-crunching, whale-saving, ACLU card-carrying, liberal Democrat; world traveler; tennis fanatic; animal lover; political junkie and activist.”
I think it is understandable that Lithuania is angry considering its geopolitical circumstances. The cancelation of the shipment seems petty, but it’s obviously within their rights, and for historical reasons, Lithuanians are extremely passionate about the current conflict in Ukraine and look very negatively upon Russia.
But what about Bangladesh? Here I can actually offer some personal perspective, because my parents grew up in Bangladesh (East Pakistan), and much of my family lives in Bangladesh. On the whole, feelings toward Russia are warm, if somewhat distant and abstract. On a geopolitical level, Russia has been a “friend” to both India and Bangladesh for decades. This is not just a theory at the scale of the nation-state, there were personal connections, as Indians and Bangladeshis traveled to the Soviet Union to study, and the USSR sent advisors to the subcontinent. On the merits Indians and Bangladeshis may not be comfortable with the Russian invasion, but should they turn their back so quickly on a relationship that goes back decades? Will Western countries embrace India and Bangladesh with open arms to reward them for their actions?
For Bangladesh, there is a more concrete historical reason for Russophilia: the Soviet Union was in the end on the side of India and the soon-to-be Bangladesh during the 1971 conflict with Pakistan. Because the US was a staunch ally of Pakistan, the official government’s position was to ignore evidence of massive human rights atrocities being reported by their own diplomats. The Bengali civilian death toll is usually given to be in the range of ~100,000 to 2 million. The latter figure actually comes from Pravda, and I think there is reason to be skeptical that 1 out of 33 Bengalis in East Pakistan were killed. But the ~100,000 figure is possibly too low. In any case, it wouldn’t be a trivial death toll even if it was around 100,000, and the need for widespread abortion clinics after the war attests to mass rapes (the rape had a eugenic intent, a Pakistani general asserted that they would “change the race of this bastard nation”).
The Nixon administration even took some threatening moves with naval power once India intervened and was clearly going to defeat Pakistan, aided by the Bengali nationalist left-wing militias. The Soviet Union mobilized its own naval power to check the US. People of my parent’s generation remember these events with some clarity (my mother was shot by Pakistani soldiers).
In 1972 Bangladesh was founded as the “People’s Republic of Bangladesh.” The name should make it clear that Bangladesh’s origin was as a secular socialist left-nationalist nation-state. Over the decades many things have changed, in particular, the rise of a more Islamic self-conception and the shift away from socialism to export-oriented capitalism. But the founding myth of a socialist nationalist struggle remains, and people of my parents’ generation remain strongly influenced by 1970’s Third World socialism.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a disaster for geopolitical stability, and now the world economy. It’s been a disaster for Ukraine, and Russia is not really benefiting so much in material terms. I am personally terrified of the increased risks of nuclear war. All that being said, are the Russians intent on a war of total subjugation laced with genocide? My own understanding is that they thought Ukrainian nationalism was a paper tiger and that the corrupt government would fall and they would take over quickly. The Ukraine invasion is far more important than the genocide in Bangladesh in the early 1970’s (that targeted Hindus and intellectuals) because the fate of the world hangs in the balance, even if the probabilities are low. But to be candid on the grand scale of humanitarian disasters I doubt the civilian death count will reach anything like what happened in Bangladesh. Would Bangladeshis really want to sacrifice the old friendship for abstractions about the international order? Or a humanitarian crisis of far lesser magnitude than what they themselves went through two generations ago?
In the years after 9/11 the US went through foreign policy disasters because it refused the understand the world that it tried to change. There are other histories and other viewpoints out there. You may not agree with them, but they are there nevertheless.
As many of you know my reading habits are quite catholic. Many years ago I read a quite idiosyncratic book, Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church. The author, H. W. Crocker III, does not try and present an even-handed narrative. If you want to read nasty snide barbs toward Martin Luther, this book for is for you!
That being said, Triumph opens up a window on a different vision of the world and how it should be organized than you would usually see. One of the Crocker’s contentions is that the Reformation destroyed the cosmopolitan commonwealth of late medieval Western Christianity. The author of Triumph is an arch-reactionary, but he is also a skeptic of the Protestant-inflected Westphalian system that emerged in the 17th-century. Nationalism. Crocker bemoans the transformation of Christendom, a set of interlocking polities and principalities united by the superstructure of the Church and the broad ethos of Western Christianity, into the West, a more rationalized system which stitched together Western Christian nation-states separated by confessional conflict.
