2023 will go down in history as the year of the cynic. When I was a college student in Delhi in the mid-Seventies, the Charminar-smoking sceptic several years into an unending dissertation was a fixture in the university’s coffee houses. He (our cynic was always a man) was world-weary about everything: the ideological protestations of both blocs of nations then conducting the Cold War, India’s democratic credentials, the prospects of the Indian cricket team and the motives of Mother Teresa. He was a figure of fun because he was predictable: he gave no State, no leader, no idea the benefit of the doubt. Looking at the world from Delhi in 2023, on the eve of the new year, I begin to think that he wasn’t wrong... just fifty years ahead of his time.
I read in today’s newspaper that the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has condemned the civilian casualties inflicted by the Russian bombing of Ukraine. Meanwhile, his government has again granted the transfer of munitions to Israel special exemption from scrutiny. There is a danger in focusing too closely on the lack of fit between what the US government says and what it does because it distracts our attention from the decisive shift away from pluralism in Western countries. This is a shift that has been in the making for several years but the pulverisation of Gaza has made it public in unexpected ways.
In Germany, for example, polling in advance of the 2023 federal elections suggests that the Alternative for Germany, the AfD, will place second, ahead of the centre-left Social Democratic Party. But the real surprise in Germany is not the AfD, it is the response of the centre-left Greens to the conflict in Gaza. The Greens have been in the vanguard of a campaign to discredit, intimidate and even deport pro-Palestinian voices in Germany. The notion that Germany’s Muslim population is a kind of Trojan horse is the AfD’s stock in trade; to see the Greens deal in that rhetoric indicates how an anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant mood has become the common sense of the European Union’s wealthiest and most powerful nation.
Germany is not alone in this. Giorgia Meloni, the newly-elected, far-Right Italian prime minister, came to power on an explicitly racist, anti-immigration platform. Scandinavia’s social democratic parties have reinvented themselves as anti-immigrant parties, and Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has taken to criticising Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives for not doing enough to limit immigration. Most ominously, Marine Le Pen and her neo-fascist party, Rassemblement National, has an 8% lead over Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party ahead of the European elections. Le Pen looks like the odds on favourite to replace Macron in the next presidential election. Her party, which jumped from 8 to 89 seats in the French assembly elections in 2022, might well own the executive and legislative arms of the French political system after the next round of elections.
European campaigns against anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre are increasingly instrumental: they legitimise a McCarthyite suspicion of Muslim immigrant populations as potential fifth columns. Starmer and Joe Biden, leaders who would normally benefit from the political preferences of immigrant communities, seem to have calculated that the electoral risk of alienating loyal minorities is either small or, in the larger cause of appealing to the mainstream — read white — voter, a risk worth taking.
Regardless of whether Donald Trump or Biden wins the next presidential election, Fortress First World is here. Despite differences about domestic politics, the outward facing policies of Democrats and Republicans, Tory and Labour politicians, AfD and Green party leaders, on every important issue —from Israel to immigration — are the same. As the West girds itself against the hordes without and the aliens within, it moves away from multiculturalism to surveilled assimilation (Britain), from laicité to an explicit Islamophobia (France). There are the virtuous immigrants who have remade themselves in the image of the host population and internalised its populist opinions — Nikki Haley, Sunak, Suella Braverman — and the insidious aliens who haven’t: keffiyeh-wearing, flag-waving supporters of the Palestinian cause, revellers at the Notting Hill carnival, different looking people who do not stay in line.
The most interesting balancing act in Europe in the immediate future will be the spectacle of countries like Britain reconciling the need for imported manpower to run the NHS and care homes as Britain becomes a greyer society with the anxiety about immigration — all immigration, not just illegal immigration — that is remaking European politics. I suspect Europe’s politicians will try to square this circle by taking a leaf out of Trump’s playbook and selectively limiting or banning immigration from mainly Muslim countries while quietly waving in migrants from elsewhere.
In this time of war, climate change and migration, Trump is a defining figure. He is Don Donald, the godfather of the Anthropocene. He represents logically and consistently the self-interest of the affluent North, its need to keep the displaced peoples of a war-torn, poor, overheated South outside its gates. He realises that there is no rules-based world order that can be relied on to do this; it must be done by making deals, making war, trading favours. What Biden and the Beltway elect dislike about Trump is his contemptuous rejection of the idea that there is some Western fellowship of virtuous nations guided by liberal first principles that is destined to manage the world.
What Trump thinks today, the West thinks tomorrow. We have seen Trump’s initiatives like the border wall and the Abraham Accords and the discrimination against Muslims become the commonsense of Western statecraft but the truly depressing thing about the world at the end of 2023 is that the West isn’t alone in its willingness to act out its phobias.
Except for Brazil, every large non-Western country in the world, including the countries that claim to be on the side of the Palestinians, has defined itself by persecuting its Muslim minorities. Vladimir Putin, who pretends to feel for the besieged Palestinians in Gaza, supervised the slaughter of Muslims in Chechnya. Xi Jinping, who chides the US for helping Israel indiscriminately bomb Gaza, organised the systematic dissolution of the Uighur’s Muslim identity via dispersal, demolition and detention camps. India over the last decade has undertaken the political subordination of its huge Muslim minority via every means possible, from the law to lynching.
Western governments and largely Western human rights organisations used to highlight these atrocities if only to score points against its old enemies. This helped sustain the belief that there was a liberal world order to be lived up to. That piety didn’t survive the sight of the West helping Israel kill Gaza’s women and children with 2000 lb, Made in the USA, bombs.
As we head into a 2024 when even consoling delusion isn’t available, I think of those long ago coffee house cynics and wonder if they would have felt any satisfaction at having their flat, un-nuanced, caffeine-induced cynicism confirmed.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
