The Ideology of Cultural Nostalgia, Enemy of Democracy
The specific limits of each and of all national/populist experiments worthy of the name ‘populist’ originate in the objective conditions characterizing the societies comprising the periphery of today’s capitalist/imperialist world—conditions obviously diverse.
But beyond that diversity some major converging factors shed some light on the reasons for those experiments’ successes and then for their retrogressions.That aspirations for a ‘Return to the Past’ persist is not the result of thoroughgoing ‘backwardness’ (as in the usual discourse on this subject) among the peoples involved. Their persistence gives a correct measure of the challenge to be confronted. All the peoples and nations of the peripheries were not only subject to fierce economic exploitation by imperialist capital: they were, by the same token, equally subjected to cultural aggression. With the greatest contempt the dignity of their cultures, their languages, their customs, and their histories were negated. There is nothing surprising in these victims of external or internal colonialism (notably the Indian populations of the Americas) naturally linking their political and social liberation to the restoration of their national dignity. But in turn, these legitimate aspirations are a temptation to look exclusively toward the past in hope of there finding the solution to today’s and tomorrow’s problems. So there is a real risk of seeing the movements of awakening and liberation among these peoples getting stuck in tragic blind alleys as soon as they mistake retrogressive nostalgia for their sought-for highroad of renewal.
The history of contemporary Egypt illustrates perfectly the transformation from necessary complementarity between a universalist vision open to the future, yet linked to the restoration of past dignity, into a conflict between two options formulated in absolute terms: either ‘Westernize!’ (in the common usage of that term, implying denial of the past) or else (uncritically) ‘Back To The Past!’
The Viceroy Mohamed Ali (1804-1849) and, until the 1870s, the Khedives, chose a modernization that would be open to the adoption of formulas reflecting European models.
It cannot be said that this choice was one of ‘Westernization’ on the cheap. The heads of the Egyptian state gave the highest importance to modern industrialization of the country as against merely adopting the European model of consumer markets. They committed themselves to assimilation of European models, linking it with renewal of their national culture to whose evolution in a secular direction it would contribute. Their attempts to support linguistic renovation bear witness to that. Of course, their European model was that of capitalism and no doubt they had no accurate conception of the imperialist nature of European capitalism. But they should bear no reproach for that. When Khedive Ismail proclaimed his aim ‘to make Egypt into a European country’, he was fifty years ahead of Ataturk. He saw ‘Europeanization’ as part of national rebirth, not as a renunciation of it.The inadequacies of that epoch’s cultural Nahda (its inability to grasp the meaning of the European Renaissance), and the retrograde nostalgia embodied in its main concepts—on which I have expressed myself elsewhere—are no mystery.
Indeed, it is precisely this retrograde outlook which was to take hold over the national-renewal movement at the end of the nineteenth century. I have put forward an explanation for this: with the defeat of the ‘modernist’ project that had held the scene from 1800 to 1870 Egypt was plunged into regression. But the ideology that tried to counter that decline took shape in this retrogressive period and was marked by all the birth defects implicit in that fact. Moustapha Kamel and Mohamed Farid, the founders of the new National Party (Al hisb al watani), chose back-to-the-past as the focal point of their combat—as their ‘Ottomanist’ (seeking the support of Istanbul against the English) illusions, as well as others, reveal.
History was to prove the futility of that option. The popular and national revolution of 1919-1920 was not led by the Nationalist Party but by its ‘modernist’ rival, the Wafd.
Taha Hussein even adopted the slogan of Khedive Ismail— ‘Europeanize Egypt’—and to that end supported the formation of a new university to marginalize Al Azhar.The retrograde tendency, legacy of the Nationalist Party, then slipped into insignificance. Its leader, Ahmad Hussein, was in the 1930s merely the head of a minuscule, pro-fascist, party. But this tendency was to undergo a strong revival among the group of ‘Free Officers’ that overthrew the monarchy in 1952.