Diarmad McCullough’s The Reformation still records that the shadow of the old unitary Christendom actually persisted pretty deep into the post-Reformation period. Some of this was due to the prestige of Latin, which was widely understood and used as a lingua franca. So Protestant Hungarians from Transylvania were known to travel to England, and study at Oxford, and lack all knowledge of English. But they could communicate in Latin.
There are vigorous debates as to the role of religion in the emergence of national identity in the wake of Reformation. I think it is hard to deny that widespread distribution of Bibles in a local dialect, which might set the standard for the national language as a whole, aided the association between nationality and language that came to be normative in later centuries. Luther and his fellow travelers occasionally made appeals to the honor of the “German nation,” as opposed to the cosmopolitan forces which marched under the Habsburg banners. In contrast, Roman Catholic preachers exhorted Catholic German peasants to show more solidarity with the Spanish soldiers of the Emperor than the Protestant German knights. Religion before nation.
These arguments persisted deep into the modern period. The institutional Roman Catholic Church was suspicious of the ideology of nationalism and the creation of nations from small polities, even if Catholicism became instrumental in the formation of the French, Polish, or Spanish, national identities. This was most strongly illustrated in Italy, whose unifiers had an ultimately hostile relationship with the Pope in Rome.
So all this has to be understood in the context of the fact that Senator Joshua Hawley has been accused of being anti-Semitic because of his reference to “cosmopolitans” in a recent speech on nationalism. To be frank, I think he has a different experience in the use of words than his critics and doesn’t understand that some of them are fraught with meaning. Or at least that his critics would take them in that manner (the conference was organized by an American Israeli Jew, and many Jewish people attended).
The association between the usage of the word cosmopolitan and Jews has a strong resonance due to our history with the two major totalitarian ideologies of the 20th-century. But, one of my major points on this weblog that I repeat over and over is that the long 20th-century is coming to an end. In the early 21st-century, 45% of the world’s Jews live in Israel, a very nationalistic, and rooted (sorry Arabs), people. Because of Israel’s high total fertility rate, the proportion of Jews in the world who live in Israel will likely go above 50% in the next few decades.
Historically the image of the cosmopolitan Jew is strong, but in the present day, that is becoming far and far less accurate. Additionally, even that stereotype is historically ephemeral. The Jews who were so threatening to the Nazis and Communists were the Jews who took advantage of the Enlightenment and the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) to become full-fledged members of Western civilization and society without assimilating (necessarily) into Christian culture in totality. They shed their shtetl garments, but they did not quite become just like their neighbors.
Armie Hammer
That is not the case today. Though places like England have huge numbers of haredi Jews due to their high fertility rates, the traditional Jewish community of Britain is in demographic decline. Part of this is due to low fertility rates, but a great part of it is due to full assimilation through intermarriage. They are becoming just like their neighbors. The fixation of the modern Left with Israel and Zionism is at least future-oriented. That is the future of the Jewry, along with people of some Jewish heritage. Like Armie Hammer, who identifies as half-Jewish (his great-grandfather was Armand Hammer).
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s world, for good or ill, is fading even in places like New York City. A world at a dynamic interface between the haredi and the gentile. Secular in religion, but unmistakably Jewish in ethnicity, and outward-facing and integrating with non-Jews.
During the period of Chimerica, as documented in Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money, there was a sort of synergistic detente between the USA and China. That is obviously over. Part of it is Donald Trump’s stance, but there is a broader American suspicion, from the Left to the Right, toward the emergent muscularity of Chinese power abroad and its authoritarianism at home. Though it is clear that I am broadly sympathetic to many aspects of Chinese culture and happy that the average Chinese is wealthier and healthier than they were in the 20th-century, it seems advisable for the American state to engage with the Chinese state in a wary manner.
Which brings me to Thiel’s comments, and one aspect of the demographics of Silicon Valley which might be a major headache: over 70% of employees are foreign-born. And many of these are Chinese nationals (over 50% of the engineering workforce at Google in the USA is now “Asian”). Obviously, most of the Chinese nationals are not engaging in espionage. But the relationship between China and the USA is now shifting to one of rivalry, rather than partnership, so it’s going to put many of these employees in a strained position.
The Chinese New Year is bringing in huge business in the Middle Kingdom. China’s sci-fi epic “The Wandering Earth” pulled in a massive $96.6 million from three territories, bringing its international tally to $606.8 million. Another movie from the Mainland, “Crazy Alien,” earned $28 million for an overseas total of $318 million, while fellow local title “Pegasus” brought in $25.7 million, taking its bounty to $238 million.
Fox’s “Alita: Battle Angel” led films on the Hollywood front, generated $56 million when it launched in 86 overseas markets this weekend. Directed by Robert Rodriguez and produced by James Cameron, the sci-fi adventure has now grossed $94 million internationally. The movie saw the best opening in Russia, where it earned $6.5 million. “Alita” also had sizable debuts in Mexico ($4.2 million), Australia ($2.9 million), and Thailand ($2.5 million).
The graph at the top of this post is based on data taken from Angus Maddison’s magisterial Contours of the World Economy. No matter how you calculate it, it does look like the United States of America became the world’s largest economy at some point in the last quarter of the 19th century. The USA has maintained that position for more than one hundred years. This has undergirded the power of the United States of America in the second half of the 20th century in all dimensions. Cultural, geopolitical, and yes, moral.
Of course, the size of the economy is not the only thing that matters in relation to influence and power. The Chinese economy was very large in the 19th century, but it was not mobilized and deployed in a manner which allowed China to maintain military parity with Western nations, and later Japan. In the years between 1900 and World War I, the powers of Europe remained culturally and geopolitically at the center of the world, despite the fact that the United States of America had surpassed any specific European power economically. That is, there was a certain “cultural overhang” which was a lagging indicator in relation to economics.
The United States during this period was a debtor nation which maintained very small armed forces as it was rising to economic prominence. Culturally it looked to Europe, with homegrown American movements such as Transcendentalism of national, but not international, interest. The British retained their self-conception as the world’s hegemon after 1900 due to their colonial Empire, despite the factual reality that the USA and Germany had matched or surpassed them economically.
After World War II, the USSR achieved some level of military parity (at least roughly) through mobilization of a disproportionate fraction of its economic resources toward the armed forces. But the USSR never matched the USA in terms of overall economic output or cultural influence. The dissolution of the Communist Bloc after 1990 resulted in the unipolar moment, when the United States of America was unchallenged militarily, geopolitically, and culturally. With the recession of the Japanese economy, the Asian flu of 1998, and American vigor in the second half of the 1990s, the USA was also economically a model for the world again.
As someone who grew into manhood in the 1990s, it was an interesting and charmed time. The future was American. Liberal democratic. Market-oriented. The popular culture of the future would be the American popular culture. The specter of Chinese economic might was still something a generation down the road. Fodder for think pieces. But mostly blue-sky. Abstract.
Twenty years on from 1999 we are now facing the world we had dim glimmers of then. There is a mix of the expected and unexpected. The expected is the demographic-economic juggernaut of China is now within spitting distance of the United States in terms of nominal GDP. Parts of China are already basically a developed economy. Barring a major catastrophe, which some have predicted every few years since the 1990s, China will become the world’s largest economy by 2030, as it was in 1880. One hundred and thirty years of the USA being the largest economy in the world will end.
The period after 2030 is murky. China faces serious demographic headwinds due to the one-child policy. Much of its population will be poor, while coastal areas will be tightly integrated with the rest of the world. The USA will likely remain the wealthiest large nation on a per capita basis for the foreseeable future. China’s preeminence as the largest nation economically will be in the context of much greater parity between it and other big economies, as well as structural factors pointing to its eventual decline. We are not looking to another unipolar, even bipolar (e.g., USA vs. Chinese), world, in the second quarter of the 21st century. Probably the best analogy is the period around 1900 when a mix of cultural, economic, and military proto-superpowers jostled for their time in the sun. The first modern age of globalization of trade and travel.
On occasion, I read a book…and forget its title. I usually manage to recall the title at some point. For the past five years or so I’ve been trying to recall a book I read on Asian diplomatic history written by a Korean American scholar. Today I finally recalled that book: East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute.
The reason I’ve been trying to remember this book is that I’ve felt it told a story which is more relevant today than in the late 2000s, when the book was written and published. From the summary:
Focusing on the role of the “tribute system” in maintaining stability in East Asia and in fostering diplomatic and commercial exchange, Kang contrasts this history against the example of Europe and the East Asian states’ skirmishes with nomadic peoples to the north and west. Although China has been the unquestioned hegemon in the region, with other political units always considered secondary, the tributary order entailed military, cultural, and economic dimensions that afforded its participants immense latitude. Europe’s “Westphalian” system, on the other hand, was based on formal equality among states and balance-of-power politics, resulting in incessant interstate conflict.
Here’s my not-so-counterintuitive prediction: as China flexes its geopolitical muscles, it will revert back to form in substance, forging a foreign policy predicated on hierarchical relationships between states, while maintaining an external adherence to the system of European diplomacy which crystallized between the Peace of Westphalia and the Congress of Vienna, that emphasized the importance of equality between states. “Diplomacy with Chinese characteristics” if you will.