The ambiguity of the Nasserist project resulted from this regression in the debate over the nature of the challenge to be confronted. Nasser tried to link a certain industrialization-based modernization, once again not on the cheap, with support to retrograde cultural illusions. It mattered little that the Nasserists thought of their project as being within a socialist (obviously beyond a nineteenth century ken) perspective. Their attraction to volkisch cultural illusion was always there. This was demonstrated by their choices concerning the ‘modernization of Al Azhar’, of which I did a critique. Currently, the conflict between the ‘modernist, universalist’ visions of some and the ‘integrally medievalistic’ visions of others holds center-stage in Egypt. The former are henceforward advocated mainly by the radical left (in Egypt the communist tradition, powerful in the immediate years after Second World War) and getting a broad audience among the enlightened middle classes, the labor unions, and, even more so, by the new generations. The back-to-the-past vision has slipped even further to the right with the Muslim Brotherhood, and has adopted its stance from the most archaic conception of Islam, IheWahhabism promoted by the Saudis.
It is not very difficult to contrast the evolution that shut Egypt into its blind alley to the path chosen by China since the Taiping revolution, taken up and deepened by Maoism: that the construction of the future starts with radical critique of the past.
‘Emergence’ into the modern world and, accordingly, deploying effective responses to its challenges including entrance onto the path of democratization, guidelines for which I will put forward further on in this text, has as its precondition the refusal to allow retrograde cultural nostalgia to obscure the central focus of renewal.So it is not by chance that China finds itself at the vanguard of today’s ‘emerging’ countries. Nor is it by chance that in the Middle East it is Turkey, not Egypt, that is pedaling in the race. Turkey, even that of the ‘Islamist’ AKP, profits from Kemalism’s earlier breakaway. But there is a decisive difference between China and Turkey; China’s ‘modernist’ option is supposed to reflect a ‘socialist’ perspective (and China is in a hegemonic conflict with the United States, that is to say, with the collective imperialism of the Triad) conveying a chance for progress while the ‘modernity’ option of today’s Turkey, in which no escape from the logic of contemporary globalization is envisaged, has no future. It seems successful, but only provisionally so.
In all the countries of the broader South (the peripheries) the combination of modernist and retrogressive tendencies, obviously in very diverse forms, is to be found. The confusion resulting from this association finds one of its most striking displays in the profusion of inept discourses about supposed ‘democratic forms in past societies’, uncritically praised to the skies. Thus independent India sings praises to the panchayat, Muslims to the shura, and Africans to the ‘Speaking Tree’, as though these outlived social forms had anything to do with the challenges of the modern world. Is India really the biggest (in number of voters) democracy in the world? Well, this electoral democracy is and will remain a farce until radical criticism of the caste system (a very real legacy of its past) has been carried through to the end: the abolition of the castes themselves. Shura remains the vehicle for implementation of Sharia (Islamic canonical law), interpreted in that word’s most reactionary sense—the enemy of democracy.
The Latin American peoples are today confronted with the same problem.
It is easy, once one realizes the nature of Iberian internal colonialism, to understand the legitimacy of the ‘indigenist’ demands. Still, some of those ‘indigenist’ discourses are very uncritical of the Indian pasts at issue. But others are indeed critical and propose concepts linking in a radically progressive way the requirements of universalism to the potential to be found in the evolution of their historical legacy. In this regard, the current Bolivian discussions are probably able to make a rich contribution. Frangois Houtart (El concepto de Sumai Kwasai) has made an enlightening critical analysis of the indigenist discourse in question. All ambiguity vanishes in the light of this remarkable study, which passes in review what, as it seems to me, is probably the totality of discourse on this subject.The contribution, a negative one, of retrograde cultural illusion to construction of the modern world such as it is, cannot be attributed to the peripheral peoples. In Europe, outside its northwestern quadrant, the bourgeoisies were too weak to carry out revolutions like those of England and France. The ‘national’ goal, especially in Germany and Italy and, later, elsewhere in the eastern and southern parts of the continent, functioned as means of popular mobilization while screening off the nature of such nationalism as a compromise, half bourgeois/half ancien regime. The retrograde cultural illusions in these cases were not so much ‘religious’ as ‘ethnic’, and were based on an ethnocentric definition of the nation (Germany) or on a mythologized reading of Roman history (Italy). Nazism and fascism—there is the disaster that illustrates the arch-reactionary, surely anti-democratic, nature of volkisch cultural nostalgia in its ‘national’ forms.
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