When I read Beyond the Global Culture War ten years ago it was interesting, but I was unconvinced. The author, Adam K Webb, has a peculiar political typology where the liberal democratic “end of history” is seen in a very negative light, part of an atomistic and dehumanizing trend across human history which has only come to prominence of late (in the past it was exemplified by atheistic and hedonistic cults, such as the Carvaka). A strange thing to someone reading in the mid-2000s is that Webb has good things to say about the Islamic Republic of Iran, and its vision for society.
It is important to remember that the clerical elite which dominates Iran are not know-nothings. Much of Shia Islam explicitly integrates and accepts the validity of ancient Greek philosophy. In contrast, mainstream Sunnis have been skeptical of philosophy’s value since the time of Al-Ghazali. Shia Islam, therefore, preserves intellectual threads which date back to the 8th and 9th centuries of the Abbassid Caliphate, which have become attenuated within Sunni Islam. Though Sunni Islam is not anti-intellectual per se, it is not surprising that the most austere and anti-humanistic sects, such as Salafism, come out of that tradition (in contrast, extreme Shiism gave rise to the Bahá’í religion).
Khomeini studied and admired both Plato and Aristotle. Many people have seen similarities between the novel republican-theocratic hybrid state of the Islamic Republic and Plato’s Republic, with Shia clerics taking the place of philosopher-kings. Webb suggested that the Islamic Republic was led by a ruling class of clerics who had a vision of the good for their society, and that was a good thing. This, in contrast to the regnant neoliberal consumer capitalism promoted by the likes of Thomas Friedman in a vulgar fashion, and Francis Fukuyama in a more implicit and subtle manner.
In Beyond the Global Culture War Webb argues for the likelihood of a resurgent movement of nationalisms based around public virtue and a vision of the “good society” which is more than just the sum of capitalist transactions between consenting adults. He imagined that despite their differences, Muslim, Buddhists, Christians, Confucians, and Hindus, could all come together as one against secular neoliberalism.
After 40 years at the helm as I am writing this the “virtuous” ruling class of Iran is under serious stress, in large part because of individual corruption at the elite levels, as well their commitment of the body politic to international adventurism. And even the best-laid plans and aims succumb to a diminishment of enthusiasm and zeal.
And yet nevertheless some of the theses of Beyond the Global Culture War are more relevant now than they were when the book was written. First, the neoliberal order of infinite plentitude and a universal middle class collapsed in the financial crisis of 2008. Though the global order continues on neoliberal precepts, it is more a matter of not knowing what the alternative could be, rather than genuine enthusiasm. Second, nationalism and localist movements which cut against the grain of global democratic liberalism have become vigorous. China shows no signs of embracing democratic liberalism, India is home to a Hindu nationalist movement that has the reins of power, and right-wing political movements are on the march in Europe. Third, a genuine international global elite has taken on greater solidity since the financial crisis, because they understand that their interests are more important in concert than the nation-states which they are notionally citizens of.
Consider Rupert Murdoch. Born an Australian, but now an American citizen. He has media properties of note across many nations. He has daughters who are half ethnically Chinese, granddaughters who are part Ghanaian, and other grandchildren who are being raised British (and are descendants of Sigmund Freud!).
Murdoch may be an extreme case, but his life and ties are not atypical for the global oligarchic class. Below them is the global professional caste which moves between nations as needed, and views themselves citizens of the world. They are foot-soldiers in keeping the machinery of internationalism chugging along. The banker in New York arguably has more in common in terms of public and private interests with the banker in London or Shanghai than they do with the citizens who reside in the hinterlands of the nation-states in which they live.
And yet nation-states exist, and nationalism is robust through popular democratic means. Just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was viewed as a traitor to the patrician class from which he came, so some demagogues will come out of the oligarchic class to elevate the importance of the nation above their own class interests. But perhaps India gives a better sense of nationalism and its tension with its global elite: Hindu nationalism is rooted in upper caste middle-class Indians, but their origins are oftensub-elite or petite bourgeois. They are often less fluent in international English, as opposed to the nascent national language, Hindi. India’s negotiation between being part of the international order of liberal democracies, and something deeply native and distinctive, may be illustrative of the future.
I am not one who believes that the nation-states were “invented” by the French in the last decade of the 18th century. But, the nation-state was given more salience and centrality in the 19th century, as multi-ethnic monarchies were seen as archaic and outmoded, and liberal nationalism captured the spirit of the day. The trend toward nationalism ironically became international. Though some nation-states were artificial and have failed their original promise, many have come to become part of the international order.
The nation-state is now part of our diplomatic heritage, and there is no movement for “world government” in any concrete sense. Though there are international governmental institutions, their solidity is similar to that of taxonomic ranks above that of species. They have some reality and utility, but they’re not nearly as relevant or distinct as species.
Over the next few years, we will start to see how the nation-state, and the resurgent nationalisms, deal with the reality of a supra-nation without a state, the cosmopolitan global overclass. At the pinnacle of the global overclass are the oligarchs. This group has always been of internationalist bent due to their reliance or positions in finance and trade. But in the past few centuries, national patriotism was a feature present even among oligarchs. To some extent, the national and personal interest were comingled. The House of Morgan did not intervene to stabilize the American economy purely out of patriotism. But the fiscal health of the United States was seen as necessarily tied to the health of the House of Morgan. And it is also true that during the great age of globalization before 1914 this class was still characterized by a powerful robust nationalist ethos which would be unthinkable today.
Tom Friedman was wrong. The world is not flat. The world is multi-textured. In the United States Obama’s presidency did not herald a post-racial era, but a more racial era! Similarly, despite the financial collapse, there is a shadow across the world of a global class which operates in a flat neoliberal landscape where the acid of capitalism has eaten away at local national affinities and affiliations in anything beyond a legal and convenient sense. The dream of lives on for some, and those “some” count a lot more individual than the multitudes who have soured on the universal global order.
The most important thing happening in the world that is different this week from last week from what I can tell is that the the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is going “full Ishmael” on us. By this I mean the reference in the Hebrew Bible to Abraham’s firstborn son, Ishmael, and the legendary ancestor of the Arabs: “And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him….”
What’s going on now? As you know there seems to be an internal purge going on, and a centralization of power around the Crown Prince. This, after the rollback of the power of the religious establishment.
Externally the quagmire in Yemen continues, and the Saudi state is now becoming more belligerent toward both Iran and Lebanon.
Most of you probably know the general issues about why the Saudi state is attempting to change and reform. Though petroleum will remain important for plastics and jet fuel, it is quite possible that the proportion used for gasoline will decline with the rise of electric cars. Additionally, there seem more supply-side possibilities with fracking technologies.
But perhaps the biggest factors are demographic. Over ten years ago Peter Turchin wrote a paper, Scientific Prediction in Historical Sociology: Ibn Khaldun meets Al Saud. It’s pretty useful in understanding what’s going on right now. The big issue which Turchin talks about more generally and is relevant to Saudi Arabia is elite overproduction. The Royal House is highly fecund. And all the scions demand unsustainable leisured lives….
There is currently a major humanitarian crisis in Burma as Rohingya Muslims flee conflict between the military and separatist militants. Obviously this is a developing story. Unfortunately, very few in the West and the media have a well developed understanding of the history of Burma. Therefore the easiest framework is something worthy of a DC superhero film: there is the good, and there is the bad.
Just because such black and white dichotomies tend to collapse complexity doesn’t mean they are wrong. In World War II the Nazis were the bad. But details are often illuminating and informative. The Soviet Union was on the side against the Nazis, but it wasn’t exactly a “good” actor. Similarly, Finland at points made common cause with Nazi Germany, but that was less about its affinity with Hitler’s regime and more about surviving a Soviet invasion. There are people who are good and bad. But there are also people in situations, which dictate actions which are bad, or enable actions which seem good. (and a mix)
If you want a broader view of mainland Southeast Asian history, which Burma plays a large part in, I’d recommend Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830. Unlike Africa (with the exception of Ethiopia and Egypt), Indonesia, and much of the Middle East (Iran and Turkey excepted), mainland Southeast Asia developed nation-states organically. Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma, were not dreamed up by European colonialists, but evolved through their own historical logic (in this case, the migration out of southern China of Tai peoples and the response of the older Southeast Asian polities, being the central narrative thread).
The only book about Burma’s history I’ve read is The River of Lost Footsteps. It has a lot of personal detail, as the author is himself a member of the Burmese Diaspora, and seems to come from an elite family with many connections the people who have run the country since independence.
In The River of Lost Footsteps the author alludes to the fact that Burma in the early modern period was on the edge of Islamicate civilization. At its peak the Mughal Empire had within its penumbra the Burmese polity, and it was impossible for the latter not to be influenced by the former (the influence actually pre-dates the Mughals, though intensified with them). The Buddhist kings of Arakan styled themselves sultans, and employed Muslims of Indian (or West and Central Asian) origin in their armies.
The descendants of these soldiers are part of the story of Islam in Burma. Too often the media representations of Islam in Burma reduce them to the Rohingya. The reality is that there are several Muslim communities within Burma, with different relationships to the majority Theravada Buddhist ethnicities. The River of Lost Footsteps claims that Aung San Suu Kyi herself (or more precisely her father) is in part from a family whose ancestry includes some of these Muslim soldiers.
Aung San Suu Kyi of course is at the heart of current events right now. Many are confused as to why this person, who has put her life on the line to defend the rights of self-determination of the Burmese people in the past, will not speak up for the Rohingya now. To a great extent this reminds me of the Lewis’ trilemma in relation to Jesus, that he was either a liar, lord, or lunatic. For many of us the answer may not be any of the above. Aung San Suu Kyi is a complex person at the heart of complex events. It was easy to portray her as a selfless saint, who was always on the side of the good as we understand it, but current events show that she was never immune to the exigencies of reality and practicality. Just as she was not saint in the past, I doubt she is a monster in the present, even if she has become caught up in events of monstrosity. Remember, if Gandhi was alive today he would surely be excoriated for his lack of solidarity with other people of color at least, and his racism at most.
Stepping aside from Aung San Suu Kyi, I think it is no surprise that democratization of Burmese society and culture has been occurring while there has been a rise in aggressive Buddhist chauvinism. Americans often do not want to admit that democratization and liberal tolerance do not go hand and hand. In places like China, and yes, Burma, authoritarian governments likely keep a lid on ethnic tensions because they are destabilizing for the public order. It was with universal white male suffrage in the United States that the racialized character of the American republic became much more explicit. Similarly, popular nationalism in Europe was associated with drives toward homogeneity and assimilation of subordinate groups.
Why are the Rohingya so hated in Burma? There are several possible reasons:
– They are racially distinct (all the photographs make it clear that they are not physically different from Bengali peasants) from most of the other ethnicities in Burma (including some groups of Muslims who descend from intermarriages with the Bamar majority).
– Their Muslim religion is very distinct from that of the dominant culture in Burma, Theravada Buddhism. Unlike China, where Buddhism is a strand within the national culture (and not a dominant one), in Burma Buddhism occupies the role that Christianity does in Northern Europe: the religion’s arrival was associated with the rise of complex societies, and political self-awareness. Though the Theravada Buddhism of Burma has local flavors (nat worship), it unites many of the disparate ethno-linguistic groups together, from the majority Bamar, to the Tai Shan, to the Austro-Asiatic Mon.
The Muslim religion of the Rohingya also enforces a stronger divergence from the majority religion than the Hindu background of other South Asians in Burma. Though most Indians left Burma in the years after independence, a substantial number have remained. The ethnographic literature I’ve seen indicates that many have re-identified as Theravada Buddhist, though no doubt maintaining many Hindu customs and practices within the community. This is not that difficult when you consider that Burmese Buddhism has many indigenous and Hindu influences already. Additionally, Hinduism and Buddhism are connected traditions, and arguably exhibit a level of commensurability that makes identity switching less stressful for both individuals and communities.
– They are perceived to relatively recent migrants to the Arakan coast from Bengal, and so not an indigenous ethnic community within Burma. Note that there are Muslim communities, even within Arakan, which are not Rohingya, which are recognized as indigenous. Not only are they perceived to be migrants, but their numbers threaten the dominance of the Rakhine people of the region.
In highlighting these elements I’ve suggesting that the Rohingya are arguably the most marginalized group in Burma. There are other Muslims ethnicities in Burma, but most are not demographic threats, derive from attested older migration events, and have intermarried with local populations so that the physical differences are not quite as salient. There are Christian minorities, such as the Chin, which have been targeted for persecution based on the religious differences, but the Chin are not perceived to be alien to Burma, simply unassimilated to dominant Theravada cultural complex. Additionally, there is no large racial difference between the Chin and the Theravada groups.
Much of the public debate revolves around the issue of Rohingya indigeneity or lack thereof. Though I have only modest confidence in my position, I believe that most of the Rohingya presence in Arakan dates to the period of British rule. Though the Rohingya language is not intelligible with standard Bengali, it is rather close to the dialect of southeast Bangladesh, Chittagong. My family is from Comilla, which borders the Indian state of Tripura. When I listen to Rohingya speak it’s only slightly less intelligible to me than the dialect of West Bengal (which is the basis for standard Bengali). In fact, the accent of Rohingya men is uncannily similar to what I remember from peasants in rural southeast Bangladesh when I visited in 1990!
If the Rohingya are not Bengali, they are something very close.
But the Rohingya will tell you something different. They do not self-identify as Bengalis, but as Burmese. Additionally, like some South Asian Muslims they deemphasize their South Asian origins, and create fictive extra-South Asian genealogies. It is important to note that the Rohingya do not write their language in the Bengali script. This means that their intelligentsia has no strong consciousness of being Bengali, because they are not part of the world of Bengali letters.
Earlier on I noted that mainland Southeast Asian had polities which easily transitioned to nation-states, because of the organic development of their identities. This is not true in South Asia. There is a bit of artificiality in the construction of South Asian polities (perhaps with the exceptions of Bhutan and Sri Lanka). Though South Asians no matter their identity are clearly defined and demarcated from other peoples, among themselves religion and community, rather than nationality scale ethnic identity, have been paramount.
In The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier the author points out that a Bengali cultural identity evolved relatively slowly over the past 1,000 years. He makes the case that the Islamic character of eastern Bengal had to do with its underdeveloped state, and that land reclamation projects under the aegis of Islamic polities stamped the local peasantry who were settling the territory with the religion of the regnant order. And yet until recently the Muslim elite of Bengal was not culturally Bengali; they were Urdu speaking. The Bengali dialects of the peasantry were not prestigious, while the Bengali Renaissance was predominantly driven by upper case Hindus who helped shaped what standard Bengali became.
I will elide over the details of the emergence of a self-consciously Bengali and Muslim intelligentsia. It is something which I am only aware of vaguely, though I have seen fragments of it in my own extended family and lineage, as people from Urdu-speaking backgrounds have allowed their children to grow up speaking only Bengali, and fully assimilated to a Bengali identity without any qualification.
But the development of a Bengali and Muslim self-identity was occurring at the same time the ancestors of the Rohingya were pushing beyond the borders of traditional Bengal, into Arakan. Their lack of Bengali identity comes honestly because peasant identity has always been more localized and inchoate, and the Rohingya intelligentsia crystallized around other identifiers which could distance themselves from their relationship to Bengalis. In particular, the Rohingya seem more uniformly Islamic in their orientation. The female anchor for Rohingya news updates always seems to wear a headscarf, as opposed to those for Dhaka news reports.
In the short-term the killing of infants and raping of women has to stop. But these simple answers have behind them lurking deeper complexities. While agreeing upon the urgency of action now, we need to be very careful to not turn complex human beings into angels and demons. We have enough history in the recent past that that sort of model only leads to tragedy down the line, as those who we put utmost faith in fail us due to their ultimate humanity.
Some right-wing intellectuals are wont to say that multicultural and multiracial empires do not last. This is not true. Historically there are plenty which lasted for quite a long time. Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottomans, to name just a few of the longest. But, though they were diverse polities modern liberal democratic sensibilities would have been offended by them. That is because these empires were ordered and centered around a hegemonic culture, with other cultures accepted and tolerated on the condition of submission and subordination.
The Ottoman example is the most stark because it was formally explicit under the millet system by the end of its history, though it naturally evolved out of Islamic conceptions of the roles of dhimmis under Muslim hegemony. For 500 years the Ottomans ruled a multicultural empire. Yes, it decayed and collapsed, but 500 years is a good run.
I bring up the Ottoman example because I was having a discussion with a friend of mine, an academic, and he brought up the idea that the seeming immiseration of the middle to lower classes in developed societies will lead to redistributive economic policies. Both of us agree that immiseration seems on the horizon, and that no contemporary political movement has a good response. But I pointed out that traditionally redistributive socialism seems most successful in relatively homogeneous societies, and the United States is not that. American society is diverse. Descriptively multicultural. There would be another likely solution.
Eleven years ago Amartya Sen wrote a piece for The New Republic which could never get published in the journal today, The Uses and Abuses of Multiculturalism. In it he looked dimly upon the emergence of plural monoculturalism. Today plural monoculturalism is the dominant ideal of the identity politics Left, with cultural appropriation in vogue, and separatism reminiscent of the 1970s starting to come back into fashion. Against plural monoculturalism he contrasted genuine multiculturalism. I think a better word for it is cosmopolitanism.
The Ottoman ruling elite was Sunni Muslim, but it was cosmopolitan. The Sultan himself often had a Christian mother, while during the apex of the empire the shock troops were janissary forces drawn from the dhimmi peoples of the Balkans. This was a common feature of the Islamic, and before them Byzantine and Roman empires. The ruling elites exhibited a common ethos, but their origins were variegated.
Many of the Byzantine emperors were not from ethnic Greek Chalcedonian Christian backgrounds (before the loss of the Anatolian territories many were of Armenian, and therefore non-Chalcedonian, origin). But the culture they assimilated to, and promoted, as the core identity of the empire was Greek-speaking and Chalcedonian, with a self-conscious connection to ancient Rome. I can give similar examples from South Asia or China. Diverse peoples can be bound together in a sociopolitical order, but it is invariably one of domination, subordination, and specialization.
But subordinate peoples had their own hierarchies, and these hierarchies interacted with the Ottoman Sultan in an almost feudal fashion. Toleration for the folkways of these subordinate populations was a given, so long as they paid their tax and were sufficiently submissive. The leaders of the subordinate populations had their own power, albeit under the penumbra of the ruling class, which espoused the hegemonic ethos.
How does any of this apply to today? Perhaps this time it’s different, but it seems implausible to me that our multicultural future is going to involve equality between the different peoples. Rather, there will be accommodation and understandings. Much of the population will be subject to immiseration of subsistence but not flourishing. They may have some universal basic income, but they will be lack the dignity of work. Identity, religious and otherwise, will become necessary opiums of the people. The people will have their tribunes, who represent their interests, and give them the illusion or semi-reality of a modicum agency.
The tribunes, who will represent classical ethno-cultural blocs recognizable to us today, will deal with a supra-national global patriciate. Like the Ottoman elite it will not necessarily be ethnically homogeneous. There will be aspects of meritocracy to it, but it will be narrow, delimited, and see itself self-consciously above and beyond local identities and concerns. The patriciate itself may be divided. But their common dynamic will be that they will be supra-national, mobile, and economically liberated as opposed to dependent.
Of course democracy will continue. Augustus claimed he revived the Roman Republic. The tiny city-state of Constantinople in the 15th century claimed it was the Roman Empire. And so on. Outward forms and niceties may be maintained, but death of the nation-state at the hands of identity politics and late stage capitalism will usher in the era of oligarchic multinationalism.
It was governed as a moderate Islamic nation for three decades under the autocratic rule of the former president, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. But after the country made a transition to democracy in 2008, space opened up for greater religious expression, and conservative ideologies like Salafism cropped up.
Years ago in graduate school I told a friend that democracy and even economic prosperity did not monotonically lead to greater liberalism. In the long run perhaps, but in the short run it doesn’t necessarily do that at all.
Today we generally focus on the Islamic world, but there are plenty of examples in the past and in other places which suggest to us democratic populist passions can be quite illiberal. The Gordon Riots in England in the 18th century are a case where a pragmatic shift toward liberalism in regards to religious freedom for Roman Catholics triggered a Protestant populist riot. In the United States the emergence of universal white man’s suffrage during the Age of Jackson signaled the rise of a much more muscular and exclusive white supremacy in this country. In Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 you see the arc of democratization tethering itself to conservative rural vote-banks which reinforce aristocratic privilege. Finally, democratic developments in Burma have seen an associated increase in Buddhist radicalism.
Eric Kauffman argues in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? that modernization, economic development, and the expansion of political representation, integrates conservative rural populations and uplifts them all the while transforming the norms of urban areas. In other words, the rural bazar melds with the urban shopping mall, and both are changed. The 1979 revolution in Iran and its aftermath has been argued to be a victory of the bazar over the Western oriented gentry. In India the rise of Hindu nationalism is an assertion of the self-confidence of sub-elites from the “cow belt” who arose to challenge the Western oriented ruling class that had dominated since the early 20th century.
In newly democratic nations which are pushed toward universal suffrage and the full panoply of democratic institutions the organic process of developing some safeguards for minorities and liberal norms has never evolved, because there was no evolution. Rather, these democracies are being created out of a box. Instead of a gradual shift toward more cultural conservatism with broader franchise, in these contexts it is a foundational aspect of the democratic system. I suspect this may have long term repercussions, as in other contexts liberal elites often institutionalized or established norms which served to check majoritarian populist impulses as they ceded much of their power over time.
The modern Left has a very anodyne view of Islam. It denies that there is something structurally within many Islamic societies which enables their illiberalism, the religion of Islam. In Islamic Exceptionalism Shadi Hamid argues that the religion itself may in some fundamental manner be inimical to the sort of secular liberal democratic society we perceive to be the terminal state of all cultures. I disagree with this view. Rather, I see in contemporary Islam the torture that Reformation era Christianity experienced attempting to navigate between an ideal of a universal church and the nascent emergence of nation-states. But in the short term both Shadi and I have the same prediction: greater democracy may lead to greater illiberalism and more repression of minorities. This an inconvenient truth for many Americans. But it may be true nonetheless.
